ABSTRACT
Although the role of prostitution in the transmission of HIV has been extensively debated over a number of years now, relatively little is known about what prostitution entails in different social and cultural settings (de Zalduondo, 1991). While research on prostitution and AIDS has become increasingly extensive in both epidemiology and social science, the behavioural links between sex work and HIV have often been more assumed than understood, and the social and cultural construction of prostitution has generally received less attention than the perceived threat supposedly posed by prostitutes to an unsuspecting public (Alexander, 1987). Assessment of the risks of HIV transmission within the sex industry, and even interventions aimed at responding to these risks, have rarely been founded on a full understanding of the specific behaviours involved or the social, cultural, economic and political forces that ultimately shape these behaviours and condition both the perception of risk and the possibility of risk reduction.
