ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the risks that AIDS poses to specific segments of the population of women, beginning with young, adolescent women. AIDS prevention programs for adolescent women and girls, in school, while increasingly common in developed countries, are still extremely rare in the developing world. Additionally, numerous studies have shown that, more frequently than, prostitutes are mothers as well as whores. Approaches that negate the mother-and lover-in the whore have been and will not be effective in preventing the further spread of HIV to women. Throughout the world, women’s sexual identities have long been defined on the basis of their reproductive capacity and, to a lesser degree, their involvement in commercial sex. Prostitution has existed in every society for which there are written records and continues to exist as a result of sexual double standards that limit women’s economic options and means of sexual expression.
