Commercial Sex, Survival Sex and Transactional Sex in Contemporary South Africa

Commercial sex, survival sex and transactional sex in contemporary South Africa

The notion of commercial sex, survival sex and transactional sex in contemporary South Africa are explored in this essay with specific reference to the studies conducted as well as the factors both micro-level and macro-level which have lead to these high-risk practices in different areas.

Hunter highlights the vital role that gifts play in fuelling everyday sexual relations between men and women. Older more well off men buy gifts and support their younger poorer girlfriends for sexual favours. One. Voluntary. testing study in KwaZulu-Natal found that nearly three. Times. As. many as fifteen to nineteen-year-old girls (43 per cent) were HIV positive than boys (17 per cent), and that while female prevalence rates peaked between twenty5 and twenty-nine years of age, male prevalence rates peaked ten years later, (Hunter 2002). His ethnography is based on two localities, an informal settlement and a township near Mandeni. The township is biggest township in KZN, Sudumbili,). The aim is to explore the close association between sex and gifts—resulting in what has been called “transctional sex”—is a central factor driving multiple-partnered sexual relationships, the principal cause of HIV infection in Mandeni. Trasactional sex has a number of similarities to prostitution. In both cases, non-marital sexual relationships, often with multiple partners, are underscored by the giving of gifts or cash. Transacional sex, however, differs in important ways: partiipants are consructed as “girlfriends” and “boyfriends” and not “protitutes” and “clients”, and the exchange of gifts for sex is part of a broader set of obligations that might not involve a predetemined payment, (Hunter 2002:101).

This concpt is useful in inorming AIDS policy intervntions such as “education” campagns that can often neglect undrlying social relations such as those relected and constituted by gifts. The article...