Mongers want sex workers to be tested but the women are hesitant about its benefits. Sex workers consider it only in case of pregnancy and to protect their children.
As a compromise, both groups agreed in having optional and confidential HIV testing. The test should be anonymous –according to the views expressed by sex workers in our discussions- and to be done at private labs, not associated with the Ministry of Health. 356 This would provide them with protection from police harassment and in the case of foreign workers, deportation. Mongers also do not want public officials doing the tests and would consider taking them only in private labs.
HIV testing can have benefits for the person who takes a test, their sexual partners and the wider community, provided that it is part of a package of prevention, counseling, care and support. It can lead to improved health and medical treatment, more informed decision-making, better practical and emotional support, increased motivation to prevent HIV transmission, and more positive attitudes towards living with HIV. It also would provide a clearance to work in the sex industry that infected sex workers would not receive. This will provide a good incentive to limit alcohol intoxication and unsafe sex.
People who know that they have HIV can take steps to protect themselves and sexual partners who may be uninfected. People who test negative can be counseled about how to avoid HIV infection. There is some evidence that HIV counseling and testing programs can motivate people to change to safer sexual behavior, if testing is voluntary and accompanied by high-quality post-test counseling, provision of condoms and ongoing care and support. 357
Never has there been a preventive intervention or program for sex workers in the Costa Rica‘s sexual tourism industry. Moreover, the only ones that get tested are the ones working in brothels that cater to low-income men. As the tourist sex industry remains practically illegal, it is hard to expect a prevention program -as the one recommended above- to be implemented by the Costa Rican government.
Lupita, for example, thinks ―The Costa Rican government would rather see us dead than admitting it has a huge prostitution problem.‖ She knows that the State is so sex-negative and so much under the control of the Catholic hierarchy that it will not be able to talk to the women in a respectful manner.
―The Government was not able to print the sex education school guides for adolescents given the Church‘s opposition. How are they going to do something for prostitutes?‖- She asks.
Jack52 also believes that Costa Ricans would rather put mongers in prison than to talk to them.
356 Policy Paper on the Forced Testing and Quarantining of Prostitutes. Prostitutes Safe Sex Project (Maggies). Toronto: The Project, 1993; English Collective of Prostitutes. Prostitute Women and AIDS: Resisting the Virus of Repression.
San Francisco, CA: PROstitutes Collective, 1988 (US edition). See also Sex Industry and the AIDS Debate '88.
Report and Conference Papers from the First National Sex Industry Conference, Melbourne, Australia, 25-27
October 1988. St Kilda, Victoria: Prostitutes Collective of Victoria, 1988.
357 In Uganda, the AIDS Information and Counselling Centre found that clients reported increases in condom use from 10 percent to 89 per cent with regular partners and from 28 per cent to 100 per cent with casual partners. A recent study in Tanzania, Kenya and Trinidad found that rates of condom use or number of sexual partners were associated with knowledge of HIV-positive status, high quality counselling and provision of condoms.
http://www.aidsaction.info/ht/section1.html
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The Catholic Church will never allow any prevention program either among upper class prostitutes or sex tourists. When sex workers came to Costa Rica from all over the world for a Congress on HIV prevention some years ago, the Church sent its troops made of fundamental Christians to prevent the event from taking place. When a Lesbian meeting was to be held in San José, the Interior Minister sent the police to “spot” lesbians at the airport and prevent them from entering the country. Any woman who traveled alone was a suspect. Perhaps with mongers, they will do something similar. Any American man who is old, fat and heads to San José instead of the beach, will be stopped, his bags searched for condoms and womens´ perfumes, and if he has a picture of a girl who is dark looking and her name is Carmen, be deported to the States. 358
Nevertheless, as more middle-class seniors in the United States become infected with the HIV virus, perhaps the motivation will come from the places that helped to develop this third world country‘s sex tourist economy.
358 http://www.costaricaticas.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=3500
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