From ‘Culture of Shame’, ‘Secret Sex’, Toward ‘Secretive Sexual Exchange’; the Impact of Cultural Practices that Increasing of HIV/AIDS Rate Level in West Papuan Mining Communities, West Papua, Indonesia.

Erna Anjarwati

Social Anthropology Department,

University of Padjadjaran, Bandung,

Indonesia.

This paper seeks to improve our understanding of the influence of the West Papuan’s cultural practices toward the spread of HIV/AIDS in West Papua and those influences toward their livelihood as a community. Through this paper, the researcher would like to position herself as an Anthropologist and analyze it with Anthropology’s perspectives as well as descriptive analytic method.

West Papua, with its rich natural resources, is an important asset to Indonesia. For over 40 years, they had to endure a climate of intimidation and violence from the Indonesian National Military (TNI) and the militias who operate to undermine and destroy any pro-independence thinking or action. By the early 80’s, as a part of the Soeharto’s New Order regime, Indonesian government has signed an MOU with one of the huge US Companies, which called the Freeport Company, to explore the natural resources in West Papua for over 20 years. One of the huge impacts of Freeport opening is the practice of sex work by the Indigenous West Papuan women.

Sex work is a burgeoning problem wherever the mining companies are.  Many women and young girls have “affairs” with Indonesian and other “white men” around the logging camps and mining towns. Most of Indigenous Papuan street workers even have sex in ‘open sites’, i.e. outdoors, on the beach, in unsafe temporary shelters or rural makeshift locations. They receive less money and access fewer state services than their non-Indigenous counterparts. Those practices are called as ‘secret sex’ and it still going on until now. In addition, other complex issues which have been faced by West Papuan, particularly women are HIV/AIDS threaten. As we known that West Papua has the highest HIV/AIDS rate in Indonesia. The number of population who infected by HIV/AIDS has continued to increase due to their own sex cultural practices. For instance, “Culture of Shame”[1] is the one which contributed significantly to the reluctance of Indonesian women to access reproductive and sexual health services. Indigenous Papuan youth from 16 to 29 years old are likely to be mobile, to drink, to have sex at a young age, to engage and to have several sexual partners. Aside those, mostly regulated sex workers, street sex workers and women are still doing ‘secretive’ sexual intercourse in exchange for food and protection, and these women would not consider themselves as sex workers.

Street sex workers are particularly vulnerable to HIV infection because of lack of access to health services, the absence of knowledge about condom use due to the poor conditions faced by many sex workers and poor knowledge amongst health workers about sexually transmitted diseases, high mobility and migration, insufficient implementation of the programs, and communication difficulties caused by high rates of illiteracy and multiple languages. Currently, the West Papuan local government, assisted by one of local NGO in Papua have been tried to reduce the HIV/AIDS rate by promoting women Condom use and undertaking massive campaign to the community since 2006, however, those cultural phenomena are still going on up to now.   

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