Sugar daddies' and HIV: is it really about money, money, money?

Abstract

Statistics on the HIV pandemic in southern Africa show that young women are much more likely to be HIV-positive than their male counterparts. In some places in Botswana, for example, HIV-rates in girls between the ages of 15 and 19 are nine times more than that of boys of the same age.

Apart from the physiological reasons that make women more susceptible to HIV, scientists often blame sugar daddies for the many HIV infections among young women. Intergenerational (where the man is more than 10 years older than the woman) and age-disparate relationships (where the age difference between the man and woman is more than five years) are common in sub- Saharan countries.