Malawi: HIV Positive Man Paid To Sleep With Women

In Nsanje district in southern Malawi, the people have a tradition called "s*xual cleansing". This tradition applies to both underaged and matured women. 

How it works is, if a man dies, his wife is required by their tradition to sleep with a particular man before she can bury him. If a woman has an abortion, she is expected to sleep with that particular man to undergo cleansing. Also teenage girls, after their first menstruation, are made to have s*x over a three-day period with a particular man to mark their passage from childhood to womanhood. If the girls refuse, it’s believed that disease or some fatal misfortune could befall their families or the village as a whole.

These men who carry out the rite are called Hyenas both in their community and neighboring communities and are paid from $4 to $7 each time. A particular man named Eric Avina, is one of the 10 hyenas in the community. Avina has two wives who know and approve of his job and Avina is HIV positive. When questioned about his state of health, he revealed that he knows he is HIV positive but does not reveal this to the women he sleeps with. He further mentioned that the women he slept with ranged from 12 year old girls to middle aged women and that they always boasted about having him as their Hyena. When asked, he put the total figure of women he had slept with to be around 104. 

Source: BBC