Knots of sex workers sit and wait among the "Ojek" - the motorbike-taxi drivers - the cheapest way to get around in Indonesia. These street walkers are at the lowest rung of the sex industry in the Melanesian island of Papua, Indonesia's easternmost province. Some are extremely young. Her father was a soldier posted to the next-door province of West Papua, who remarried after her mother died. Marcella did not get on with her stepmother and ran away from home. She knows of six other children from similarly broken homes selling sex.
Marcella shares a room with three women, all divorced, two of whom have children to support. With only limited education in a region where formal job opportunities are scarce, prostitution is one of their few options. They were aware of HIV, as were most of their clients, they said, but all admitted they had sex without protection if a customer insisted. Condom use is extremely low across the two provinces of Papua and West Papua, collectively known as Tanah Papua the land of Papua.
According to a behaviour study, just 2. When sex was paid for, the figure was slightly higher than 14 percent. Tanah Papua has an HIV prevalence rate of 2. Its hard-to-reach lowland and highland regions limit the delivery of health and education services, but do not inhibit the mobility of those looking for seasonal work or trading, who are familiar with the footpaths that crisscross the heavily forested terrain.
This has allowed the virus to penetrate some of the remotest parts of the island. Multiple sexual partners are common in Tanah Papua, alcohol abuse and sexual violence are high, over one-third of Papuans have never attended school, and male circumcision, unlike in the rest of Indonesia, is rare; the multiplicity of languages and cultures - roughly - complicates advocacy campaigns.
Under the statue of MacArthur, staring out across the sea to the Philippines, Papuan sex workers make a difficult living among local ethnic Melanesians and working-class migrants from the rest of Indonesia, settled here by the government in the s and '80s in response to a separatist movement opposed to Indonesian control.
