SP/Dina Manafe, Surabaya – The recent closure of half of Surabaya's red light districts has prompted worries about the spread of HIV/AIDS throughout the city, as sex workers will no longer be confined to certain areas, an official said on Tuesday.
Nurul Laila, the head of the Dupak Bangunsari Community Health Center in Surabaya, said two out of four red light districts in the city were closed down last year. She said safe sex advocates and health care professionals were now having difficulty in conducting outreach, such as distributing free condoms and information about sexually transmitted diseases, because sex workers and their clients were now spread throughout Surabaya.
In 2010 the local government reported there were at least 3,500 women working as sex workers in Dupak Bangunsari, an area known to have contained a red light district before the government cracked down on prostitution there last year.
"We heard that all red light districts will be closed down this year for a political reason. The impact will be tremendous," Nurul said during a visit with Health Minister Nafsiah Mboi.
Nurul said concentrating prostitution to certain areas helped the health workers conduct intervention, fight against the spread of HIV/AIDS and treat those who were infected. She added that since the closure of red light districts, efforts to reach out to sex workers and their clients became elusive.
Low public awareness about HIV/AIDS has also hampered efforts to curb its spread, she said, adding that many who were infected rarely came to clinics for treatment because they believed that everybody infected with the virus would die.
Nafsiah echoed Nurul's concerns about public ignorance regarding HIV/AIDS, saying that just 21 percent of Indonesians have comprehensive knowledge about the infection. Nafsiah added that 35.7 percent of Indonesian men said they wear condoms when engaging in risky sexual behaviors.
At the Dupak Community Health Center, Nurul said, there were 19 new HIV cases in 2012, and four of the patients were pregnant women. So far this year, five people have been diagnosed with the infection.
"If we knew where they [sex workers] live, we could easily monitor the spread of HIV by distributing condoms and conducting regular blood tests, or treatment for those who have been infected, but after the red light districts were closed down, we lost contact with them," Nurul said.
Nafsiah said the spread of HIV has been increasing in most districts across Indonesia.
"In all areas the number of new infections is increasing, with no exception, this is why our target to achieve zero infection for Millennium Development Goal is very unlikely to be achieved," she said.