Source: Ryot
Government grants in South Africa are keeping young women away from “sugar daddies,” who health officials say are major contributors to the spread of HIV.

A collaboration between Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand and England’s Oxford University surveyed 3,500 teen girls over the course of three years. The study, published in the medical journal Lancet Health Global Health, found that those in homes receiving government child support were 63 percent less likely to date older men for money.

According to the Human Sciences Research Council, almost 25 percent of women in South Africa 15–49 years of age are HIV positive. Over 13 percent of men suffer from the treatable but incurable disease.

Young girls are up to three times more likely to become infected with HIV than boys. Most of them sleep with older men, not in exchange for Pretty Woman shopping sprees, but so they can afford food, shelter and school fees in a nation where too many people are poor and jobless, but public education ironically costs money.

“This study shows that as long as they are given enough money to survive, girls will choose not to have a sugar daddy,” said Lucie Cluver of the University of Oxford in a statement.

“Child support grants do not make teenagers more sensible when it comes to safer sex,” added the University of the Witwatersrand’s Mark Orkin. ”But what they can do is to provide enough financial security for girls that they do not have to choose their sexual partners through economic necessity.”

• South Africa