Saving Face Can’t Make API Women Safe

This article features Assistant Professor Hyeouk Chris Hahm and was originally posted at New American Media on May 18, 2011.

SAN FRANCISCO – Sex was a taboo subject in Meena Sachdev’s home.

“My parents [from India] are liberal in their ideology, but it is hard for them to break away from the traditions they were raised in,” said the 24-year-old U.S.-born woman, who did not want her real name used for fear of stigmatizing her family.

At school, all the sex “education” she and her peers received was in the eighth grade when they were given a handout containing pictures of male and female genitalia.

“So a lot of what I learned about sex as I grew up was from personal experience. [From family] I learned that I had to give men what they wanted.”

She did exactly that to a young man she met in college, with whom she had a monogamous relationship. He was her first sexual partner.

Before long, Sachdev found out during a routine ob/gyn exam that she was HIV positive, even before her partner, from whom she contracted the virus that causes AIDS, knew he was.

Sachdev is among a growing number of Asians and Pacific Islander women who are living with HIV/AIDS in the United States. About 86 percent of them contracted it through heterosexual contact.

The disease continues to rise unchecked among Asian and Pacific Islanders (APIs), especially among API women, observed Dr. Hyeouk Chris Hahm, a Boston-based leading researcher in Asian and Pacific Islander women’s sexual health, during a press conference here yesterday spotlighting the alarming growth in new HIV infections among API women. May 19 commemorates the 7th annual National API HIV/AIDS Awareness Day.

Two other panelists participated in the discussions, as well – Sonia Rastogi, communications coordinator with Positive Women’s Network in Oakland, and Jaimie Kahale-Callahan from Hawaii who has been living with HIV for 20 years.

“Risky sexual behavior among API women is the least scientifically explored [subject]” in the United States, lamented Hahm, who is currently the principal investigator of the API Women’s Sexual Health Initiative Project, which is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.

Hahm said studies indicate that young Asian American women have the highest rate of virginity and are “very conscious about their first intercourse,” but once they lose their virginity they grow careless. They worry more about becoming pregnant than about contracting HIV.

She said she and her team of researchers interviewed 650 “sexually experienced API women between 18 and 35 years of age in the Boston area. Most felt they were “invincible and wouldn’t contract HIV” even if they or their partners didn’t use a condom during intercourse because of the perception that they belong to a “model minority.”

Read the entire story here.

– By Viji Sundaram