Study Indicts “Sugar Daddies” in AIDS Plight

A research fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies released a study last month demonstrating the effects of imbalanced, or transactional, relationships in the perpetuation of Africa’s AIDS epidemic.

According to researcher Nancy Luke, so-called “Sugar Daddy” relationships—in which large economic and age disparities exist between sexual partners—are a significant cause of unsafe sexual behavior in young African women.

Luke’s survey of 1,052 males, ages 21 to 45, in Kisumu, Kenya, focused only on extra-marital relationships.

Luke and her colleagues found that the probability of condom use decreases as the age difference between partners and quantity of gifts bestowed by a man to his partner increase.

Although concern over the spread of HIV through transactional relationships has frequently been voiced by researchers and health workers, this is the first time the “Sugar Daddy Syndrome” has been quantitatively demonstrated. According to the study, published in the March 2005 issue of International Family Planning Perspectives, social norms in regions of Africa permit and often encourage sexual intercourse outside of marriage, and with much younger partners.

According to the study, “socioeconomic realities enable men to monopolize sources of income and give older men more social and economic power than young men.”

This often gives older men, who are more likely to carry HIV than younger men, the power to demand unprotected sex. As a result, Luke said in an interview last night, the chances of having unsafe sex, and therefore transmitting HIV, are greatly increased.

1,052 Kenyan men who had engaged in sexual intercourse within the previous month were asked to describe their sexual behaviors and to what extent they had provided material assistance to their partners. Of the men surveyed in the study, 47 percent had partners who were adolescents, 14 percent had relationships involving an age difference of at least 10 years, and 23 percent had relationships involving more than the mean amount of male-to-female material assistance.

Luke and her colleagues also found that the education level of men affected their likelihood of using condoms. For each year of education, men were 20 percent more likely to practice safe sex.

Luke, a demographer and sociologist, said she combined her expertise with that of Kyvan Munshi, an economist at Brown University.

From an economics perspective, Luke said, women in Africa are weighing the risks and benefits of engaging in this sort of economic transaction—and are finding it worthwhile to trade unsafe sex for material assistance.

This, she said, is indicative of a larger social problem. “Perhaps if women had better outside options, they wouldn’t have to go these relationships as a source of income,” Luke said last evening. “This might be reflective of the poor economic options that women have.”

Luke noted that although “Sugar Daddy” relationships seem to be universal, her research does not necessarily indicate a universal mechanism in the spread of AIDS. “I would say that if we look at economic exchange within relationships, that happens across all parts of the world,” said Luke. “But the giving of gifts connected to unsafe behavior is highly context specific.”

In future research, Luke and her colleagues hope to analyze risk behaviors within marital contexts as well as in extra-marital contexts, and to look at how such behaviors change over time.