January 13, 2011: The children of sex workers often face heightened risk for contracting HIV, having sex at an early age, not enrolling in school, and being socially marginalized by society. Yet these children’s needs are rarely addressed, according to IRIN/PlusNews, citing a study that appeared last summer.

That review, headed by Boston University assistant professor Jennifer Beard, found scant research conducted on the problem. Most funding targets at-risk adults rather than their offspring, Beard told IRIN/PlusNews.

"We don't really know anything about children of MARPs [most-at-risk populations],” she said.

According to the review itself, “Family-centered interventions have been implemented in low- and middle-income contexts, but they tend to be small, piecemeal, and struggling to meet demand.” To learn more about such programs, Beard and her co-researchers examined an intervention effort run by an organization providing services to sex workers and their families in Zambia.

Bringing Change in Zambia

Zambia's Tasintha Program, named after the local Chichewa word for “change,” began in 1992 in an area known for its concentration of commercial sex work. Working with adult sex workers and their children, the group finds that helping the offspring of female sex workers has been effective in broadening the women’s options and lowering HIV risk.

In many cases, found Beard’s review, sex work became cross-generational within families. Without other viable income sources, mothers handed the trade to their daughters. This pattern spurred the Tasintha Program in 1998 to widen its reach to include sex workers’ children.

Many groups are unaware of this family economic dynamic, Tasintha program founder Nkandu Luo told IRIN/PlusNews, “because they are seeing the individual, not the systems around this woman. The fact that she is a mother, because she doesn’t make enough money, means the children also join [her].”

Challenging Task

Convincing sex workers to give up a profession that is highly lucrative compared to alternative options such as brick making, is an enormous challenge, said a Tasintha program coordinator.

Despite hurdles, Tasintha provides education subsidies for its clients’ children and has managed to send many underage sex workers back to the classroom. And as program founder Luo said, "If you support the mothers but are not able to support the children, the women will always have that pressure to go back to the streets to support them."