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Last Updated: Dec 28th, 2006 |
Safer sex health services are now being offered on a more frequent basis to gay and bisexual men in Kenya, even though it is still a crime for them to have sex there, UN news service IRIN Plus reports.
A major problem in Kenya, says the publication, is that “widespread stigma and denial regarding homosexuality make it virtually impossible for men who have sex with men to seek knowledge and treatment openly and, as a result, ignorance about safer sex practices persists.”
One example of how prevalent this stigma can be is that only 0.1 percent of the Kenyan visitors to The University of Liverpool's Voluntary Counselling and Testing Services said they had sex with a man, though the real number is probably much higher: "There are lots of studies from across the globe that suggest that between five [percent] and ten percent of any given male population participate in some form of same-sex sexual behavior," MSM (men who have sex with men) services coordinator Angus Parkinson told IRIN.
The safer sex message does seem to be getting through on some level, though. “A 2005 Population Council study on MSM in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, found that 75 percent of respondents had used a condom the last time they engaged in male-to-male sexual contact,” according to the news service. But not all men in Kenya know how to or are able to use condoms correctly. “The Population Council report found that just 26 percent of respondents knew that only water-based lubricants should be used with latex condoms,” says IRIN.
There have been demands that Kenya’s law against gay sex, which carries with it a prison sentence of up to 14 years, be abolished. But, says IRIN, these requests “have been widely condemned by conservatives and the religious right, who feel that homosexuality does not conform to religious teachings and is un-African.’”
© This Week In Texas
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