An HIV-positive Malawian man has been found guilty for having unprotected sex with newly bereaved widows.<\/p>\n
The practice of “widow cleansing”, when a widow must have sex after her husband dies, was outlawed a few years ago.<\/p>\n
Eric Aniva, a sex worker known in Malawi as a “hyena”, admitted in a BBC interview to having sex with more than 100 women and underage girls and not disclosing his HIV status.<\/p>\n
This led to the president ordering his arrest in July.<\/p>\n
President Peter Mutharika had wanted Aniva tried for defiling young girls, but none came forward to testify against him.<\/p>\n
Instead Aniva was tried for “harmful cultural practice” under section five of Malawi’s Gender Equality Act for having sex with new widows.<\/p>\n
Two women testified against him.<\/p>\n
He will be sentenced on 22 November 2016.<\/p>\n
The BBC’s southern Africa correspondent Karen Allen says the case has attracted international media attention and sharply divided opinion as to how widespread the practice remains.<\/p>\n
Aniva was the subject of a BBC feature into various sexual cleansing practices in Malawi.<\/p>\n
In some remote southern regions of the country it is traditional for girls to be made to have sex with a man after their first menstruation.<\/p>\n
Last year Malawi banned child marriage, raising the legal age of marriage from 15 to 18 – something activists hoped would put an end to early sexual initiations.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An HIV-positive Malawian man has been found guilty for having unprotected sex with newly bereaved widows. The practice of “widow cleansing”, when a widow must have sex after her husband dies, was outlawed a few years ago. Eric Aniva, a sex worker known in Malawi as a “hyena”, admitted in a BBC interview to having […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":270058,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[3,13767],"class_list":["post-270053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international","tag-ghana-news","tag-malwian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=270053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=270053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=270053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=270053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}