Parents are paying an HIV-positive man to have sex with their daughters

Eric Aniva is known as a “hyena” in the Nsanje district in Malawi, a country in Southern Africa.

Other cultures might refer to him as a rapist, but in Malawi Aniva is actually paid between $3 and $7 to have sex with young girls after they reach puberty. Aniva’s story was told on the BBC website and on its World Service program “Assignment.”

Hyenas are part a “sexual cleansing” ritual performed in some communities in southern Malawi. They are men hired to have sex with women and girls at certain periods of their life to “cleanse” them, such as when they’re widowed, after they have an abortion or when they hit puberty. The ritual stems from old beliefs that children need a sexual act to pass into the “heat” of adulthood.

Custodians of the tradition in Aniva’s village said the practice was organized by parents for their daughters “to avoid infection with their parents or the rest of the community.” The custom specifically says a condom can not be used during sex with a hyena, but that hyenas are specifically chosen for their good morals and therefore cannot be infected with HIV or AIDS.

But Aniva told the BBC he is HIV positive — and he does not mention this to the parents who hire him. He estimates he’s had sex with more than 100 girls.

“Most of those I have slept with are girls, school-going girls,” Aniva said. “Some girls are just 12 or 13 years old, but I prefer them older. All these girls find pleasure in having me as their hyena. They actually are proud and tell other people that this man is a real man, he knows how to please a woman.”

But girls forced into the practice had a different story for the BBC, saying they didn’t want to do it but felt they had no choice.

“There was nothing else I could have done. I had to do it for the sake of my parents,” one girl, Maria, said. “If I’d refused, my family members could be attacked with diseases — even death — so I was scared.”

Father Clause Boucher, a French-born Catholic priest who’s lived in Malawi for 50 years, said the custom is no longer practiced in most of the country, but remote southern areas have stubbornly held on. Those people know the use of hyenas is widely condemned.

“There’s nothing wrong with our culture,” Chrissie, one of the female custodians of the tradition, told the BBC. “If you look at today’s society, you can see that girls are not responsible, so we have to train our girls in a good manner in the village, so that they don’t go astray, are good wives so that the husband is satisfied, and so that nothing bad happens to their families.”

One of Aniva’s two wives, Fanny, said she “hates” the practice, both when her husband does it to girls now and when it happened to her.

“I want this tradition to end. We are forced to sleep with the hyenas,” Fanny told the BBC. “It’s not out of our choice and that I think is so sad for us as women.”

This story was originally published July 22, 2016 at 11:12 AM with the headline "Parents are paying an HIV-positive man to have sex with their daughters."