A crackdown on Indonesia's LGBT community is fuelling a spike in HIV cases as at-risk people avoid prevention services or seeking treatment, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said today.
Conservative politicians and hardline Islamist groups have been increasingly vocal against the vulnerable community in recent years, while lawmakers eyed outlawing gay sex in the world's biggest Muslim majority country.
Police conducted "arbitrary and unlawful" raids on places frequented by LGBT people including saunas, night clubs, hotel rooms, hair salons, and even private homes, HRW said.
That has discouraged some at-risk groups from accessing prevention and treatment services, according to the report entitled 'Scared in Public and Now No Privacy: Human Rights and Public Health Impacts of Indonesia's Anti-LGBT Moral Panic'.
As a result, HIV rates among men who have sex with other men have soared five-fold since 2007 from 5.0 per cent to 25 per cent, HRW said, adding that the group accounted for one-third of Indonesia's new infections.
"The Indonesian government's failure to address anti-LGBT moral panic is having dire consequences for public health," said Kyle Knight, LGBT rights researcher at Human Rights Watch and the report's author. "The Indonesian government should recognise that its role in abuses against LGBT people is seriously compromising the country's response to HIV."
Indonesia had about 48,000 new HIV infections and 38,000 AIDS-related deaths in 2016, with only 13 percent of those infected getting treatment,
"Clubs were hot spots for us because we knew that even the discreet guys felt safe about their sexuality inside, so we could do HIV testing and give condoms and they wouldn't be scared to participate."
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