Could husband-hunting be a deadly business for South Africa’s young women?
Jeremy Magruder, a young American economist at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Social Science Research, thinks so.
“Registered deaths among women in South Africa peak quite sharply from ages 25 to 35,” says Magdruder, who is completing his PhD at Yale University in the United States. “But they decline to rates which are no different from the era before HIV by the time they reach the ages of 50 to 55.”
The classic explanation is that a core group of frisky, risky chancers may be transmitting the incurable virus among themselves but Magruder suspects that something far more “normal” is pushing the infection: dating, with a view to marriage.
“The average age of first marriage for women is 25 in South Africa,” he explains. “The deaths suggests that most infections may take place either while women are single or from infections that their spouse incurred before marriage.”
Naturally, men are also at risk, but there are significant differences in the death statistics.
The peak death rate for husbands, fuelled by Aids-related opportunistic infections, begins later — in their early thirties — but carries on for much longer than it does for their wives, until the age of about 45 to 50.
“This suggests that marriage is important for men as well, who seem to be about five years older than women when they first marry,” suggests Magruder.
“Also, men marry over a longer interval of time. However, quite frankly, I’m looking mostly at women because we have better information on them.”
In the same way that many young people job-hop before settling down at a workplace, he thinks that young men and women are “trying out a variety of potential partnerships before they settle on their spouse”.
Without condoms, this means that marriage may last until an Aids-related death parts the couple.
This is not to say that older women are safer, or that married couples are protected from HIV/Aids, but that young women in the dating game are particularly vulnerable — partly because their partners may be highly infectious and totally oblivious to the fact, and partly because they may be “surfing” the wave of eligible bachelors in order to find their one and only. There’s still much to learn.
“On one level, reading about deaths all day isn’t the most uplifting thing,” Magruder says, gesturing to the data on his computer. “But it’s important to try to understand it.”
Magruder will be speaking on Thursday March 3 at lunchtime on Marital Shopping and the Spread of Aids at the Centre for Social Science Research’s weekly seminar series on the fourth floor of the University of Cape Town’s Leslie Social Science Building on the upper campus. More information: [email protected]