Sparks: Alcohol, sex and violence: a dangerous cocktail that makes young women vulnerable to HIV

Watching the girl descend into the cellar of her own ruin, you find a secret relief in her destruction, for it confirms your suspicion that the soul is merely a commodity to be bartered for a moment's oblivion.

Forget the sermons on morality; the state of affairs persists because the men who hold the bottle and the purse have more leverage than the girls who hold only their own hope for survival.

Walking past the bright tavern where the virus waits in the glass, we pretend the violence is a tragedy of fate rather than the inevitable result of a society built on the systematic exploitation of the weak.

When the elder fails to protect and the ritual of the cup becomes a snare for the innocent, we must stop calling this a social crisis and recognize it as a total collapse of the fundamental human obligations.

That a generation should be consigned to pestilence through the combined weight of physical coercion and economic desperation is a violation of the laws of nature that no amount of charitable rhetoric can ever hope to rectify.

In every market from the Maghreb to the lands of the Hindus, I observe that where the law of hospitality is replaced by the commerce of the flesh, the traveler finds only a desert of the spirit.

Strange it is that a thousand girls should tremble before a single custom of vice, as if they had forgotten that the power of their tormentors exists only because they have been taught to offer themselves up.

The transaction is described as an exchange of pleasure for gain, yet the invisible hand here is not that of a market but of a predator who has successfully removed all competition from the victim's choices.

The doctor records the rising infection rates in his ledger while the sound of glass breaking in the next room is ignored by everyone currently discussing the beauty of the village sunset.

Sitting in the dust of the roadside, I see that the geography of this epidemic is mapped not by mountains or rivers, but by the precise paths where a woman’s safety is traded for a meager meal.

Things that are truly distressing: a young face clouded by cheap wine, the heavy shadow of a man who does not belong there, and the cold silence of a house where no one is safe.

These medical interventions are merely a bandage on the wound of capital, which requires a class of vulnerable bodies to be consumed by the violence of the market before it will grant them the right to exist.

From inside the clinic where the girls wait in line, the official talk of 'vulnerability' sounds like a lie told by people who have never had to choose between a blow to the face and a lethal sickness.

There is a fence around the modesty of the home that the reformers tore down to make room for progress, and now they are shocked to find that the wolves have arrived exactly where the fence used to be.

They talk about these girls like they are some abstract problem in a book, but I have felt the weight of that same hand and I know that a stomach full of hunger hears no sermon.

Tracing the operational sequence of this tragedy reveals that the biological virus is merely the final instruction in a long and cruel algorithm of social deprivation and physical force.

How wonderful is our civilization, where we provide the most exquisite spirits to dull the senses of the young so they may more cheerfully participate in their own demise for the benefit of our pious statistics.