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Men’s Extramarital Sex, Marital Relationships and Sexual Risk in Urban Poor Communities in India

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Abstract

The objectives of this paper are to (1) understand the nature of men’s extramarital sexuality in three low income communities in Mumbai, India; (2) explore the associations between marital relationships and extramarital sex; and (3) assess the implications of the research results for intervention. Results are based on survey data collected from 2,408 randomly selected men from the three study communities and a matched subset of 260 randomly selected men and their wives who responded to a female version of the men's survey. These surveys produced a unique data set, which allows sociodemographic, attitudinal and behavioral variables from husband and wife and variables that are the product of husband and wife interaction to be utilized to predict men's extramarital sex through multiple sequential logistic regression analysis. Results indicate that men's extramarital sex is significantly associated with husband's and wife's age, wife's perception of domestic violence, husband's education and place of birth, husband's alcohol use, wife's willingness to engage in marital sex, and types of marital sexual acts. These results confirm the need to move from the individual to the couple as the unit of research and the need for intervention to reduce the risk of HIV/STI transmission within marriage both in India and internationally.

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Acknowledgments

The research on which this paper is based was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, “Male Sexual Concerns and Prevention of HIV/STD in India” (RO1 MH 64875) and a supplement, “Assessing Women’s HIV/STD Risk in Marriage in India” funded by the Office of AIDS Research of the National Institutes of Health. We thank the field and office staff of the RISHTA program at the International Institute for Population Sciences for their hard work and commitment to the collection of quality data under difficult circumstances.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for International Community Health Studies, Department of Community Medicine, University of Connecticut School of Medicine, 263 Farmington Ave., Farmington, CT, 06030-6325, USA

    Stephen L. Schensul PhD

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  1. Stephen L. Schensul PhD
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  2. Abdelwahed Mekki-Berrada
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  3. Bonnie K. Nastasi
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  4. Rajendra Singh
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  5. Joseph A. Burleson
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  6. Martha Bojko
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Correspondence to Stephen L. Schensul PhD.

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Schensul, Mekki-Berrada, Burleson, and Bojko are with the Center for International Community Health Studies, Department of Community Medicine, University of Connecticut School of Medicine, 263 Farmington Ave., Farmington, CT 06030-6325, USA; Nastasi is with the Institute for Community Research, Hartford, CT, USA; Singh is with the International Institute for Population Studies, Mumbai, India.

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Schensul, S.L., Mekki-Berrada, A., Nastasi, B.K. et al. Men’s Extramarital Sex, Marital Relationships and Sexual Risk in Urban Poor Communities in India. JURH 83, 614–624 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-006-9076-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11524-006-9076-z

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