MONTEGO BAY, St James – A 26-year-old prostitute returned to the busy Montego Bay Hip Strip last week after being out of ‘business’ for six weeks because one of her clients broke her arm during a fight.

She had stolen US$200 from him, so he beat her and slammed her arm into the railing of a hotel balcony.

“I see him wallet lying carelessly on the bed so I tek it up and tek the money out of it,” she said. “When we finish having sex, him tek up the wallet and find out that the money was missing.”

Her client became angry when she denied that she had stolen his money.

“Him lift mi up and tek me out to the balcony of the room and put mi left hand on the railing and bruk it,” she said.

Her story, like those of many other ladies of the night, highlighted the dangers of prostitution.

“Wi make good money out of it, but sometimes wi go through hell with some of the man dem,” said another member of the commercial sex trade who works the busy Ironshore to Montego Bay strip.

She told the Sunday Observer that she was recently beaten by a well-known businessman who wasn’t pleased with her services and asked for a refund of the $2,000 he had paid her.

Physical abuse is an all-too-familiar tale with these sex workers and because prostitution is illegal, they rarely go to the police.

And many rarely get tested for diseases, like the deadly HIV/AIDS, which they contract from and pass on to other clients.

The commercial sex trade, according to Dr Peter Figueroa, the head of the Ministry of Health’s epidemiology unit, is one of the major contributing factors to the spread of HIV in the island.

“When we look at the risk factors among persons who have AIDS, as many as 30 per cent of them have participated in commercial sex, and that figure is the same if you go among people who have other sexually transmitted infection,” he said during last month’s AIDS forum in Montego Bay.

But the prostitutes interviewed by the Sunday Observer were adamant that they were neither infected with HIV nor at risk on the job because they do not engage in unprotected sex.

However, one teenager admitted that one of her friends recently died from an AIDS-related illness.

The hooker, she added, had contracted the disease from a client.

For those in the commercial sex trade who are lucky enough to survive the beatings and diseases, they then have to negotiate the pitfalls of drug addiction.

“Many of them work good money, but they blow it out by smoking crack/cocaine and ganja,” said the operator of one of Montego Bay’s exotic clubs.

“A lot of them, too, spend huge sums of money on expensive outfits and liquor and so they save nothing.”

There is the well-known tale of one 40-year-old prostitute who has been in the sex trade for more than 22 years. Negril has been her base for the last decade and a half and though those who know her well say she is making “good money”, she is still struggling to make ends meet.

“She still live in a one-room house and can hardly send her two children to school,” said a Negril resident.