AIDS, Behaviour, and Culture: Understanding Evidence-Based Prevention

AIDS, Behaviour, and Culture presents a challenge to the prevailing wisdom of "the global AIDS industry" and offers an alternative framework for understanding what works in HIV prevention. Arguing for a behaviour-based approach, the authors make the case that the most effective programmes are those that encourage fundamental behavioural changes such as faithfulness, avoidance of concurrent or overlapping sexual partners, delay of age of first sex, and complete recovery from drug addiction and that successful programmes are locally based, low cost, low tech, innovative, and built on existing cultural structures. In contrast, they argue that anthropologists and public health practitioners focus on counselling, testing, condoms, and treatment, and impose their Western values, culture, and political ideologies in an attempt to "liberate" non-Western people from sexual repression and homophobia.

Contents include the following:

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Introduction

1. An Anthropological Approach to AIDS Prevention

2. Sex, Culture, and Disease

3. How the Global AIDS Response Went Wrong

4. Refocusing HIV Prevention on Primary Prevention

5. Primary Prevention in Concentrated Epidemics

6. Facts and Myths about HIV Prevention in Generalized Epidemics

7. Primary Behavior Change and HIV Decline

8. HIV Prevention and Structural Factors

9. Gender, Marriage, and HIV

10. An Endogenous Response to AIDS

Conclusion: Where to from Here?

References

Index

About the Authors