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We learn best through talk with peers rather than through top-down instruction. |
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Humor and controversial analogies encourage creative thinking about HIV prevention. |
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We need to stop asking ifprevention works but try to understand how it works. |
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The personal is political. We need more discussions about desire, sex and risk as social relations. |
The problem with current prevention practice.
The professionalization of HIV knowledge has created barriers separating the people targeted for interventions and the experts who design interventions. The professionalization of AIDS knowledge creates an over-reliance on expert, directive knowledge. Consumers of HIV prevention must develop critical skills to analyze the often contradictory risk information provided by AIDS experts. Counselors, outreach workers and prevention educators are not adequately trained and high rates of burnout reveals a need for more professional support and continuing education.
What is HIV Prevention?
HIV prevention is counseling and community based education that aims to empower people to reduce the harm in their behavioral environment. The practice of harm reduction is not based on a body of knowledge, so much as a set of skills. These skills include active listening, analyzing behavior in a non-judgmental way, making appropriate analogies to produce insight, and modeling pragmatic attitudes that help to reduce harm.
Prevention education has for too long been conceived as simply providing knowledge. We all know that ignorance is not the cause of risky behavior. Too little attention has been given to the role of transgressive desire in relation to prevention advice. Prevention messages can reinforce oppressive categories of guilt and innocence in relation to HIV risk and testing negative can serve to rationalize risky behaviors.
By defining prevention in terms of interactional skills rather than a body of knowledge, we can analyze it as a social and political process. For example, we can analyze counselor's narratives about difficult clients and transcripts of test counseling sessions in order to make predictions about the effectiveness of particular approaches. We can analyze client's reactions to counselor's advice to see how prevention advice is used to rationalize risky behaviors. This approach helps us to design training materials around real skills, used in real situations under real constraints rather than on theoretical models that are assumed to work with a particular "population."
How this web site can help.
Prevention workers cannot wait for adequate training and support to be funded and implemented. We must help each other by sharing our insights, techniques, and emotional support. Lay persons can learn from counselors how to apply harm reduction and prevention education in their own lives. This site aims to break down the barriers to AIDS prevention knowledge by offering everyone access to prevention resources and discussions in a non-clinical, non-didactic manner. The challenges of doing prevention work and staying safe will be openly addressed rather than silenced.
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