Partner negotiation and insertion difficulties are key barriers to female condom (FC) use in sub-Saharan Africa. Few FC interventions have provided comprehensive training in both negotiation and insertion skills, or focused on university students. In this study we explored whether training in FC insertion and partner negotiation influenced young…

Researchers are often skeptical of sexual behavior surveys: Respondents may lie or forget details of their intimate lives, and interviewers may exercise authority in how they capture responses. We use data from a 2010-2011 cross-sectional sexual behavior survey in rural South Africa to explore who says what to whom about their sexual lives.…

Life Orientation sexuality education in South Africa faces many pedagogical challenges, not least among which is that it is sometimes perceived as irrelevant to learners' real interests and concerns. Learners report that the content is repetitive and that they learn more from peers than from the reiterated lessons of risk and disease avoidance…

The stakes are high for sex education in South Africa: it has been estimated that 8.7% of young people live with HIV. Within primarily US and UK contexts, there has been much debate over the relative merits of abstinence-only and comprehensive sexual education programmes. These perspectives have largely been presented as irreconcilable, but…

Communicating about sex is a vital component of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention and influences how HIV educators convey messages to communities and how couples negotiate safer sex practices. However, sexual communication inevitably confronts culturally based behavioral guidelines and linguistic taboos unique to diverse social…

This paper explores the ways in which young South African school children (aged between seven and eight) in a predominantly white primary school give meanings to HIV/AIDS. Using ethnographic methods and interview data, the analysis of young children's responses shows that their accounts of HIV/AIDS draw from their knowledge of disease more…

In this article we report on the manner in which participatory action research (PAR) was utilised by teachers in developing a Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) school plan, in collaboration with university researchers. The need for a structured HIV and Aids school plan emerged during the course of a…

Three studies examined the co-existence of natural and supernatural explanations for illness and disease transmission, from a developmental perspective. The participants (5-, 7-, 11-, and 15-year-olds and adults; N = 366) were drawn from 2 Sesotho-speaking South African communities, where Western biomedical and traditional healing frameworks were…

"I go to the hospital with my mother when she is sick. I can't go to school and leave her in so much pain. I won't concentrate." Millions of adolescents live with AIDS-affected parents or primary caregivers. Little is known about educational impacts of living in an AIDS-affected home, or of acting as a "young carer" in the…

Although much has been written on the need to integrate HIV into tertiary education programmes, very little research has been done in terms of how it should be done. This article will report on the first phase of a larger action research project designed to research, develop and evaluate best practices for the transformation of the curricula of…

Responses to AIDS have often neglected children. Drawing on a qualitative study of young children aged 7-9 years, this paper draws attention to their understandings of HIV and AIDS. It is argued that young children are able to give meaning to the disease in ways that link to their social contexts, where gender inequalities and sexual violence are…

Women who become HIV infected through heterosexual transmission are faced with the task of making sense of how they became infected. This paper presents a qualitative analysis based on interviews with 35 HIV-positive South African Black women. A specific theme, that blame of a male partner was avoided or disavowed in interviews, is explored in…

In 2006, De Beers Consolidated Diamond Mines in South Africa entered into a partnership, with the Soul City Institute for Health and Development Communications to implement an HIV and AIDS Community Training Partnership Program (CTPP), initially in five diamond mining areas in three provinces of South Africa. The aim of CTPP was to improve HIV…

South Africa, a country with the highest incidence of rape and child rape in the world, has the fifth highest prevalence of HIV in the world, with 1.1 million AIDS orphans. The UNAIDS Global Report reveals 370,000 AIDS-related deaths in South Africa in 2003. Given the numbers of people infected and dying, South Africa is regarded as having the…

loveLife is a high profile, expensive and controversial nationwide awareness and prevention campaign that has been addressed at young South Africans since 1999. This paper examines the discourses 20 Black youths used to narrate their involvements, satisfactions and difficulties as peer educators. The primary data sources are individual interviews…