AIDS awareness literacy challenges
This is the first in a series of vignettes by students documenting the work of BvLF partners as part of the Hine Fellowships project, a collaboration between BvLF and the Lewis Hine Documentary Initiative. Sarah Leeper is working with the Children's Rights Centre in Durban.
Please note that reports from Hine Fellows published on this website constitute their own personal impressions and in no way represent the official positions of their host organisation, the Bernard van Leer Foundation or the Lewis Hine Documentary Initiative.
I'm currently gathering materials and working closely with a graphic designer on the layout of the Living Positively Handbook (for Children with HIV), pediatric treatment literacy materials.
Due to the scarcity of treatment literacy materials for children, we were excited when another group of early childhood development workers offered to send us a CD with worksheets and stories they're using to teach children about HIV. When it arrived, however, we became less enthusiastic.
One workbook contained colouring book images of a baby coughing up blood ("Can you colour baby's blood red?"), a dying parent in a bed ("If your parents died from HIV, what would you remember about them?"), and two frightened children being chased by a pack of faceless monsters ("Very bad things can happen to orphans. List some of those things in the space provided.")
Some sections were simply bizarre. A worksheet with a herd of cows, some very thin and some fat, asks "Can you circle the cows with AIDS? Cut out all the cows with AIDS and put them on one side of the fence. Put the healthy cows on the other side."
Such well-meaning but misguided efforts to educate young people are not only unfortunate - they can be dangerous.
The arrival of the worksheets coincided with controversy over the release of a new LoveLife media campaign in South Africa. LoveLife is a government funded organization tasked with raising awareness and prevention messages about HIV among children aged 15-29, the group with the highest new infection rates.
The new campaign features billboard ads on the theme of "HIV loves..." including "HIV loves skin on skin", "HIV loves your daughter", "HIV loves players", and "HIV loves women getting pregnant to prove their womanhood." Images are nearly-abstract silhouettes: of a pregnant woman's body, three pairs of feet sticking out of a blanket at the foot of a bed, etc.
These messages have become the target of several protests by NGOs and PLWAs, who argue that they are scare tactics which, rather than being helpfully educational, communicate negative messages about people who become infected by HIV - that they are promiscuous, that they are somehow "asking for it".
These are just a few of the many examples of how HIV is represented and arguably misrepresented. It's easy to identify the mistakes, but difficult to blaze a better trail.
In putting together these literacy materials, we find ourselves considering topics we never would have imagined: How do you define sexual assault so that a girl child under 10 can understand it, an can name it if it has happened to her, but not live in fear of it if it hasn't?
How do you explain resistance to a 5-year old in danger of defaulting her second-line regimen? How do you explain the difference between HIV and AIDS to a 7-year old? How do you support a 9-year old who has received threats of violence against her family because of her status?
Very seldom do we have good answers, but we're getting better at connecting with people who do: mothers, grandmothers, pediatric patients, doctors, nurses.
We hope to publish the handbook by the beginning of June, in order to get a useful product back into the hands of the people who so generously helped us create it.