Sexuality and HIV Among Young Urban Congolese - Tchetgnia, Lucas; Charbit, Yves; Libali, Benoit (The Anthropological Demography of Health)
In the context of the country’s widespread HIV/AIDS epidemic, young Congolese women and men take remarkable risks in their sex lives. They do so aware of what Western biomedicine has shown about modes of AIDS infection and necessary protection against it. This chapter documents and explains the central problem that local risk behaviour raises: how can there be such a gap, in this life-and-death matter, between the awareness of risk and actual behaviour? The chapter argues that several factors are at play: their experience of condom use and other appropriate or inappropriate preventative behaviour in light of prevailing, accepted ideas of the body and sexuality; the main forms of sexual relationships in light of Congolese gender and age relations, combined with the powerful influence of relative poverty; their distrust of national and clinical institutions; and the role of religion and traditional healing practices that speak directly to young people’s understanding and experience of their sexuality and vulnerability. The findings do not provide a formal model of risk which effectively displaces the concepts of rational choice in preventing infection that prevail in clinical programmes. They do, however, show very powerfully that young people act in alignment with reasons that make good sense, given the limited options available to them.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198862437.001.0001
Keywords: bookSection