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Education has already been proved to be effective and necessary, both for people who are not infected with HIV, to empower them to protect themselves from HIV, and for people who are HIV+, to help them to live with the virus. There is a huge wealth of educational resources available around the world, and yet in many places people still lack the knowledge they need to protect themselves. Many people are dangerously ignorant about the virus - a survey in the UK found recently that a third of teens thought there was a 'cure' for AIDS. Education is an important component of preventing the spread of HIV. Even if education were completely successful, it would still have to be an ongoing process - each generation a new generation of people become adult and need to know how to protect themselves from infection. The older generations, who have hopefully already been educated, may need the message reinforced, and need to be kept informed, so that they are able to protect themselves and inform the younger. |
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AIDS education prevents new infections from taking place. This can be seen as consisting of two processes:
- Giving people information about HIV - what HIV and AIDS are, how they are transmitted, and how people can protect themselves from infection.
- Teaching people how to put this information to use and act on it practically - how to get and use condoms, how to suggest and practice safer sex, how to prevent infection in a medical environment or when injecting drugs.
AIDS education is needed is to improve quality of life for HIV positive people. Too often, AIDS education is seen as being something which should be targeted only at people who are not infected with HIV in order to prevent them from becoming infected. An important and commonly-neglected aspect of AIDS education with HIV positive people is enabling and empowering them to improve their quality of life. HIV positive people have varying educational needs, but among them are the need to be able to access medical services and drug provision and the need to be able to find appropriate emotional and practical support and help.
People need AIDS education to reduce stigma and discrimination. In many countries there is a great deal of fear and stigmatisation of people who are HIV positive which results to prejudice and fear. With HIV positive people being burned to death in India, and many families being forced to leave their homes across the United States when neighbours discover a family-member's positive status
results of prejudice and fear can be extreme and discrimination against positive people can help the AIDS epidemic to spread. If people are fearful of being tested for HIV, then they are more likely to pass the infection to someone else without knowing. |
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To plan an effective AIDS education strategy with smaller sections of the population, it helps to know the characteristics of the group who are to be educated. It is possible to identify four distinct groups of people who require targeted education:
People who have not yet been educated and may be at risk of becoming infected. This usually means young people, who need to know the risks involved in unsafe sex and drug use before they are old enough to find out for themselves.
People who have already been educated for whom the education was not effective. If AIDS education were completely effective, there wouldn't be nearly so many new infections. These infections do not only occur amongst young people, many people who have already experienced AIDS education continue to become infected with HIV.
Everyone needs to learn how and why not to discriminate against positive people. People who are not HIV positive must learn about how the virus is transmitted in order that they are able to protect themselves from infection. At the same time, they must also learn how the virus is not transmitted. People need to know that they cannot become infected from such things as sharing food, towels or toilets. This will help to reduce discrimination against positive people by reducing ignorance and fear.
People who are already infected also require education.Initially, this must involve an element of counselling and support, and must teach them how about living well with HIV, the tests they may need to have and the medications they may need to take. They must also learn about HIV transmission and safer sex, for two reasons - they need to know how to live positively without passing the virus on to anyone else, and they need to know how to avoid coming into contact with a strain of the virus which differs from the one they are already have. |
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If AIDS education that had been done up until now had been fully effective, then there wouldn't have been five million new infections in 2002. It is clear that the campaigns carried out so far have failed to prevent the spread of the virus, so the message needs to be repeated, in different forms, until people appreciate it, or until, hopefully, education is no longer needed. AIDS education doesn't always take place in a classroom. It can be presented in many ways and put across by many forms of media, which should be selected with the target group in mind. Some people can be best reached via newspapers and magazines, whilst other people might be more used to street theatre as a form of media.
AIDS education needs to embrace culturally appropriate and relevant media. These might include radio, television, billboard advertising, street theatre, comic strips, etc. Sometimes AIDS education is about giving people information which they will remember on a long term basis, about how to protect themselves, the difference between HIV and AIDS, and helping to reduce discrimination. On other occasions, an education strategy might intend to have a more immediate effect and target people when they are most likely to take part in risky behaviour for example, in nightclubs or holiday resorts. Education, however, is a crucial factor in preventing the spread of HIV, and, given the huge numbers of deaths that might still be prevented, the importance of effective education cannot be overestimated. |
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