An agenda for future research on HIV and sexual behaviour among African migrant communities in the UK
Section snippets
Introduction: ‘black Africans’ and rising HIV rates in the UK
The success of combination anti-retroviral therapy in delaying AIDS among those with HIV disease may be making the western public complacent about the continuing threat of infection and dismissive of the huge personal and public costs that the disease continues to exact. In Africa, by comparison, complacency is impossible. While the price of desperately needed pharmaceuticals now seems set to fall (PHLS (2001a), PHLS (2001b), BBC Online (2001c)), drugs will remain beyond the reach of most
Weaknesses in the existing literature on ‘ethnicity’ and sexual health in the UK
Most of the limited work that has been conducted in the British context on HIV/sexual health and ethnicity has been quantitative and more strongly influenced by biomedical than social health perspectives. Valuable though this work is, it rarely displays an appreciation of the socially produced nature of the categories utilised in the measurement of health. A consequence of ‘objective’ taxonomic classification and measurement is that it can produce a ‘black box epidemiology’ in which ‘ethnicity’
The need for methodological and ontological shifts in sexual health research
Elam, Fenton, Johnson, Nazroo, & Ritchie (1999), Chinouya, Fenton, and Davidson (1999 (2000) are among those who have begun the process of addressing the dearth in empirical data on sexual behaviour among ethnic minorities and are following up this work with a larger longitudinal quantitative survey of sexual behaviour among ‘black Africans’ across London. In addition to simply filling in gaps in knowledge this work and that of Elam, Fenton, Johnson, Nazroo, and Ritchie (1999) is also
Conclusion
This paper has reiterated the point made by others that more work addressing the health needs and HIV related sexual behaviours of Britain's ‘black Africans’ is urgently needed. Although people in this heterogeneous community face the greatest risk of HIV infection via the rapidly expanding heterosexual route, they remain a remarkably under-researched population subgroup. Nevertheless, we argue that simply increasing the number of studies describing the unequal epidemiology of HIV in the UK
Acknowledgements
Thanks to colleagues at St Andrews and UCL for their comments on drafts of this paper and associated research proposals. Thanks also to Hannah Weston for her useful insights based on her doctoral work among Britain's Asian community. We also wish to thank our two unnamed referees for the constructive and insightful criticism that challenged us to clarify our thinking in several important areas of the paper. Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and
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