Youth sexuality in the context of HIV/AIDS in South Africa

The vast majority of non-biomedical research on HIV/AIDS has been behavioural research, usually by survey methods, counting people's sex acts, partners, preferences, places times and reasons for sex, and assessing levels of risk for HIV infection, revealing the dominance of seeing sex largely as behaviours. The notion of behaviours denudes sex of all meaning and pleasure. It neglects how meaning and pleasure rely on context, how context exemplifies culture, and how culture is structured by history and discourse. When we drive our understanding of the epidemic by behaviours alone, we fail to comprehend that many of the social determinants of behaviour lie beyond the conscious apprehension of immediate acts and volitions. If we fail to understand the determinants of HIV risk and vulnerability as profound social- and by social is meant relational, contextual, cultural, political, economic, historical, symbolic and discursive -we fail to understand best how to intervene.