School 4: Kanemu Co-education School
R- Does Straight Talk cover such a topic for example?
society, HIV/AIDS is often associated with emaciation. The local name for AIDS is silimu a corruption of the English word ‘slim’. Straight Talk does not publish such
images and therefore the respondents’ negotiation in this case is influenced by their social environment and messages from different media and other sources. Interestingly,
Kitzinger had similar findings in her British study. Many participants in her HIV/AIDS audience reception study agreed that you could not tell who is infected by HIV by just looking but many of them reported discriminating between potential partners by their looks. She explains this by saying:
People may ‘know’ something on one level but reject it on another, or they may know what they ‘ought’ to think but find it hard to act on. …This ‘mental image’
seemed to be partly due to long-standing links between disease and dirt/poverty, but it was also reinforced by contradictions within the media campaigns
themselves (Kitzinger, 1993: 293).
Another mode of HIV transmission that was discussed in both the up-market Kanabiri Girls School and Kanasatu Boys College was oral sex. This issue had not been included in the questionnaire but it came up in the boys only school after the other two focus groups had been conducted. Some teenagers in the boys only school expressed
uncertainty about the safety of oral sex so the researcher decided to pursue it in the girls only focus group that was yet to be conducted. The discussion in the girls’school went as follows:
It is important to note that the health corner in the June 2003 issue of Straight Talk in answer to two teenagers’ questions was dedicated to education on the dangers of oral sex but Straight Talk was on the defensive about tackling this issue. This is what they wrote,
“Straight Talk does not usually talk about oral sex. Traditionally in Africa it has not been practiced much. But when we saw these letters we had to say something!”
In summary, the teenagers in this study have a general understanding of the modes of HIV transmission but they do not foreground these images. It was, however, also observed that it is not clear to the teenagers that oral sex is a mode of HIV transmission.
Also, the participants were aware that people with HIV may look normal but they did not readily acknowledge that people with AIDS could look normal too. This is particularly relevant with the advent of HIV anti-retroviral drugs.
Perception of own vulnerability to HIV/AIDS
In relation to HIV transmission one other issue that deserves special mention is these teenager’s awareness of risky behaviour that could expose them to HIV/AIDS. The most popular pictures in the risky behaviour category (D) were girl-boy lovers out at night (22 and 23) and alcohol abuse (3). Out of a total of sixty-nine pictures featured in the whole study, only ten were featured from this category, six of them by the teenagers in the disadvantaged, Kaine Private School.
In Kanabiri Girls School some of the younger girls argued that the emaciated ill boy (picture 27), could have got HIV/AIDS from his parents and they did not think he could have got it through any other means such as sex with an infected partner because
according to one of them “he is too young”. When asked about whether they were at risk of getting HIV/AIDS the teenagers in most of the focus groups chorused ‘no’ and when asked about their friends’ vulnerability their immediate reply was often negative though on further probing they admitted that some of their friends engaged in risky behaviour.
This could imply that not all teenagers in this study were aware of risky situations that could expose them to HIV/AIDS or they are ignoring the fact that they are at risk. As
discussed in Chapter Two, Marcus (2002) in her study of white university students in South Africa had similar findings.
Though most of the teenagers in the Straight Talk study were aware that anybody could have HIV/AIDS, they often argued that adults were more at risk and responsible for infecting teenagers. One group in the first co-educational school captioned a picture of an intimate man and woman relaxing in the garden as: “Older men have been the people that have contributed to the high spread of HIV/AIDS”. This group argued that the man looked much older than the girl and was a ‘sugar daddy’16 responsible for the spread of HIV. A boy from Kaine Private School commented that, “Sugar daddies have proved as the biggest problem that has brought HIV/AIDS to us. When girls see money they run like dogs”.
It is of concern that these teenagers imagine that their age group is safe from HIV/AIDS especially as from the discussions in this study and research done else where in Uganda (Nyanzi et al., 2000) there is evidence that many teenagers who are sexually active get involved with multiple partners sometimes with concurrent sexual affairs among themselves and with adults. In the focus group at Kanabiri Girls School one girl
mentioned that after being in a relationship for some time teenagers stop using condoms on the assumption that they are safe. She said, “They tend to develop mutual trust and stop using condoms because they are using pills”. This is similar to what South African researchers (Kelly et al., 2000) found, namely that though the youth were aware of the value of condoms in preventing HIV infection, fifteen percent of all sexually active youth held the conviction that they and their partners are not HIV infected and therefore they did not need to use condoms. Also after being in a relationship for some time, some youth developed false confidence that if “there is love in a relationship, the risk of infection is lessened; and the assumption that risk decreases during the course of a relationship, with
16 In Uganda ‘sugar daddy’ is used to describe elderly lovers who lure teenage girls, in most cases school girls, into sex in exchange for money or other material favours like sugar, cell phones, cars, etc.
youth who begin safer sex practices deciding to forgo safe sex practices as the relationship becomes more established” (Kelly et al., 2000: 3).
The younger teenagers in Kanabiri Girls School argued that the emaciated ill boy (picture 27), could have got HIV/AIDS from his parents and they did not think he could have got it through sex with an infected partner because according to one of them “he is too young”. As noted in Chapter Two, researchers Greene et al. argue that most adolescents have the capacity to perceive risk, and engage in risky behaviour not because they lack knowledge but because they do not necessarily weigh the risks in their decision-making.
Adolescents who think they are unique and invincible may easily “ignore warnings in health promotion messages regardless of source because they feel unique, not at risk, or believe health promotion messages do not apply to them” (Greene et al., 1996: 134).
They recommend that highly abstract messages may not be appropriate for the adolescent who still functions at the level in concrete cognitive operations.
Variables- lived realities and teenager reception
As established in Chapter Two, audiences interpret what they hear and see in the context of what they already know or think (Hall, 1980; Kitzinger, 1993; Radway, 1987). Thus, the teenagers’ reception of the HIV/AIDS media messages should be contextualised in relation to their lived realities. This section therefore considers three aspects of such lived realities, namely, the respondents’ proximity to HIV/AIDS, their gender and their
economic disposition. It considers the influence these might have on the respondents’
negotiation of the HIV/AIDS meanings.
Media reception and proximity to HIV/AIDS
As discussed in Chapter Two, experience is one single factor that influences audiences’
negotiation of media messages because knowing somebody with AIDS makes the disease more real (Philo, 1990; Kelly et al., 2000; Marcus, 2002). In this study the way in which the images from the HIV/AIDS effects category (E) are featured in the news game throws some light on the findings on the influence proximity to HIV/AIDS has on the teenagers’
negotiation of the HIV/AIDS messages. As established earlier, 22 pictures from this
category were used, the highest number in the whole study. One picture in this category that appealed to three of the groups was that of the very ill and emaciated boy (27). It is not a typical Straight Talk picture and Speaking Facts Newspaper, one of the two newspapers that echoed Straight Talk was one of the five groups that did not use this picture. The Kanabiri girls’ group that used this ill boy’s picture as their central piece included two in their group who had been affected by experiences of people with AIDS.
In the discussion one girl gave a moving monologue on how she had nursed her mother who died after a long AIDS related illness, and how this has affected her outlook on people with HIV/AIDS and also affected her perception of media messages:
F2- it is really absurd [read sad] especially if the person is so close, and in my it was my mum… at times you get bad, you cry and you really want her to be strong, you don’t want her to know she is going to die. She says I want you to (voice falters) me and she doesn’t want you to know that you are going to lose your mother. She says don’t cry am going to be okay that kind of thing. But at times you really see she is really badly off and you really need to be patient with her because you may not know what the future holds, what if it is you next. So you really have to be patient. But at times you would feel like am tired, you have just put juice there, she is like I want tea, that kind of thing.