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"Letting Them Die - Why HIV/AIDS intervention programmes fail"
HIVAN Media Office.
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"In the old South Africa we killed people. Now we're just letting them die." - Pieter-Dirk Uys, South African satirist. Why do people knowingly engage in sexual behaviour that could lead to a slow and painful premature death? Why do the best-intentioned HIV-prevention programmes often have so little impact?
Social psychologist Catherine Campbell is a Reader at the London School of Economics, and a Research Fellow at HIVAN, the Centre for HIV/AIDS Networking. Her book, "Letting them die" is an examination of the social constructs and unique contexts of sexuality, participation and social change, compiled through detailed study of the processes yielded by a large-scale participatory HIV/AIDS intervention strategy undertaken in Summertown, a small mining township in the South African province of Gauteng, over a three-year period during the late 1990s.
In her observation of the process of the Summertown Project, which focused on limiting the spread of HIV through a multi-layered, well-resourced, community-led intervention programme and the promotion of partnerships and alliances between community stakeholders, Campbell led the documentation of responses from participants amongst four groups of people: migrant mineworkers, commercial sex-workers, young people and a diverse array of community stakeholders committed to implementing this complex and ambitious intervention programme.
The book presents the history and goals of the Summertown Project, the theoretical framework within which the research was evaluated, the distillation of the documentation from the interviews and focus group sessions, and the consolidation of the findings into what manifestly emerged as a mobilisation strategy with "less than optimal results". The concluding chapter confronts these findings, and, drawing on social psychology, sociology, anthropology and social medicine, evaluates the elements and dynamics of power-bases inherent in the seen and unseen structures of impoverished communities struggling to address effects of the epidemic in South Africa.
"Letting them die" is a forceful presentation of the earliest and most comprehensively researched critique of the participatory community development approach to HIV prevention. It also contains recommendations that reshape and invigorate the approach so as to promote health-enabling community contexts, and to strengthen social capital so that survivors of the epidemic might reconstruct their lives with some prospect of success.
Published by The International African Institute in association with James Currey (Oxford)/Indiana University Press (Bloomington)/Double Storey Books (a Juta Company, Cape Town) 2003.
The book is available at all leading bookstores in South Africa, including Adams Campus Bookshop at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban (Telephone 031- 261 2320), or can be ordered directly from the publisher, c/o Kathy Pittaway on the following email address: [email protected]
To view the author's research profile and other publications, please click on the link on the righthand side of this page.
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