Search results

The Russian Federation is the scene of one of the fastest-growing HIV epidemics in the world. In dialogue with the scholarship on gendered connections between migration and HIV/STIs, this study employs unique survey and qualitative data to examine HIV/STI-related risks and attitudes among working migrant women from three Central Asian countries and their native counterparts in three Russian cities. The analyses focus on involvement in risky sexual relationships, negotiation of trust and safer sexual practices in permanent partnerships, worries about HIV infection, and experience of HIV testing by comparing natives and migrants as well as migrants of different legal statuses. The results suggest that while migrant women are generally less likely to engage in risky behavior, they are also less able to establish trust and to negotiate safer sex within their permanent partnerships, compared to native women. Migrants are less worried about HIV risks than are native women. Finally, migrant women are less likely to get tested for HIV than natives, but the analyses also point to a particular disadvantage of migrants with temporary or irregular legal status. The findings are interpreted within the structural and cultural constraints that shape migrant women’s lives in Russia and similar migrant-receiving contexts.

In societies where formal channels of diffusion of health risk and prevention-related information and practices are inadequate, informal social networks offer a powerful alternative. This study compares how social networks deal with two types of public health concerns — the prevention of cholera and HIV/AIDS. It is based on data from in-depth interviews and focus groups conducted in Maputo, Mozambique, in June-August of 1998 — in the aftermath of a major cholera epidemic and in the midst of an unraveling catastrophe of HIV/AIDS. For both diseases interaction through social networks compensates for the insufficient and inadequate information distributed through official channels. However, the differences in the latency period, course, and clinical manifestations of the two diseases affect the nature, mechanisms, and forms of social interaction. Because HIV/AIDS remains largely an abstract threat not supported by practical knowledge and everyday experience, HIV/AIDSrelated social interaction transmits mainly rumors and unconfirmed suspicions. In addition, this interaction is constrained by traditional social barriers and distances, such as the ones based on gender and age, which may retard the rise of HIV/AIDS awareness in the community. In contrast, the symptoms of cholera are easily identified and understood, and the generalized threat of the epidemic spawns intensive and widespread interaction both within and across conventional social boundaries. This interaction mobilizes the community against the epidemic and helps individuals to improve the prevention of infection.