ABSTRACT
Advances have been made in the women/HIV/drugs context since that time: the literature on the subject, though still small, is growing; the number of conferences and meetings addressing the subject has also increased considerably; the World Health Organization-inspired World AIDS Day 1990 drew attention to the wide-ranging effects of the HIV epidemic on women worldwide; in Britain there are now a number of HIV posts in local and health authorities with special responsibilities for women; and informal networks of women working in the drugs and/or HIV fields operate in a number of regions. Additionally, some of the public messages surrounding women and HIV, part of the backdrop for care, have changed. Whereas previously public health education targeting heterosexual behaviour using women as its currency drew upon long-established social understandings of sexuality which associate sexually active women with deviance, more recent campaigns in young women’s magazines have addressed young women in a way which condones and normalizes, rather than stigmatizes, an active female sexuality-‘sex feels better when you’re using a condom’ (HEA, 1990).
