ABSTRACT
The Women, Risk and AIDS, Project 1 was conceived in the late 1980s when fear of AIDS in the UK was escalating. Public concern focused on contamination by members of high-risk groups — homosexual (and bisexual) men, injecting drug users, sex workers, and those who had been treated with blood containing HIV in the early stages of the epidemic. The key policy issue was that of containing the risky few, in order to protect the innocent public. Most women were considered to be innocent of AIDS and to have a low risk of infection. Reports from parts of Africa, the USA and elsewhere, however, made it clear that HIV was spreading through normal heterosexual sexual practices (Gross, 1988; Heyward and Curran, 1988, AIDS Newsletter, 1990b: 5).
