ABSTRACT

In the first decade of AIDS, Brazilian prevention efforts and campaigns directed toward the sexual transmission of HIV were based on the ideas ‘promiscuity’, ‘fear’, ‘death threat’, and the ‘hazardous other’ within an overall strategy of targeting ‘risk groups’. More recently, safer sex (defined as condom use and fewer partners) has increasingly been promoted through face-to-face activities, and many activists and AIDS educators have begun to work using small group interventions. Most of these small-group programmes have focused on risk reduction and individual responsibility through interactive information and, in the relatively rare cases where the necessary resources are available, modelling sexual communication and negotiation skills.