ABSTRACT
As an infection that is primarily sexually transmitted and that is yet to be controlled by the medical establishment, HIV/AIDS has assumed a central place in global discussions about sexuality since the 1980s. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has devastated populations in various countries around the world, in particular in sub-Saharan Africa, with the burden of the disease being carried by poor nations in the global South and poor communities of color in the North.1 For 2001, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) concluded that in the Americas, the Caribbean was the hardest hit area, with an approximately 2.2 percent rate of infection among adults (compared with 0.5 percent in Latin America and 0.6 percent in North America), of which 50 percent were women.2 By 2002, the Caribbean ranked as the second most affected region of the world, with an estimated five hundred thousand people living with HIV/AIDS in a regional population of 34 million, with Haiti accounting for approximately 50 percent of the cases.3 Although first reported among men who had sex with men in Haiti, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago in the early 1980s, and originally defined as a homosexual disease, HIV/AIDS transmission in the region was quickly acknowledged to be predominantly heterosexual in nature.4
AIDS is now established as the leading cause of death in the Caribbean among twenty-five-to forty-five-year-olds irrespective of gender, and sexually active adolescents are the sector of the population that stands to be the most affected by high levels of HIV infection.
