Intimacy revealed: Sexual experimentation and the construction of risk among young people in Mozambique

Abstract

The expanding AIDS epidemic in Mozambique is fuelled principally by heterosexual transmission, with young people identified as a key group for prevention efforts. However, little is known about the sexual behaviour of young people in Mozambique and the protective practices they adopt. This paper seeks to identify the contexts and rules governing sexual risk‐taking among young people in Maputo. In doing so, the paper affirms the importance of context in understanding risk practices, but highlights the fluidity of practice as an important limitation for the use of contextual analysis in prevention interventions. By focusing on one innovation, the saca cena one‐night stand, this paper shows how a subgroup of young people in Maputo has redefined a “risky” sexual practice to include exclusive condom use. As a risk context, the saca cena dictates a set of implicit rules emphasizing anonymity, discretion, verbal and non‐verbal cues, and for a set of select innovators, condom use. The saca cena challenges the hegemonic gender roles found among many young people in Maputo of male dominance through sexual conquest and female acquiescence. Instead, the practice allows young people to be both adventurous and responsible. The discourse demonstrates how sexual identities have been redefined to combine risk reduction with sexual experimentation and the satiation of desire.

Keywords:

• HIV/AIDS
• Mozambique
• social construction
• risk
• sexuality
• young people
• prevention
• discourse analysis

Notes

This paper uses the term young people in a broad sense to include adolescents, youth, and young adults. The term adolescent is used only to refer to the specific period of post pubescence, usually between the ages of 14 to 19. The term young people distinguishes the period between childhood and adulthood, roles bound by Western conceptions of a period of dependency on family, community, and society as individuals come to take on productive roles in society. The distinction between the various physical and emotional stages of young adults has coincided with a more nuanced understanding of the contextual factors driving young people to take risks, including the perceptions of young people themselves in what risk means (Bohmer and Kirumira 2000).

Estudo Qualitativo de Alto Risco (Qualitative study of high risk).

Interpreted as follows FGD—focus group discussion, average age of participants in the group, gender of participants in the group, current schooling and self‐reported sexual activity – paragraph number.

Due possibly to prohibitions on having sex during menstruation, during fertile period, post‐partum, post‐abortion (Awunsabo and Anarfi 1997, CDC 2000).

This contrasts with the neo‐Durkheimian school, which situates risk as a class or institutional artefact (Douglas and Wildavsky 1980, Beck 1992).