The unfinished nature of rights-informed HIV- and AIDS-related education: an analysis of three school-based initiatives

Abstract

Over the past 25 years, there has been growing investment in concepts of rights in the areas of HIV prevention, care and treatment, including HIV- and AIDS-related education delivered in schools. Despite this increasing commitment to the notion of rights, few efforts appear to have been made to understand the varying conceptions of rights that underpin different kinds of initiatives. Engaging with a multi-disciplinary body of literature on the issue of rights, and through a focus on three rights-informed HIV- and AIDS-related initiatives, this paper seeks to address this gap in the current literature. In so doing, it also examines a central tension within human rights discourse, namely between the construal of rights as shared and universally applicable to all human beings, while being created in and limited by the location in which they were elaborated, as well as by the language used to formulate them. More explicit engagement with the diversity of approaches made possible through a commitment to human rights may facilitate forms of HIV- and AIDS-related education that are more meaningful to young people.

Keywords::

• HIV/AIDS
• education
• human rights
• rights discourse
• young people

Notes

^1. In comparison, the programmes defined as scientifically informed initiatives predominantly used terms such as ‘behaviour change’ and ‘psychosocial determinants’, while programmes concerned primarily with moral issues used words such as ‘values’ and ‘appropriate behaviour’.