Marseille 2007
| Abstract #504 - Gendered strategies for being safe: IDUs notions of risk reduction practices, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania | ||||
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Session: 37.3: Navigating risk and safety (Parallel) on Tuesday @ 14.00-16.00 in Auditorium/Overflow Chaired by Susan M. Kiene, Danuta Kasprzyk Authors: Presenting Author: Dr Sheryl A. McCurdy - University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, United States |
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| Additional Authors: Prof Gad Kilonzo, Prof M. Leshabari, Prof Mark Williams, | ||||
| Aim: Over the last four years the Tanzanian AIDS Prevention Project has worked with injection drug users (IDUs) in Dar es Salaam to examine women and mens changing sexual behaviors and heroin injection practices that put them at risk for HIV. | ||||
| Method / Issue: This mixed method study included, in addition to two surveys and the collection of biologicals, semi-structured, face-to-face interviews (n=94) conducted in Swahili with 38 female and 56 male IDUs between February 2003 and December 2006. We elicited thick descriptions of Tanzanian IDUs, attitudes, and beliefs about HIV and its relationships to other topics, most particularly intentions to safer needle and sexual practices, Verbatim transcribed interviews and media reports were analyzed in ATLASti using the constant comparative method. | ||||
| Results / Comments: During the first month of interviewing it became clear that female and male drug users in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania organized their daily lives differently and put themselves at risk for HIV infection in different ways. As a group women have always been able to earn more money more quickly and most women operated independently of men. Mens anger towards women and their ability to more easily procure money and drugs erupted in the shooting galleries during the summer and fall of 2005, when violent attacks on women escalated. By spring 2006 women were more inclined to inject at home, a room they shared with another woman, than to go to a shooting gallery. By the summer of 2006 some shooting galleries briefly became single sex spaces as women refused to enter them. By the end of 2006 two phenomena had emerged: Some women had begun female-only shooting galleries and in other shooting galleries women had acquiesced to paying the price of a dose of heroin to men in the shooting galleries in an effort to ensure their safety. | ||||
| Discussion: As women talked about the violence that is a part of their day to day negotiation of the drug world, their use of flashblood [passing a syringe full of blood after injecting to another] and vipoint [drawing up and injecting only a cc or less from a common container], it became apparent that interventions for this drug using community must be gender specific. . While poverty and addiction drove many women into sex work, the stigma associated with both sex work and drug use leads many women to become estranged from their families. In contrast, many male IDUs still live with their families. | ||||
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