Session Theme Feedback: Do You Speak Youth?

DO YOU SPEAK YOUTH
Report on the session by Laura Washington from Project Empower.

Doing HIV prevention with youth is a crucial element in overall HIV prevention work. We are not having as much success as we should have with preventing new infections: statistics are not showing a significant decrease in HIV incidence amongst young people.

I introduced the session briefly by making a few comments about what we mean when we talk about “youth”.

To approach prevention work with young people most usefully, we need to understand that there are significant differences between the people we refer to as “youth”.

Some of these are:
Age: there is a big difference between pre-adolescents, early adolescents and young people who are sexually and physically matured. We must speak differently and appropriately to different age groups.
Gender: young people are gendered and will respond differently to different messages. Power relations between the genders are beginning to be experienced between youth people, often acutely and our HIV prevention work has to take power into account.
Sexual orientation: not all young people are heterosexual and yet most youth focused HIV prevention work only talks about heterosexuality. Early youth especially is a time of developing sexual awareness and sexual experimentation and we have to design messages that are appropriate for heterosexual and homosexual interests. 

During the presentations, we need to look out for:

• What organisations are saying to young people (messages);
• How they are saying it (means of communication); and
• Opportunities for learning that are being created.

The four speakers had agreed to focus their presentations as follows:

• Lihle – the value of the wilderness experience as a unique opportunity for individual reflection using stories of participants as examples;
• Sue – activities to be done with the group showing methodologies that engage young people rather than “talking at them”;
• Sithembiso – working with rural youth;
• Ann Mary – successes and challenges of the peer education approach.

 
The primary weakness in the session was that the speakers did not follow their briefs and mostly did not convey useful experiences to the participants (with the exception of Ann Mary from PACSA).

Lihle gave an overview of her programme and did not describe the wilderness experience or share any stories of individuals that she had worked with.
Sue approached me at the beginning of the session to say that what she had planned was not appropriate and she would not be doing a presentation. Half way through the remaining presentations, she indicated that she had changed her mind. I allowed her to make a presentation, but she gave an overview of her organisation’s work with out of school children and how the organisation worked to ensure these children were placed back in school, and did not speak about learning methodologies at all. This was unfortunate both because the planned focus on methodologies was important and also because it distracted the participants from discussing youth.

Sithembiso from oPhondweni gave an elaborate overview of the organisation’s history, structure, and challenges and hardly addressed youth work at all. During the question and answer sessions, he was asked what messages they gave to rural youth and he outlined the ABC approach, and went into great detail about the organisation’s focus on abstinence. The ABC message, especially the almost exclusive focus on abstinence put forward by the speaker, was challenged from the floor by the representative of ALN.

The session then broke as planned into small groups. Because of the interest in discussing children’s issues, one small group consisted of people working with children while the other two focused on youth. The groups were asked to consider the messages, the vehicles for conveying these messages and the learning experiences put forward by each of the speakers and come up with recommendations for working with youth (or children).

In the two groups working with youth, there was heated discussion around the relevance of the ABC message, especially abstinence. It was good that ABC was challenged, although as Pumla from Oxfam Australia said at the end of the session “surely we have moved beyond ABC by now.” Debating the relevance of ABC prevented an in-depth look at alternative youth-appropriate messaging.

The groups came up with the following recommendations:
Working with children:

1. Ensure that there is child participation in programming:

• It must be meaningful; and
• Voluntary.
• 2. Work with children and caregivers together. Role playing methodology can be useful when working with both children and their caregivers.

Working with youth:
1. Ensure that there is meaningful involvement of young people at all stages of programming
2. Ensure that the diversity of young people is acknowledged at all stages of programming
3. Approaches should ensure that the holistic development of young people is looked at: youth as human beings, not just as youth
4. Consistent, relevant, appropriate, updated messaging
5. Human rights approach: No means no
Redefining masculinity
Sexual and reproductive health and rights
6. Delaying debut rather than promoting blanket abstinence
7. ABC – is this still relevant?

Recommendations:
1. Rather than giving a platform to an organisation promoting such a strong abstinence agenda, it would have been better to showcase approaches that were based on redefining gender, or rights based work for example.
2. We should be careful not to mix up children’s work with youth work.
3. I should have spent a lot longer with the speakers – in person, before the session- ensuring that inputs were appropriate and targeted.