McDonnell KA, Gielen AC, Burke JG, O'Campo PJ, Yonas MY; International Conference on AIDS.

Int Conf AIDS. 2002 Jul 7-12; 14: abstract no. E11655.

George Washington University School of Public Health, Washington, United States

BACKGROUND: As we enter the 21st century the magnitude of the effects of HIV on women are unabated. There is a need to recognize the lives of women who are HIV infected or at risk for HIV infection when safer sex interventions are designed and implemented. It is to this end that our project sought to gain information on how we as public health researchers can move from traditional static interventions that measure the same outcome among all participants, to a stage based intervention that takes into account the context of women's lives, namely intimate partner violence(IPV). METHODS: Quantitative interviews were conducted with 445 women, half of whom were HIV positive. Two additional phases of qualitative interviews were conducted with subsets of women to understand the effects of IPV on women's ability to engage in safer sex practices and how interventions could be improved to incorporate a stage-based paradigm. RESULTS: Over half of the HIV+ and HIV- experienced some form of IPV in the year preceding the interview. Multivariate analyses indicated that IPV was significantly related to condom use with their partners. Thematic analysis of the qualitative interviews provided a rich description of the barriers that women must cope with in conjunction with trying to incorporate safer sex practices, namely IPV, economic, social, and behavioral factors. Women also described strategies that they used to end their abuse and endorsed the need for enhanced interventions that are peer based and incorporate an individualized staged approach. CONCLUSIONS: Interventions aimed at increasing the practice of safer sex behaviors need to move from a static model, where the measured outcomes are the same for all participants, thereby leading to low participation rates, low efficacy, and increased rates of "failures" to a stage based approach with an expanded definition of "success" that meets women where they are and is prepared to help abused women progress toward ending the abuse.

Publication Types:

• Meeting Abstracts

Keywords:

• Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome
• Battered Women
• Counseling
• Female
• HIV Infections
• HIV Seropositivity
• Humans
• Interviews as Topic
• Safe Sex
• methods

Other ID:

• GWAIDS0015212

UI: 102252710

From Meeting Abstracts