Migrant women in ACON’s sights
Grappling with how to reach HIV positive people who don’t read the gay press or live in the gay ghettos, ACON is looking at setting up a women’s outreach program in western Sydney.
It doesn’t have funding yet, but ACON CEO Stevie Clayton said they hope to make it easier for the more than 700 positive women in NSW to access services.
We’re talking about predominantly heterosexual women who don’t necessarily want to go into a gay organisation, Clayton said.
Lots of them have children and it’s harder for them to travel to get where our services currently are. For lots of them there are issues about disclosure, stigma and discrimination and what it might mean for their kids. If we can find a way of taking those services to them and help them with all of those services then it’s going to make life a lot better for them.
While there had never been a single community of positive women before, the latest National Centre for HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research reports show 70 percent of heterosexuals who are newly diagnosed come from high prevalence countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
Clayton said those refugees and migrants were more likely to locate in one area, western Sydney, which also had outreach services already tapping into those growing communities.
From what we’ve heard, if we want to be accessing these people in western Sydney we need to be building some family-based services that look at the extended families. The skills are about listening, consultation, understanding, bringing in our understanding of HIV and applying it to new cultural situations, she said.
ACON has long run services for women as part of its Women and Families project at the Positive Living Centre. Those services will continue.
The balancing act we’ve always had is the majority of people with HIV are gay men. We want to create an environment that is welcoming to them, and not pretend that the epidemic is not as gay as it is, and at the same time create an environment that is not scary for people who are not gay men.
Whether or not the additional outreach will target refugee and migrant women, or all positive women, has not been settled, but Clayton hoped the issue of immigrant HIV would not lead to the political backlash that led to former prime minister John Howard’s call for positive migrants to be banned.
It’s certainly a difficult issue and not one we would necessarily have gone to under the previous government… But it seems we’re under a different climate at the moment where it’s much safer for us to go.
Thanks Jason, and I agree that just because a group is such a tiny proportion of the demographic, they shouldn’t be overlooked. I assume that “if we want to be accessing these people in western Sydney ” means the focus will be on that proportion of the 8% of the HIV+ that reside in that area.
My point is that, first, there are very many other groups, (like men who have sex with men but don’t identify as gay, and somehow believe that makes them immune to the virus,) that also need targeting.
But overall, the priority of the AIDS Council has to be improving the shocking ignorance that currently prevails in the larger community about the virus and safe sex, currently listed as their third top priority.
Hmm Shayne, seems you have failed to read the story correctly.
It doesn’t have funding yet, but ACON CEO Stevie Clayton said they hope to make it easier for the more than 700 positive women in NSW to access services.
And I hate to state the obvious, but acon is there to do more than just deal with gay men’s issues – it is there to deal with HIV issues and these women deserve the same attention as any poof who calls Oxford St home.
There are now more than 10,000 people diagnosed with HIV in NSW. More than 400 people in the state discovered they were HIV-positive last year.
8 per cent of the HIV+ are female. I don’t know how many of them comprise the proposed acon demographic, maybe a half of that.
A third of the HIV+ live below the poverty line, BGF says nine out of 10 of their clients live in such poverty.
So, I hate to state the obvious, but is this really an effective focus for our community funding?
Perhaps the primary objective ought to be that which acon seems unable to do, communicate the simple fact that HIV is still incurable, will shorten your life, is associated with many terminal illnesses like cancer, and will likely mean the loss of the career, libido and lifestyle that we take for granted.
How hard can it be to say, ‘don’t exchange blood, don’t get cum in your blood?” There, I said it, and it didn’t even take a mirror ball, a drag queen, a comic book hero or any other absurdity.