I’m Michael Ross, and I am Professor of Public Health at the University of Texas. My presentation was on HIV/AIDS and sexuality.

What are some of the key points of your presentation?
I think there are two issues that we neglect when we talk about HIV/AIDS and sexuality. The first is that we tend to think just about sexual acts, and we don’t realize that the risk often occurs not just in a specific sexual act in a couple of minutes, but in the whole situation surrounding that. For example, the 30-minute situation around the sexual act is probably where most of the risk is decided – whether people are going to use condoms or not, whether people are going to use lubricants or not, what’s going to happen, whether they’re going to be drunk. So I think that the sexual situation is what we need to modify to change HIV and STD risks, and not just sexual acts, which are the end point of those situations.

What suggestions do you have for changing these situations?
I think we need to talk in prevention about the situations that lead up to risk, so that people have an awareness that they are getting into a situation which will culminate in risk. For example, people on payday going to commercial sex workers and getting drunk. If we can point out to people that most of their risks occur in a particular context or situation, then they can be in a position to avoid those risks or prevent them. One of the issues about situations is that they are very vulnerable to different levels of power. Usually it’s gender and power, where the woman has much less power than the man, and so it’s much less simple for a woman to avoid risk in one of those situations. And often in less-developed countries, there’s a lack of power on the part of the woman. Or perhaps there’s an age difference, or some other difference in power, which makes it much more difficult to be safe with regard to HIV/AIDS and STDs.

Closing Statements…
When we’re talking about reducing HIV and STD risk, we need to think about the sexual networks that are involved, rather than the individual people, because spread beyond one or two people depends on the sort of networks that they’re connected to. And networks can be very different between countries, and indeed between regions, in urban and rural areas in different countries. So an awareness of the sort of sexual networks that are involved is key, at a larger level, to reducing HIV and STDs.