Sexuality and Identity Construction: The Youth

Looking at the history of HIV prevention in the discourse of sexuality in Zambia it is no secret that it has sometimes yielded a controversy on the use of the condom by the different sectors involved in the mitigation. In this prevailing assumption of the controversies on the ABC mitigation discourse are the vulnerable groups in which the youths fall. What then is the content the youth have adopted to help them stop the spread of HIV/AIDS which has a bearing on their sexuality and identity construction? What knowledge have they acquired from the multi-sectoral approach? How are the youths responding to the knowledge they have acquired from these discourses? Could there really be a relationship between the knowledge they acquire and behavioural change? Being a teacher who teaches HIV/AIDS as a cross-cutting issue and a mother of three teenagers who are said to be born in AIDS generation, I was motivated to explore how youths were interpreting the mitigation discourses on HIV/AIDS. I wondered how I would penetrate into their world and get the meanings from their perspective and this led me to this research study. I hope and pray that many will benefit from this book as I have.