Behavioural Surveillance Surveys - The Wisdom of Whores

Data can be packaged to meet the interests
of virtually any sector. The ministry of labor
may want to know how widespread risk
behavior is in the urban adult population in
order to anticipate training needs as well as to
increase support for HIV prevention in the
workforce. The finance ministry might be
startled by the implications of financing health
care if 10 percent of those reporting risk
behavior were to become infected with HIV.
The private sector and non-government
organizations can also be interested in the
results of BSS and be persuaded to act on
them if they understand the relevance to their
own work. Again, the careful selection of
relevant data and its presentation in the right
language are fundamental to success. Private
firms may respond to the language of the
bottom line, while development organizations
may be persuaded to contribute more to
preventing HIV when information is couched
in the language of rights and responsibilities.
Choosing relevant data requires some
attention to detail. In some cases, it may be
helpful to present information for only some
age groups, or for only one gender, to stress
the relevance of the findings to the audience
at hand.
There are many ways to get to an audience.
One is to arrange meetings and to present
information directly to a targeted group.
This is often most effectively done by arranging
invitations to speak at regularly scheduled
meetings of the group. A presentation to the
national chamber of commerce monthly lunch
is likely to reach far more senior business
people than a specially arranged seminar on
HIV and the workplace. Another way of
reaching a target audience is to use “back door”
approaches such as the media. A feature article
about HIV-related discrimination in the national
legal review may, for example, be an effective
way of reaching lawyers who collectively
have the capacity to press for more effective
enforcement of anti-discrimination laws.
One type of audience deserves special
attention: that is any group that has shown
that it has the power to obstruct effective HIV
prevention efforts. Information prepared for
these groups should take special care to take
into account the concerns that are at the root
of their opposition to prevention efforts.
For example, if parents are opposed to sex
education in schools, it is not helpful simply
to bombard them with data showing that their
children are, indeed, sexually active from an
early age. These data have to be presented
sensitively, together with information (perhaps
from neighboring countries if none is available
locally) about the association between
reproductive health education in schools and
later age at first sex.
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C H A PTER 8 B EHAV I OR A L S U R V EI L L A NC E S U R V EY S