SRC CRS Knowledge Centre

Relative Safety: Risk management among gay men with diagnosed HIV who have unprotected intercourse (Part 3)

SRC Guest Lecture Series on March 9th, 2011: This paper examines discourses of risk and risk mediation employed by homosexually active men with diagnosed HIV who participate in unprotected anal intercourse (UAI), based on more than 40 qualitative interviews undertaken in 2008 in England and Wales. The data from this study paint a changed sexual landscape for HIV positive men in the UK in the early twenty-first century. Where once a space existed for some of these men to mitigate risk by disclosing their status and existing within a defined, supportive community of people with and without an HIV diagnosis (Adam 2005), recent legal developments, scientific advances and broader social discourses about responsibility appear to have prompted a constriction of this community. The findings presented in this paper will explore the way that these emerging social contexts influence men’s perceptions of the physical and non-physical risks and harms that they associate with having unprotected intercourse.

Dr. Catherine Dodds

Lecturer at Sigma Research, University of London

Dr. Catherine Dodds is a lecturer at Sigma Research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, part of the University of London. She has been undertaking social research in the field of HIV prevention and sexual health among sexual and ethnic minority populations in the UK for over 13 years, and comes from a sociological background. She has extensive qualitative research experience into the interaction between social inequality and HIV prevention need among homosexually active men and among African migrants to the UK. Catherine has a particular interest in criminal prosecutions for the transmission of HIV, as well as the ways in which responsibility is represented in connection with HIV.