Our latest newsletter is looking at a variety of issues that are affecting our work. Specifically, the growing conservatism in some media we have traditionally used that is trying to censor, edit or influence our style of communication. This poses problems for us, whilst at the same time, I can’t help but feel we have become increasingly bland in recent years and lost some of our direct connection with the communities we serve.

Up Front January/February

Unusual Penile Discharge

Why do parents sometimes struggle to get their kids to see things the way they want them to? Why do teachers need special skills to manage students’ behaviour? In essence, it is the nature of the relationship, where one is in a position of authority and human nature has an innate need to challenge. These are parent ↔ child relationships having an imbalance in power and control.

We approach our work with our priority populations with a commitment to peer education. This isn’t because of some wishy-washy idealistic community sector fluffiness. No, it is because peer to peer sets up adult ↔ adult relationships and notions of power, authority and control are more or less eliminated. This generates an essential credibility on both sides.

Our work involves health promotion. In simple terms this means giving people information that encourages a set of behavioural choices that reduce risk to an acceptable level should they choose. It doesn’t involve judging their decisions.

In reality, adverse outcomes through risk decisions should cause us to think our information was not relevant and provided no incentive to think and act differently. For us to be relevant, we have to be able to communicate in a way that connects and engages our target audience. We are not the Government and should present our authority only in terms of subject expertise. More importantly, we are peers and this must be inherent in our communication style and message. This means we are dependent on our image as an organisation and dependent on using the language and terminology embraced by those we are seeking to influence.

Keiran Rossteuscher has written a very thoughtful piece in this newsletter about the difficulties we are increasingly facing with conservative media that wants to edit our language for fear of offending those for whom the messages are not intended. So instead of talking about ‘pissing razor blades’ to highlight a possible indication of a gonorrhoea infection, we are asked to refer to ‘uncomfortable urination’. Instead of referring to a ‘drippy dick’ we are encouraged to use a term like the title of this piece.

The implication of this is that we have to be creative in our media choices and find different opportunities to maintain a sense and sound of being peers.

But, I also think this raises another question, which is whether we have lost some of our ability to communicate in a peer way. It remains relatively easy to do so in directly communicating in workshops, but how about when our messages are presented through a third party conduit such as a magazine or bus shelter? How are we perceived by our community after a decade or more of bland (at times) and authoritarian (at times) communication? It is often argued, correctly, that the success of gay men in minimising the epidemic of HIV in the early days was because it was gay men themselves who responded in a collective way. A definitive example of peer education.

These days, we in health promotion are bureaucratised within a sophisticated national and international sector, buried under tons of behavioural and epidemiological research and dependent as workers on government largesse to fund our professional lives. In other words, it has become more and more difficult for the communities most affected and/or at risk of HIV to control the message.

It took half a century to cut the road toll and not much less to reduce the rate of smoking, and all with authoritative and Government sponsored messages; frequently built around fear. In only a handful of years, gay men devised and executed programs that resulted in most men choosing condoms most of the time, decimating the rate of new infection by 1988 and most gay men still use condoms most of the time.

Given that early success, one would have supposed that HIV would have disappeared by now, but it hasn’t and $140 million of government sponsored research over the last decade hasn’t told us why. I think we need to wake up and stop TELLING gay men what to do. Let’s stop being bland and act like the peers we supposedly are.