Vulnerability, risk and sexual rights

This think piece, prepared for a UNAIDS workshop on Vulnerability and AIDS, suggests how sexual rights and sexual pleasure could play a role in bridging the gaps in HIV strategies. The author outlines how the UNAIDS strategy framework for intensifying HIV prevention is based on three interrelated factors: risk reduction, vulnerability and impact reduction. The author argues that the division between risk and vulnerability in this strategy does not match experience: most people face a mixture of individual risks and structural vulnerabilities. Moreover, the risk paradigm downplays structural constraints and the vulnerability paradigm downplays individual agency.

The author suggests that a rights based approach, in particular a sexual rights and sexual pleasure framework, could provide the answer to the above mentioned limitations. The right to seek pleasure and an enabling environment in which to do so are needed not just to improve the quality of life, but also for two practical reasons. Firstly, where the vulnerability discourse denies the possibility that women might act on desire, a focus on pleasure can make women less vulnerable to unsafe sex. Secondly, risks are motivated in part by pleasure-seeking. Safe sex strategies could use pleasure-seeking and endorse the right to pleasure as a means to motivate safer behaviour. [adapted from authors]