Presenting Awareness

Information about preventing and responding to HIV and violence against women is delivered using various methods. Information and communication materials such as pamphlets and posters, public service announcements in newspapers or on radio and television spots, billboards and fictionalised morality tales made into films, comic books and serialised stories have all been employed across Papua New Guinea in the past 30

years. Marches and rallies take place in villages, towns and cities for World AIDS Day and during the 16 Days of Activism to End Violence Against Women. Public lectures, workshops and sermons by local activists, health and law and justice professionals, representatives of international development NGOs or church groups and community educators are also common. These can include screenings of films themed around warning people about ‘risk’ behaviours (Darius 2006, 2008) or presentations of similarly themed, self-devised theatre pieces to help draw a crowd, followed by a discussion led by peer educators or health workers and a community forum. For the most part, these public performances of lecture, film or theatre, which revolve around an address to a crowd and a community forum, comprise what constituted ‘doing awareness’ throughout the research. These are supported by ephemera like posters, billboards and pamphlets, referred to by distributors and audiences as ‘awareness materials’. Ideally, all of these technologies and techniques are geared towards connecting the public to service providers: health centres and HIV clinics, police, welfare offices and courts. In contexts such as Papua New Guinea, particularly rural Papua New Guinea where accessing services is difficult, doing awareness relies heavily on lay community members trained in peer educator programmes, a strategy that I discuss in more detail presently.

David Dickinson (2009, 97–9, 205–6) identifies different categories of interactions where awareness activities take place, which he labels as front stage and backstage spaces. Front stage spaces refer to public performances of awareness, ‘modelled on the classroom lesson, the church sermon, and public speeches … [they] present information … but provide no guarantee that anything will change because such performances are largely unconnected to the lives of the audience’ (Dickinson 2009, 205). In front stage interactions, hierarchies are established between experts delivering information and largely passive audiences who ‘display a polite public reception, learn the correct responses, but do little more once the lecture is over’ (Dickinson 2009, 13). This is not to say that front stage awareness efforts have no utility: throughout the research, respondents used slogans heard on the radio or seen on billboards as a starting point for conversations about family violence and HIV. However, the distant or public nature of front stage performances of awareness can prohibit open, informed discussion about what the information presented means for people’s day-to-day lives (Campbell and Cornish 2010). Peer education programmes are, in principle, a way of bridging this space. The value of peer educators is that they are able to translate and relate information to their communities

that has been issued by transnational experts, using shared language and idioms, cultural cues and knowledge of social contexts. In Dickinson’s framing, where peer educators are able to have private conversations with peers in comfortable circumstances, more effective ‘backstage’ information exchanges take place: ‘Away from the staccato volleys of AIDS facts delivered through formal educational interventions there are countless moments when the same information can be woven into the routines of everyday life: at work, at leisure, at worship, or at the bus stop—anywhere’ (2009, 206).

Throughout the fieldwork, people reported such interactions taking place alongside ‘front stage’ performances. Indeed, the design of one of the largest peer education initiatives in East New Britain, the stret toker programme, part of the East New Britain Sexual Health Improvement Project (ENBSHIP)11 _{was predicated on encouraging almost entirely} ‘backstage’ forms of awareness (Butcher and Martin 2011). In practice, however, most peer educators feel pressure to perform awareness in more public ways. Women in particular said that they wanted to show that they were being ‘active’ and not lazily squandering the education and opportunities that they had been afforded by participating in peer educator training. Spreading awareness was talked about in ways that evoked Christian evangelism (Eves 2012b, Wardlow 2008), with a moral imperative to reach as many people as possible and reducing HIV prevention messages to commandment-like behavioural proscriptions. One-to-one discussions are less effective in reaching this goal than, for example, a DVD screening that might attract a whole village. Attracting larger crowds to be counted as participants in awareness was historically important to donor- funded prevention programmes also: counting numbers of attendees in project reports could be a crucial measure of success and contribute to securing further funding, even where the quality and effect of information was not interrogated (Carlson et al. 2012, 41– 2).

Ideally during these awareness sessions, peer educators are supported by service providers who could answer more complex questions and act as a referral point for those who needed legal support or an HIV test. The next best option might be that peer educators are supported enough that they feel able to admit limits to their knowledge or

11 This was part of a country-wide initiative of five projects funded by the Australian aid programme as part of the Papua New Guinea–Australia Sexual Health Improvement Program. ENBSHIP was managed by Australian NGO the Burnet Institute, and operated in partnership with the East New Britain Provincial Health Office.

ability to provide help without losing face, and can direct those asking questions to seek assistance from health centres or police stations. In practice, peer educators often felt that their credibility might be undermined by admitting that they did not know particular facts, and would piece together answers using their own beliefs or best guess (Wardlow 2011). Additionally, in some areas there are no service providers available to refer people to; or service providers that are in place may not have effective relationships with, or ways of relating to peer educators.

Research respondents’ recollections of how they had encountered awareness messages reflected the variability of support from service providers. They also revealed the differences in the degree to which information content and methods of delivery were monitored, supported and updated across field sites. These factors speak to the different experiences of disadvantage felt across research sites, which are affected by geographic location; access to transport, political attention and resource distribution; and local incomes. These factors, as much as cultural and social norms, shape how awareness messages are translated, understood and applied to ideas of what makes a good man. In the next section, I discuss the key themes of HIV prevention and violence against women prevention in Papua New Guinea in turn, and the historical trajectory of each intervention over recent history. I then consider the aspects of the responses that were emphasised at each of the research sites and the awareness and service provision contexts within which they are presented.