Sexual negotiation and attitudes

Programme goals

People's sexual behaviour is shaped in part by their attitudes (and those of the society around them) towards sex. If it is widely believed that men need many partners to stay healthy, for example, then messages centring on monogamy alone will have little chance of success. If a woman is considered family property, bought with a dowry to provide sexual and reproductive services to her husband, then messages encouraging women to use condoms with their husbands are likely to produce few results.

Effective campaigns promoting safe sex depend on an understanding of these norms and beliefs. Many national AIDS programmes aim to change these attitudes over the long term, creating a climate in which safer sex is easier to package to the public. Since social norms are usually deeply ingrained among older people, some programmes concentrate their efforts on young people whose attitudes are more easily influenced and whose behaviours are not yet established.

Key questions

• Is there legislation to protect women's rights?
• Do women have any sexual negotiation power?
• Can women refuse sex or insist on condom use?

Measurement challenges

Social norms may be specific to a culture, a religious group or an age cohort. It is exceptionally difficult to define attitudes that influence sexual behaviour in the same way across all cultures, thus it is difficult to come up with internationally valid indicators.

Attitudes are amorphous. They influence behaviour, but are less easily measured than behaviour. It is easier to get a straight answer to "Have you ever...?" than to "Do you believe...?". The answer to the second question almost always includes a component of "It depends". In general, qualitative research methods are more appropriate for measuring attitudes than quantitative methods. However, qualitative methods are generally not appropriate for establishing trends over time.

Despite these difficulties, it may be possible to define some basic attitudes which influence sexual behaviour across all cultures. People's exact perceptions of condoms may differ, but they will all reflect either a willingness or an unwillingness to use them in a given situation. The relationships between men and women vary from culture to culture, but double standards in sexual behaviour is a fairly constant thread that may be investigated in many different contexts. It is worth bearing in mind that it is not worth tracking attitudes to the balance of power in a sexual relationship unless something is being done to try to change those attitudes.

Sexual Negotiation and Attitudes Indicators

1. Women's ability to negotiate safer sex with husband