Participation in Action: Campaign aims to counter the stigma surrounding HIV

Access to testing, early recognition and medication mean that HIV-positive young people can live a healthy and relatively normal life with the right support. It is actually the stigma they face in day-to-day life that young people say is too often the biggest obstacle in their way.

Life in My Shoes, a campaign run by HIV charity Body and Soul, was set up to find a way of challenging the culture of fear that surrounds the virus, and to try to change negative attitudes of young people towards those affected by HIV.

Organisers ran a series of meetings with a group of 13- to 19-year-olds living with the virus to establish the real issues that they face, and the best ways of countering them.

The meetings led Body and Soul to commission an independent report by the Office for Public Management to establish how much people know about HIV, and how their knowledge affects their behaviour. The report concluded that while the level of education and understanding of the virus is high, people’s behaviour often contradicts what they know. While, for example, the majority of respondents knew that HIV cannot be contracted by holding hands or kissing, young people still said they would not want to kiss or hold hands with an HIV-positive person.

To address such attitudes, the young people involved in Life in My Shoes decided to produce a short film to be shown in schools called Undefeated, based almost entirely on their real experiences.

Campaign director Emily Kerr-Muir says they wanted their project to offer a different view on life with HIV. “We needed to make sure it was something that people could engage with, and that it reflected reality,” she explains.

Engaging with issues
The group hired a director, who through a series of interviews and sessions with the young people, used their stories and experiences to write a script. The script was then posted online, and young actors from across the country were encouraged to submit audition videos to YouTube. The open auditions were, says Kerr-Muir, all part of the plan to get young people engaging with the issues around HIV.

She says: “It was a clever way of getting people learning about the facts, literally stepping into the shoes of the character and talking on a wider platform, through YouTube , about HIV.”

Kerr-Muir and a group of the young people involved are piloting the campaign and associated package for schools, in which they present the film and host a series of talks and Q&As about living with HIV. They are hoping it will be run across London and further afield.

Isabella, one of the young people involved and now a Life in My Shoes ambassador, says: “We’ve had enough of the scary statistics, we want to spread a positive message, and this campaign is about living, not dying. It’s about understanding each other better.”