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'positive' role models, daily sun, generations, hiv testing, mcp, media monitoring africa, safe sex messaging, soapies, stigmaSoaps and tabloids make top team!
Kim Johnson
18 August 2011
The Daily Sun otherwise known as the ‘people’s paper’ and local soap operas are making good on their potential to be a formidable HIV awareness team.
In a letter to the tabloid reader Kotse Ntsoane praises the soapie Generations for heeding the call for HIV-positive characters and storylines because they provide positive role models for people living with HIV, “Through watching such characters…people learn to live positively with the virus and to take responsibility not to spread it.”
The Sunday Sun also featured an article on a new HIV-positive character on the Scandal! scene. Mbali (played by Koketso Mojela) is a new mom who is HIV-positive and struggling to make ends meet. Mbali brings the number of HIV-positive characters on the show to two.
Introducing more HIV-positive characters and storylines featuring HIV represents a turn away from the typical soapie recipe, which in the past has glamourised multiple sexual partners and left HIV out of the picture.
This is scary stuff especially when we consider that multiple concurrent sexual partners are thought to be one of the key factors in the spread of HIV.
Research by Media Monitoring Africa, commissioned by the HIV and the media project, on the portrayal of multiple and concurrent partnerships (MCP) in soap operas and tabloids found that a shocking 82% of soap opera episodes showed MCP while only 8% of the episodes mentioned HIV or AIDS.
And what goes on in SA soapies has the power to influence people’s behavior.
After one episode of Generations featured a storyline on HIV-testing, the Society for Family Health reported that they had unprecedented numbers of people coming for HIV tests and 30, 000 smses asking for more information on HIV-testing.
The ‘positive’ turn in HIV messaging in tabloids and soapies is clearly for the best because if South Africans can take a leaf out the book of a character going for an HIV test, then who is to say that they wouldn’t do the same in relation to a character engaging in MCP or behaviors which reflect HIV-related stigma and prejudice?
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