PhD candidate Rusty Souleymanov writes chapter for report ‘Getting to Zero: Global Social Work Responds to HIV’

The chapter, titled “Social workers at the frontiers of technology: Online-based HIV prevention and care for men who have sex with men” provides an unprecedented international snapshot of the online-based HIV initiatives for gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men. This work calls our attention on how access to online-based services globally is complicated by profound barriers, such as criminalization and violence against sexual minorities, gender-based violence, stigma, punitive laws around HIV transmission, socioeconomic disparities between industrialized and developing nations, and the fact that existing online HIV prevention initiatives tend to adopt values from English-speaking, Western cultures. The chapter also provides recommendations on how researchers, practitioners, funders and the private sector could help promote the development of culturally sensitive, online-based initiatives, programmes and services for sexual education, advocacy and HIV prevention for gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men globally.

The chapter is available for free at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314172573_Social_workers_at_the_frontiers_of_technology_Online-based_HIV_prevention_and_care_for_men_who_have_sex_with_men

Abstracts for each chapter are available in English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, and French. The publication is written not only for social workers and people working on the response to HIV, but also for all health care providers and care workers. The full e-publication is available at http://www.unaids.org/en/resources/documents/2017/global-social-work-responds-to-HIV

Getting to Zero: Global Social Work Responds to HIV

Editor in Chief – Associate Professor Mark Henrickson (IASSW and Massey University)
UNAIDS liaison with the editorial team – David Chipanta (UNAIDS)

Regional Editors:

Vincent Lynch (North America)
Hernando Muñoz Sanchez (Latin America and Caribbean)
Vimla Nadkarni (Asia)
Tetyana Semigina (Europe)
Vishanthie Sewpaul (Africa and Middle East)