The Representation of HIV Positive Identities to Children and Adolescents in Britain, 1983-1997
[Re]inventing Childhood in the Age of AIDS: The Representation of HIV Positive Identities to Children and Adolescents in Britain, 1983-1997
A thesis submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health
2016
Hannah Elizabeth Kershaw
School of Medical Sciences
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Contents
Title page 1 Figures 5
List of Abbreviations and Acronyms 7
Abstract 8
Declaration 9
Copyright Statement 9
Acknowledgements 10
Timeline of HIV/AIDS-related Education Events and Texts 12
[Re]inventing childhood in the age of AIDS: The representation of HIV positive identities to children in Britain, 1983-1997 13
Overview 15
The Anxious Teleological History and Politics of Childhood 19
Children’s rights and problem agency in practice 23
Constructing the chronology and parameters of child-related AIDS policy 26
Constructing childhood and the child through policy and legislation, 1981-1997 27
The textual history of childhood 38
Constructing HIV positive identities: theorising realities 41
Identity as Aetiology – tracking the media mediation of AIDS 46
Conclusions 53
Chapter 1: Timeline of Key events 55
Chapter 1: Constructing childhood pragmatically: The discursive production and dissemination of HIV and AIDS education material by established public health institutions 1985-1997 56
The problem with Teaching about HIV and AIDS 57
Sex, education, AIDS, and legislation – a battle for jurisdiction 62
The Family Planning Association’s ‘crisis’ response 65
The FPA-HEA representation of HIV positive identities to the under-eighteens 70 3
Teaching about HIV & AIDS – an FPA, HEA (& DES?) endeavour 72
Indecision and Consensus: the British Medical Association’s Response to AIDS 81
Educating the ‘public’ 85
Risky knowledge for risky identities: Censorship and prejudice in AIDS and You 89
The Production and Dissemination of the BMA’s AIDS and You Game 96
Conclusions 106
Chapter 2 Timeline of Key Events 110
Chapter 2: The Construction of HIV positive Identities in Teenage Girls’ Magazines, 1983-1997 111
Introducing the Right Honourable Peter Luff MP 111
Producing a Magazine, Constructing an Audience 115
‘Infections in your vaginas are ... common’: Constructing and deconstructing narratives of sexual risk in Just Seventeen 124
‘The most important thing for you to know ...is that you stand virtually no chance of catching it’: Constructing ‘at risk’ identities in Just Seventeen 129
Risk, blame and narratives of ‘safe-sex’ 139
The end of the teenage magazine era 145
Conclusions 147
Chapter 3 Timeline of Key Events 150
Chapter 3: The construction of HIV positive identities on children’s television, the BBC’s Grange Hill 151
Examining children’s texts 153
Creating Children’s television at the BBC: Policy and intent 157
Grange Hill: trend setter to safe product, 1978-1995 160
Bullying boys & anxious adults: Grange Hill’s depiction of obstacles to sex education 164
The representation of risk in Grange Hill’s AIDS Workshop 168
The effect of AIDS on identity and the nuclear family in Grange Hill 172 4
The representation of AIDS stigma and ‘at risk’ identities in Grange Hill 182
Conclusions: ‘Private things affect other people’ 193
Chapter 4 Timeline of Key Events 195
Chapter 4: ‘It is like living with a tiny time bomb’: Representing HIV positive identities to HIV-affected children 196
‘[T]his is not a gay disease’: Recognising HIV as a ‘family disease’ 202
Picture books for HIV-affected Children 214
Resources for Older Children 232
Conclusions 240
Conclusions 242
AIDS and children after 1997 249
Avenues for future work: limitations and opportunities 251
Bibliography 253
Archival Sources 253
British Medical Association Archive 253
The Wellcome Archive 255
The National Archives 257
Newspapers and Periodicals 257
Televisual Sources 260
Other Published Primary Sources 260
Just Seventeen 263
MIZZ 264
Oral histories 265
Secondary sources 265
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Figures
Figure 1. Key events in the Politics of Childhood ...... 29 Figure 2. Beliefs, Aims and Objectives of the Sex Education Forum, 1987 ...... 69 Figure 3. Teaching about HIV & AIDS teaching pack cover, 1988 ...... 74 Figure 4. Module 1 and 2 outlines ...... 77 Figure 5. AIDS and You: An illustrated Guide, 1987 ...... 88 Figure 6. Getting AIDS - A typical double-page spread ...... 92 Figure 7. A taxonomy of dangerous behaviour ...... 93 Figure 8. 'Risky' sex acts ...... 94 Figure 9. Destroying the virus ...... 96 Figure 10. AIDS and You board game, 1989 ...... 97 Figure 11. AIDS and You board game with Teaching Pack ...... 98 Figure 12. Imagery deemed too insensitive to appear in the 1991 edition of the AIDS and You booklet ...... 99 Figure 13. Unsafe and avoidable acts ...... 101 Figure 14. Safe and socially acceptable ...... 102 Figure 15. AIDS and You: an edition for more independent learning, 1994 ...... 103 Figure 16. 'Personal Column', Just Seventeen, (March 13, 1985), pp. 52-53...... 131 Figure 17. Tricia Kreitman, 'Body and Soul', MIZZ, 1 (April 12-25, 1985), p. 26-27.. 134 Figure 18. 'New Wives Tales: "Kiss a homosexual?! -Don't you realise you'll get AIDS?!!" ...... 137 Figure 19. Isobel Irvine, the MIZZ book of AIDS, (November 27 - December 10, 1991) ...... 140 Figure 20. 3 pages inside the MIZZ book of AIDS ...... 141 Figure 21. Department of Health and Social Security ‘Don’t Aid AIDS’ Adverts ...... 142 Figure 22. ‘THE MIZZ AIDS SURVEY - help us to help you’ ...... 143 Figure 23. THE MIZZ AIDS SURVEY RESULTS ...... 144 Figure 24. Disruptive, the boys laugh; attentive, the girls shush them and try to listen in episode 15 ...... 166 Figure 25. Jodie places a condom on a cucumber; Dennis, Dudley and Josh hit each other with cucumbers and condoms ...... 167 Figure 26. Rachel walks to the 'high risk' end of the scale to demonstrate ‘unprotected sex’ is not ‘safe’ ...... 170 6
Figure 27. The Year Tens imagine how a loved one diagnosed with HIV might feel .. 174 Figure 28. Mrs Mitchell on screen, Episode 14 ...... 177 Figure 29. Mr Mitchell panics ...... 181 Figure 30. Plague Girl Death Touch. Dean defaces Lucy’s locker ...... 185 Figure 31. It’s Clinic Day by Ruth Stevens ...... 217 Figure 32. What a load of questions! ...... 221 Figure 33. ‘I'm HIV, Rosie has AIDS’ ...... 222 Figure 34. Mrs Khan keeps Jane very busy ...... 223 Figure 35. ‘It only hurts a little... and I'm brave.’ ...... 225 Figure 36. The HIV bug is a nasty one ...... 226 Figure 37. "They ask me..." ...... 229 Figure 38. "And I tell them, for the last time, no you can't." ...... 230 Figure 39. Maybe they wouldn't be frightened ...... 231 Figure 40. ‘become a very good friend’ ...... 234 Figure 41. ‘Don't talk to her you'll get AIDS!’ ...... 237 Figure 42. ‘I wish someone had told me about it...’...... 238 Figure 43. ‘Hello, is that the AIDS help line?’ ...... 239
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List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
AIDS Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome AVERT AIDS Virus Education Research Trust – though now known simply as AVERT AZT Azidothymide BBC British Broadcasting Corporation BBCWA British Broadcasting Corporation Written Archive BMA British Medical Association BMAAF British Medical Association AIDS Foundation CCETSW Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work DES Department of Education and Science DHSS Department of Health and Social Security EAGA Expert Advisory Group on AIDS FPA Family Planning Association FPIS Family Planning Information Service GRIDS Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Syndrome HAART Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy HEA Health Education Authority HEC Health Education Council HIV Human Immune Deficiency IPC International Publishing Corporation LEA Local Education Authority LHA Local Health Authority MP Member of Parliament NHS National Health Service STD Sexually Transmitted Disease STI Sexually Transmitted Infection TMAP Teenage Magazine Arbitration Panel TNA The National Archive TWA The Wellcome Archive
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Abstract
The advent of the AIDS crisis saw institutions previously tasked with educating adults about sexual health or children about ‘the facts of life’, thrust into the awkward and publicly prominent new role of sex educators to the nation. During the 1980s and 1990s, the parameters of public sexual health education and childhood were redrawn and AIDS as a disease was reframed from an acute to a chronic illness. In an atmosphere of utmost urgency, potential educators within and outside Whitehall shared and fought for the authority to produce HIV/AIDS and safer-sex education policy and material for under- eighteens while grappling with anxiety over presenting children with explicit content; circumnavigating or embracing prohibitions against the inclusion of any content on homosexuality; and constructing competing and conflicting ideas of the child as a vulnerable innocent or knowing agent.
This thesis analyses how adults negotiated and realised the decision to represent HIV positive identities to children and adolescents through a variety of children’s media. This reveals how adults, in grappling with their own anxieties about HIV/AIDS, exposed many of their attitudes to childhood, adolescence, disease, gender, sexuality and agency. To directly address how representations of HIV positive identities have been constructed disseminated and received, a broad interdisciplinary approach was adopted, allowing the research to move beyond the historiography, to include other areas of scholarship such as sociology, media studies, queer and critical theory. This approach has opened new areas of analysis, allowing me to attend to HIV positive identities as intersectional, situational, hierarchical and temporally specific intertextual artefacts, revealing the complex interplay between individual agency and the social, cultural and personal creation of HIV positive identities.
This thesis is not a history of children’s lives in the age of AIDS, rather I offer a glimpse of how adults reactively [re]constructed childhood in the age of AIDS. Each chapter focuses on a different source and type of children’s media, placing them in their wider cultural and political context and in comparison with adult media. 9
Declaration
No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning.
Copyright Statement
The following four notes on copyright and the ownership of intellectual property rights must be included as written below: i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes. ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made. iii. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trade marks and other intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions. iv. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property University IP Policy (see http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=24420), in any relevant Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s regulations (see http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/about/regulations/) and in The University’s policy on Presentation of Theses.
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Acknowledgements
This thesis was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the President’s Doctoral Scholarship Award.
This thesis is the result of the support, encouragement and patience of more people than can possibly be named. Firstly I must express my deep gratitude to my supervisors in CHSTM and the History Department here at Manchester. David Kirby in CHSTM made my project possible, pushing me to work with more rigour and encouraging me to take my work to new audiences. I must thank Frank Mort for support and advice which he has offered generously and patiently since I was an undergraduate, just starting out on my academic career and inspiring me to continue. His enthusiasm for the project and belief gave me the confidence to start this project and his encouragement throughout has been invaluable, encouraging me always to try harder and do better.
I have been extremely grateful to receive a warm welcome from the scholarly community at large. Particular thanks go to everyone at the SSHM, BSHS Annual and PG Conferences, iCHSTM 2013, and to everyone who came to a CHSTM lunchtime seminar. It has been a pleasure to meet you and share in your enthusiasm for research. All the staff at CHSTM and the School of History at Manchester have provided me with a supportive and constructively critical home; many thanks to Drs: Elizabeth Toon, Jane Gregory, Amy C Chambers, Harriet Palfreyman, Sarah Roddy and Neil Pemberton who've joined me on conference panels, improved my teaching and offered me a wealth of advice and encouragement. I must also thank all of those who have proofread for me, battling my baffling word choice and dodgy grammar with good humour and mild exasperation.
This project would have been impossible without the staff at The Wellcome Archive and Library, whose advice identifying AIDS ephemera proved invaluable. My thanks also to the staff at the British Medical Association and the National Archives, they were incredibly generous with their time. The staff at the University of Manchester Library, Cambridge University Library, and at the British Library have also been vital. I would also like to thank David Hepworth and Naomi Honigsbaum who kindly agreed to be interviewed for this project.
Throughout this thesis, I have been lucky to receive the support and friendship of an incredibly close PhD community at CHSTM. So, thank you to Andrew, Andrew, Erin, Jia Ou, Kath, Rachel and Stuart. I would particularly like to thank you for facilitating my need to rant, drink coffee and consume vast amounts of cake. I must also mention Alice White who we hoodwinked into becoming an honorary member of the CHSTM- PhD clan; she has provided us all with support, encouragement and laughter.
I’d also like to acknowledge the patience and support of all those outside my PhD bubble. Those of you who, in the earliest days of my PhD, supported me through my father's death and have once again rallied around me in recent weeks. You've cooked for me, pulled me away from my laptop, taken me climbing, and generally tried to keep me sane and happy and I am so grateful for it! To my sister Mary, her partner Mick and their children Elodie and Zoë, I extend my love and my thanks for offering me a sanctuary of normal life and laughter. You were an escape and a reason to continue.
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To my incredible friends Min and Chis, there simply are not the words. Without your kind offer of a place to live, myself and Moriarty would have been homeless and this thesis unfinished. Not only did you take me in and make me feel incredibly welcome, but you’ve looked after me, bought me tea and chocolate, fed me gin and hugged me when I needed it. All while making me laugh.
Finally, I must thank Rob and Michael. You lived with me (and my thesis) and loved me through it, despite it all. I am incredibly lucky to have you both. 12
Timeline of HIV/AIDS-related Education Events and Texts
•Sexual Offences Act decriminalises sex between consenting men over 21 in private 1967 •Abortion Act legalises abortion
•International Year of the Child 1979 •Conservatives win UK election under Margaret Thatcher
1981 •First cases of AIDS in Britain documented in Lancet
•House of Lords overturn Gillick ruling, Gillick Competence becomes an accepted measure of children's agency in law and medicine 1985 •AIDS first represented in teenage girls magazines MIZZ and Just Seventeen
•British Medical Association (BMA) publishes AIDS and You booklet 1987
•Introduction of the National Curriculum makes biological aspects of sex education compulsory •Section 28 of the Local Government Bill prohibits LEAs from ‘promoting’ homosexuality 1988 •Health Education Authority publishes Teaching About HIV and AIDS, Family Planning Association distributes it
•John Major becomes Conservative Prime minister. 1990
•National Curriculum revised and HIV/AIDS is added to statutory science curriculum for pupils aged 11 to 16 1991 •Revised Edition of BMA’s AIDS & You booklet published
•Picture book It’s Clinic Day published 1992
•1993 Education Bill makes the provision of sex education in schools compulsory but removes non-biological aspects from statutory science curriculum Parents are given the right to withdraw 1993 their children from sex education classes.
•Videogame version of AIDS and You released 1994
•BBC airs a five episode Grange Hill storyline about AIDS and sex education 1995
•Tony Blair becomes Labour Prime Minister 1997
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[Re]inventing childhood in the age of AIDS: The representation of HIV positive identities to children in Britain, 1983-1997
In 1992 the Edinburgh District Council Women’s Committee published a picture book called It’s Clinic Day. Authored by HIV positive mother Ruth Stevens, the book sought to script an answer to a question which lies at the heart of my thesis: ‘what do we tell the children?’ The book follows a little girl called Jane as she and her mother visit an HIV/AIDS clinic so they can both be tested for the virus, and along the way, Jane learns about the virus, testing, transmission and stigma.
Stevens felt compelled to write the book for her daughter to help her – and other HIV positive or HIV-affected parents like her – to explain the social and morbid aspects of HIV/AIDS, something which she felt ill-equipped to do because of a lack of resources. The core of this thesis is focused on actors who, like Stevens, felt motivated to answer the perennial parenting question ‘what should we tell the children?’ It examines the texts they produced, the narratives they constructed, the identities they created and the attitudes to children which their texts belied. These producers, together with the decisions they made and the artefacts they generated are used throughout the thesis to understand how production context, ideology and anxiety shaped the construction, dissemination and reception of HIV positive identities designed for the consumption of children and adolescents.1 In answer to the perennial parenting question ‘what should we tell the children?’ the thesis argues that the answer depended on what concept of childhood motivated the speaker and whether they aimed to bolster the agency of the child audience or to limit it. This is nuanced still further by several linked arguments: that childhood is a situational and temporally specific construct and that often the motive behind education, especially sex education, was the construction of a specific kind of childhood which located children’s agency within specific arenas. This is subtly different to saying that the purpose of education was to limit or bolster agency; rather the objective was often to create or reduce opportunities for children and adolescents to
1 I use the terms child, adolescent and teenager interchangeably throughout this thesis, with age differentiated where necessary as ‘younger’ or ‘older’ or by school years. This is a reflection of the texts I investigate, the language used by the actors who produced them and their understanding of their young audiences. Where terms were differentiated and specific age groups given, this exactitude is indicated. 14 exercise their agency within specific settings, for instance the sexual, the medical, the classroom and the future. Although there are several existing cultural, political and historical investigations of HIV/AIDS in Britain, and though the study of sexual health education is an expanding field, the body of literature which directly investigates how adults have conveyed the social and morbid realities of HIV/AIDS to children is limited to social science, psychological and education literature addressing current practices.2 This has left the AIDS-related education policies, practices and material culture of the 1980s and 1990s implicated in the construction of childhood in the age of AIDS largely unexamined. To amend this oversight, this thesis will analyse how adults negotiated and realised the decision to represent HIV positive identities to children and adolescents through a variety of children’s media. My focus here is on media produced by adults who assumed their child audience was still within reach of adult intervention, more specifically, those aged between 4 and 17 – below the age of majority, and perhaps more importantly, held captive within the school system. This will reveal how adults, in grappling with their anxieties about HIV/AIDS, exposed many of their attitudes to childhood, adolescence, disease, gender, sexuality and agency. In order to address directly how representations of HIV positive identities have been constructed, disseminated and received, a broad interdisciplinary approach has been adopted. This approach allows my research to move beyond the historiography, to include other areas of scholarship such as sociology, media studies and queer theory. This approach has opened new areas of analysis, allowing me to attend to HIV positive identities as intersectional, situational, hierarchical and temporally specific intertextual artefacts, revealing the complex interplay between individual agency and the social, cultural and personal creation of HIV positive identities. Through this analysis, I offer a glimpse of how adults reactively [re]constructed childhood in the age of AIDS.
2 See for example: Jonathan G. Silin, Sex, Death, and the Education of Children: Our Passion for Ignorance in the Age of AIDS, (New York: Teacher's College Press, 1995); Seth M. Noar, Philip Palmgreen, Melissa Chabot, Nicole Dobransky, and Rick S. Zimmerman. ‘A 10-year systematic review of HIV/AIDS mass communication campaigns: Have we made progress?’, Journal of Health Communication, 14:1 (2009), pp. 15-42; Richard Parker, Peter Aggleton, ‘HIV and AIDS-related stigma and discrimination: a conceptual framework and implications for action’, Social Science & Medicine, 57:1 (2003), pp. 13-24; Melissa Gross, Annette Y. Goldsmith, Debi Carruth, HIV/AIDS in Young Adult Novels: An Annotated Bibliography, (Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2010). 15
Overview The thesis begins first with an extended methodological and theoretical discussion, defining key terms and demonstrating the toolkit I adopt throughout the thesis. This offers a broad-stroke discussion of the HIV positive identities I discuss throughout the thesis in the context of 1980s and 1990s Britain. Here I discuss the key histories, policies and ideologies which limited the agency of my actors, shaped the production contexts of the HIV positive identities they produced, and coloured how these texts were received by other adults. This foregrounds the analysis of children’s media which forms the substance of my later chapters. Due to the variety of texts and production contexts interrogated in this thesis a flexible theoretical and methodological toolkit was needed to allow the analysis to maintain focus. This was achieved by locating the analysis in the identities and narratives existing within the children’s media and testimonies scrutinised; treating the HIV positive identities themselves as texts or artefacts packaged within differing genres. This allowed an engagement with a variety of media, reflective of the plethora of texts available to children and teenagers, without the loss of methodological, theoretical or subject focus. By focusing first on the cultural and political construction of childhood in 1980s and 1990s Britain, this introduction outlines the politics of anxiety that influenced the construction, representation and reception of HIV positive identities intended for the consumption of children and adolescents. The introduction encompasses a brief history of sex education in Britain and pertinent legislative changes which codified parental or children’s ‘rights’ before moving into a discussion of identity construction outlining the three complementary and interconnected approaches – intertextuality, narratology, intersectionality – used throughout the thesis.
The first chapter of my thesis interrogates how the parameters of public sexual health education were redrawn during the 1980s and 1990s as institutions such as the Health Education Authority (HEA), British Medical Association (BMA) and Family Planning Association (FPA), were charged with producing up-to-date and authoritative education materials on HIV/AIDS for adults and children with utmost urgency. While the public health message evolved from one of nebulous risk to more explicit messages on safer- sex, potential educators’ fought for the authority to produce education material for the 16 under eighteens while grappling with anxiety over presenting children with explicit content, circumnavigating or embracing prohibitions against the inclusion of any content on homosexuality and constructing competing and conflicting ideas of the child as a vulnerable innocent or knowing agent. My first chapter explores how these complex difficulties were managed, manifested and overcome by public health institutions, demonstrating the cacophony of competing voices which shaped sex education and health policy, enshrining adult anxiety in both law and texts produced for the consumption of children and adolescents. This is achieved by following the production and dissemination of several key children’s AIDS education texts produced by the BMA, FPA and HEA. Despite shared aims and relatively similar production contexts, the texts explored in the chapter demonstrate a variety of AIDS narratives and ideas about childhood which are observed throughout the thesis. The chapter concludes by arguing that while 1980s and 1990s education policy ultimately constructed children as vulnerable and best governed by parental authority, placing the rights of the parent above those of the child, the HIV/AIDS education materials produced at this time were ideologically varied, in some cases constructing and defending an ‘agentic’ child as its imagined audience.3 In some instances, the ideological differences manifest in policy and practice resulted in materials which acknowledged government education policy before then circumnavigating it or providing numerous alternate opinions championing the agency of children in order to drown out the voice of official ideology, belying the tension at the heart of sex education policy between ideologies of health pragmatism and conservative moral ideologies. In contrast to the dissonant assemblage of official voices and narratives that populate the texts explored in my first chapter, my second chapter explores the harmonious chorus which occupied the rebellious pages of teenage magazines. It argues that teenage magazines offered destigmatizing and empowering counter-narratives to the pessimistic and panic-stricken AIDS coverage which typified the adult press. The chapter questions how these texts came to play a vital role in the sexual health education
3 Throughout this thesis, I use the term agentic, borrowed from social psychology, to mean the quality of having a measure of agency which can be used to exercise self-determination, changing the world of the individual and affecting the social order. Albert Bandura, ‘Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective’, Annual review of psychology, 52:1 (2001), pp. 1-26; Colin Campbell, ‘Distinguishing the power of agency from agentic power: A note on Weber and the “black box” of personal agency’, Sociological Theory, 27:4 (2009), pp. 407-418. 17 of children and adolescents, especially with regard to HIV/AIDS. It argues the success of magazines in this arena was in part due to their ability, through a variety of editorial practices, to mitigate the impact of HEA and Department for Health and Social Security (DHSS) AIDS adverts which these government departments asked them to carry. The chapter demonstrates the vital role this popular media played in the construction and dissemination of HIV positive identities produced for the consumption of children and adolescents in the 1980s and 1990s through an analysis of the visual and written AIDS-related content in Just Seventeen and MIZZ. The effects of AIDS representations and the accompanying narratives of ‘safer-sex’ in particular are tracked and analysed by examining the place of AIDS in the wider sex-related content of teenage magazines. The chapter concludes by arguing that adults, in representing STDs, HIV positive identities and safer-sex to children, exposed their own attitudes to identity, particularly with regard to gender, sexuality and personal agency. It reveals that teenage magazines often deployed the representation of AIDS to their readership of girls (aged between 11-17) opportunistically; using the subject to open up discussions on sexuality, prejudice and gender politics, while simultaneously drawing their readers in with critiques of government sexual health and education policy; rendering the subject salient to their school-girl readership. Constructed as a rebellious space for teenagers and littered with direct reader contributions, these magazines presented themselves in disagreement with the New Right’s characterisations of childhood as a precarious time without agency; instead, they viewed their audience as having and consuming ideas of, empowered teenage agency. This point is nuanced when one notes that Just Seventeen and MIZZ, in constructing their imagined audiences as knowing and empowered teenage agents, simultaneously proselytised the self-realised consumerist individual as an ideal, turning a profit through the sale of these rebellious magazines and the advertising space within their pages. My third chapter scrutinises the representation of the HIV-affected teenager Lucy Mitchell in the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC’s) long-running children’s soap opera Grange Hill. Placing the five episode AIDS storyline in the context of producer Phil Redmond’s conceptions of childhood and wider moves by the BBC to engage younger audiences, the chapter asks how a provocative AIDS storyline came to feature in the show in 1995 and what intervention it made into the AIDS education arena. The chapter argues that the AIDS storyline offered by the BBC forms a 18 critique of the sex education policies discussed in chapter one, while attempting to appeal to the self-same teenagers who populated the previous chapter on magazines. The chapter argues that the Grange Hill AIDS-storyline is a deliberate political and didactic intervention into the lives of children, and the adults who cared for them, through a popular but banal media source. The multiple dialogic techniques employed by Grange Hill’s creators receive particular scrutiny, allowing the chapter to reveal how this text represents a culmination, a response and an intervention into the politics of AIDS and sex education that preceded and surrounded it. The chapter concludes by arguing that Grange Hill, by offering an examination of teenage agency and consent within the classroom, the family and the clinic, demonstrated the way childhood is constructed situationally. Furthermore, by dramatising the contradictory conceptions of children’s – and to a lesser extent parents’ – competence at the heart of education and health policy, the show presents children as the victims of adult incompetence, offered protection without participation. Children are depicted in a constant battle to have their agency and rights acknowledged, and are ultimately better placed to be the masters of their own destiny than the adults who anxiously attempt to govern them. My final chapter moves from the fictive needs of an HIV-affected teenager to the realities of representing HIV to children directly affected by the virus. This concludes the thesis by acknowledging the near absence of voices from those who lived the reality of the HIV positive identities in the material produced for the consumption of children in this period. By investigating how social service practitioners undertook to meet the needs of HIV-affected children, the chapter relocates the analysis from the textual representation of HIV positive identities to moments of interaction between social workers and HIV-affected persons. This is achieved by critically engaging with key social work texts, discussion papers, reports and an oral history, tracing how social work practices related to HIV positive children were codified, and how narratives were produced and developed in response to the needs of HIV-affected children. The chapter then moves on to the analysis of two rare but representative fictional didactic texts aimed at HIV-affected children and adolescents: the picture book It’s Clinic Day mentioned earlier, and a pamphlet titled What Can I do About AIDS?, co-produced by Barnardo’s and the Terrence Higgins Trust in 1991. The chapter contends that this material was produced as much for HIV-affected children as it was for their HIV-affected parents, drawing on a Lacanian argument made 19 elsewhere in the thesis to reflect on the interaction between producer, text and adult and child audiences. This chapter argues that while adults were apprehensive about frightening HIV-affected children by explaining the morbid effects of AIDS to them, a greater concern to them was the possibility of an informed child unwisely disclosing the HIV-affected status of their family leading to experiences of AIDS-related stigma. Here children’s rights to protection were again pitted against their participatory rights, with children’s agency limited but also potentially threatening to the agency of their parents. The chapter concludes by demonstrating that while moves towards strengthening the participatory rights of HIV-affected children were undertaken by HIV-affected parents and social workers, the process was slow, anxious and stymied by the persistence of adults’ perceptions of the child as a passive innocent.
The Anxious Teleological History and Politics of Childhood One of the arguments made throughout this thesis is that thinking about, speaking about, and writing about (and for) the child, real or imagined, is an inescapably political act; moreover it is an act which renders us anxious. The political nature of the act lies in the construction of the child as a teleological entity we send forward to our futures, changed or maintained in the present for the sake of them and ourselves. The anxiety in the act lies in the uncertainty of this future-thinking and the fragility of the child as a foundational figure – real, imagined or figurative – whom we must protect or empower even as we imagine them as plastic proto-adults, treating them as means rather than ends.4 The child thus becomes a microcosm of futurity and a politically inflected adult fantasy; the vulnerable victim of a world gone bad or the hero we construct to save us from ourselves, ‘the telos of the social order and …the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust’.5 Children then are disruptive figures: brimming with unstable political possibility which they themselves might harness or which might be harnessed by the wrong sort of adult. Children are liminal: figurative embodiments of past, present and future, reminding us what we as adults were, what they presently are, and what they could or should become.
4 I of course speak from the position of being an adult myself throughout this thesis. Where the interlocutor is a child, the act of speaking of, and for, children remains political, but somewhat less fanciful. Certainly there is a marked difference between a child demanding rights and an adult providing for or defending the rights of a child. The former act demands liberty and the latter act imagines it. 5 Lee Eldelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 11. 20
The splicing of temporalities is not the sole source of discomfort we feel when we approach the figure of the child: rather it is their ability to force upon us questions of what and when an act demonstrates agency and constitutes consent that so unsettles us. In children, we mark the boundaries of what defines an able actor, the point of ‘self- realisation’ at which liberty transmutes from ‘freedom from’ to ‘freedom to’ and rights become, within legal bounds, inalienable.6 Children’s status as boundary figures is perhaps at its most obvious when we consider, as much of this thesis does, how their identities as innocents and agents collide in the field of sexual health education, their rights to participation placed in conflict with their rights to protection. Late twentieth century legislation has constructed children within a medical context ‘as ‘quasi-adults’ entitled to confidential advice and treatment’ able to refuse or accept medical interventions, while in an educational context they are ‘constructed as ideally non-sexual, vulnerable and dependant’, their ability to consent and access to information ‘restricted or censored’.7 The very plastic nature of their identities and the fragility of children’s ‘rights’ or agency stands as a constant reminder of our own instability and the constructed nature of the cultural laws, mores and ideologies with which we govern our worlds and ourselves. It is with reluctance that we acknowledge how recent the creation of an age of consent was in Britain; with discomfort we admit the extent of global variation in children’s rights; and elliptically we recognise the (necessary) contradictions which govern children’s bodies and lives in Britain today.8 Within the history of sex education, the intersecting histories of sexuality and childhood meet and announce one another’s constructed nature, connected by a thread
6 I draw here on Berlin’s account of positive and negative liberty as agents’ ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’ act, nuanced by MacCallum’s tridactic account of the same. Though not explicitly discussed in isolation, these concepts of liberty have directed my investigation of the construction of children’s agency throughout this thesis. See Gerald C. MacCallum, ‘Negative and Positive Freedom’, Philosophical Review, 76:3 (July 1967), pp. 312-34; Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Contemporary Political Philosophy, An Anthology, ed. by Robert E Goodin, Philip Pettit, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp. 369-386; Charles Taylor, ‘What is wrong with Negative Liberty?’ in Contemporary Political Philosophy, An Anthology, ed. by Robert E Goodin, Philip Pettit, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp. 387-397. 7 Ann Blair, Daniel Monk, ‘Sex Education and the Law in England and Wales: The Importance of Legal Narratives’, in Shaping Sexual Knowledge: A Cultural History of Sex Education in Twentieth Century Europe, ed. by Lutz D. H. Sauerteig, Roger Davidson, (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 37-51, p. 46. 8 This creates a palpable risk of presentism for the historian; uncomfortable with the dissonance of the past and present, past trespasses upon children’s rights are mitigated by a narrative of inevitable progress towards a safe agentic childhood, free of abuses such as marriage before the contemporary age of consent; corporal punishment and exploitative labour. This in effect constructs our present culture, mores and ideology as the inevitable result of cultural evolution, reducing the disruptive effects of acknowledging the constructed nature of our culture and ourselves; protecting children from the possibility of a return to past abuses and othering those adults who mistakenly perpetrated them. 21 of anxiety over the threat of deviation from the norm. A brief foray into the historiography of childhood will furnish one quickly with evidence of the constructed and temporally specific nature of childhood and adolescence, a key element of its varied construction across time and within differing cultures being the multiplicity of ways in which society perceives children’s sexuality, sexual knowledge and sexual agency. If one follows the broad narrative within the historiography, prior to the eighteenth century, in Western Europe children were presumed to be naturally wicked and in need of constant vigilance and moral correction, of particular concern were children masturbating.9 During and after the enlightenment, attitudes began to shift: Rousseau’s pronouncement on the ‘innocence’ of children reflects this change. During the nineteenth century emphasis shifted to ‘surveillance and regulation by the central and local State and civil society in countries such as England’, exemplified by the Contagious Diseases Acts and debates around the age of consent.10 According to the historiography on the cultural history of childhood, sexologists such as Ellis and psychoanalysts such as Freud were integral to transitions at the start of the twentieth century in attitudes to childhood and adolescence wherein this stage in human development began to be viewed as having an innately sexual component, thus normalising ideas of children’s sexuality.11 During the early twentieth century sexuality in childhood was remodelled as a normal aspect of development, but one prone to a ‘pathological turn if certain developmental stages or phases were not experienced or, in the case of autoeroticism, overcome.’12 Thus as Bullogh points out, the conceptualisation of childhood plays an important role in how historians interpret the influence of social attitudes and living conditions upon children with regards to sexuality. Those who emphasise innocence as an aspect of childhood, rather than the agency of children, regard children differently as historical actors, producing histories of their treatment by adults wherein they gain little or no voice, with their sexuality produced in them biologically and as a product of adult
9 Lutz D. Sauerteig, ‘Shaping the sexual knowledge of the young: Introduction’, in Shaping Sexual Knowledge: A Cultural History of Sex Education in Twentieth Century Europe, ed. by Lutz D. H. Sauerteig, Roger Davidson, (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 1-2. 10 Lesley Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Changes in Britain Since 1880, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 29-30; Sauerteig, ‘Shaping the sexual knowledge of the young’, pp. 1-3. 11 See V. L. Bullough, ‘Children and adolescents as sexual beings: a historical overview’, Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics in North America, 13 (2004), pp. 447-59; S. Fishman, ‘The history of childhood sexuality’, Journal of Contemporary History, 17 (1982), pp. 269-83. 12 Sauerteig, ‘Introduction’, p. 3. 22 intervention or neglect.13 After the psychoanalytical turn, while children’s sexuality might be conceived of as part of the process of growing towards adolescence and adulthood, it was still regarded as requiring ‘observation and control, even suppression’.14 Another important aspect of the history of childhood sexuality that has garnered some interest is the differentiation in roles between child and adolescent, with the development of a degree of sexual knowledge and the pursuit of sexual behaviours being seen as a key aspect of the latter.15 Adolescent sexuality has been cast by many as a problem, with the responsibility for producing a solution falling to health authorities, the government, educators or parents – depending largely upon one’s views on parental jurisdiction and the necessity of state intervention in issues such as public health.16 The 1920s saw the proliferation of increasingly nuanced understandings of the development of sexual identity and experience as a psychological, biological and culturally inflected phenomenon, which although still considered prone to deviance was more fully understood as sexology, psychoanalysis and the study of hormones laid new areas of the human condition open to systematised scientific scrutiny.17 From the late 1960s onwards, a range of sexual practices such as kissing and petting became somewhat more expected aspects of adolescent sexual behaviour. Social attitudes to these developments remained ambivalent, however, and such changes resulted in a multiplication of ideas around childhood and adolescence rather than a complete eradication of the concept of childhood as a time of innocence. This resulted in an uneasy coexistence of contradictory ideas within the policy and practice that governed the lives and bodies of children in the twentieth century, a dissonance exemplified by Victoria Gillick’s campaign against the provision of contraception and contraceptive advice to children under the age of consent. Gillick’s challenge to medical authority in favour of parental authority was by no means unique; as many scholars have observed, a series of ‘moral panics’ relating to intersecting anxieties around childhood and sex erupted during the 1980s and 1990s.
13 Bullough, ‘Children and adolescents as sexual beings’, pp. 270-275. 14 Sauerteig, ‘Introduction’ p. 3. 15 J. P. Moran, Teaching Sex: the Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century, (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 1-5, 14-22; J. Mclean, Taylor, ‘Adolescent development: whose perspective?’, in Sexual Cultures and the Construction of Adolescent Identities, ed. by J M. Irvine, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), pp. 29-50. 16 Hall, ‘In Ignorance and in Knowledge’, p. 34. 17 Hall, ‘Sex, Gender and Social Change’, pp. 94-95. 23
Detailed accounts of key moments in these debates around childhood and sexuality have been fruitfully investigated by a number of scholars, with Gillick’s campaign, Section 28, the age of consent, and the various campaigns against teenage pregnancy proving illuminating case studies.18 The widespread coverage of problematized representations of childhood sexuality in the media set the tone of fevered moral and political debates over the rights and duties of the child, the parent and the state.19 As a more powerful and consolidated New Right emerged, the institution of childhood, and alongside it education, became an increasingly fraught site of ideological expression, with sexuality a reoccurring theme in a series of contentious debates.20 This thesis, through investigating adult anxiety around the provision of AIDS-related education and safer sex information, will contribute to this scholarship. In so doing it will situate both the ‘moral panics’ and specific AIDS-media anxiety of the 1980s and 1990s in the wider history of adult discomfort around child and teenage rights, sexuality and education and agency.
Children’s rights and problem agency in practice In Britain in the latter half of the twentieth century formalised sex education remained firmly cast, as it was from its Victorian inception; as ‘a strategy of damage limitation’.21 The focus of this was firmly fixed on preventing unwanted pregnancy, disease, loss of social status and moral degradation, rather than the possibilities of ‘pleasure and empowered choice’.22 While the location of risk had shifted away from Victorian
18 Jane Pilcher, ‘Gillick and After: Children and Sex in the 1980s and 1990s’, in Thatcher’s Children? Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s, ed. by Jane Pilcher, Stephen Wagg, (London: Falmer Press, 1996), pp. 77-93; Jackie Stacey, ‘Promoting Normality: Section 28 and the Regulation of Sexuality’; in Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies, ed. by S. Franklin, C. Lury, J. Stacey, (London: Harper Collins, 1991), pp.284-304; Joe Moran, ‘Childhood sexuality and education: the case of section 28’, Sexualities, 4 (2001), pp. 73-89; Debbie Epstein, Richard Johnson, Deborah Lynn Steinberg, ‘Twice Told Tales: Transformation, Recuperation and Emergence in the Age of Consent Debates 1998’, Sexualities, 3:1 (2000) , pp. 5–30; Lisa Arai, Teenage Pregnancy: The Making and Unmaking of a Problem, (Bristol: Policy Press at the University of Bristol, 2009), pp. 3-18. 19 R. Thomson, ‘Unholy Alliances: The recent politics of sex education’, in Activating Theory: Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Politics, ed. by J. Bristow and A. Wilson, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993), pp. 219-245; R. Thomson, ‘Moral Rhetoric and Public Health Pragmatism: The Recent Politics of Sex Education’, Feminist Review, 48 (Autumn 1994), pp.40-60; Martin Durham, Sex and Politics: The Family and Morality in the Thatcher Years, (London: Macmillan, 1991) . 20 Jane Pilcher, Stephen Wagg, ‘Introduction: Thatcher’s children?’, in Thatcher’s Children? Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s, ed. by Jane Pilcher, Stephen Wagg, (London: Falmer Press, 1996), pp. 1-7, p. 2. 21 Hall, ‘In Ignorance and in Knowledge’, p. 20. 22 Ibid. 24 concerns over the morally degrading power of masturbation by the 1980s,23 the struggle, both in the media and in the House of Commons over the purpose of sex education was heavily gendered. Indeed histories which excavate the normative functions of sex education and the manner by which it constructs norms, deviancies and proscribes against ‘dangerous sexualities’ and risky behaviours have revealed its integral role in the ideological process whereby the normative construction of gender and sexuality – which furnishes men with power while locking women in subordinate roles – is maintained.24 A key aspect of the history of sex education highlighted by feminist perspectives is the need of investigations into the effects of adherence to gender segregation both in practical terms within the classroom, and with regards to cultural perceptions of what constitutes necessary sexual knowledge for different genders along binary lines: that is, what society perceives children and adolescents need to know and be ignorant of differs according to gender. The gendering of knowledge, ignorance, agency and risk is a thread that runs throughout this thesis. An attention to gender reveals the relative imperviousness of attitudes to sexual knowledge in the young that continued in some sectors of society; these attitudes remained both relatively conservative and markedly gendered in the late twentieth century.25 Alongside the gendered rhetoric of risk was one that offered the possibility of redeeming sex and sexuality through sanctioned heterosexual relationships. Douglas, writing extensively on the subject of risk, observes that moves made by authorities to ‘reduce risk’ have an extensive normative function, not only against the ‘risk’ identified, but against those persons identified as ‘at risk’ and those who fall foul of the risk despite the warnings – those who experience blame.26 Inextricable from the idea of risk, it is through blame and the avoidance of blame that risk rhetoric performs its cultural work. This normative dichotomy of risk and redemption, present in the ideology of
23 Lesley A. Hall, ‘Forbidden by God, despised by men: Masturbation, medical warnings, moral panic and manhood in Britain, 1850-1950, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2 (1991-1992), pp. 365-97. 24 Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities, Medico-Moral Politics in England Since 1830, (London: Routledge, 1987); Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The regulation of sexuality since 1800, (London: Longman, 1989); N. Thorogood, ‘Sex Education and Social Control’, Critical Public Health, 3 (1992), pp. 43-50; J. Melia, ‘Sex education in schools: Keeping to the norm’, in Learning our Lines: Sexuality and Social Control in Education, ed. by C. Jones, P. Mahoney, (London: The Women’s Press, 1989), A. M. Wolpe, ‘Sex in schools: back to the future’, Feminist Review, 27 (1987), pp. 37-47. 25 Jane Lewis, Trudie Knijn. ‘The Politics of Sex Education Policy in England and Wales and The Netherlands since the 1980s’, Journal of Social Policy, 31:4 (2002), pp. 669-694, pp. 688-690; Hall, ‘In Ignorance and in Knowledge’, p. 23. 26 Mary Douglas, Risk and blame: Essays in cultural theory, (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3-19, 34-37. 25 early sex education, is evident in the representational division of HIV positive identities into innocent victims and deserving deviants. The pervasive narratives of risk that dominated sex education in the late twentieth century had a further consequence: the conspicuous absence, in official sex education, of the erotic and pleasurable side of sexuality. Reluctance to represent this, stemming partly from a fear of corrupting a child’s innocence, resulted in a sex education which unquestioningly emphasised the social problems and risks associated with the sexualisation of the young, without much talk of sex itself. Hall observes that this highlights the ‘dialectical struggle’ at the heart of conflicts over the need for, and purpose of, sex education: those on one side ‘advocating the provision of clean, healthy scientific knowledge (by the standards of the day) to combat the sordid or partial information picked up from a range of sources by children’ in hope of promoting healthy risk-free behaviours; and those on the other side operating under the belief that the act of educating children about sex ‘was to corrupt primal innocence’ and to encourage the development of sexuality and sexual behaviours which might otherwise not manifest.27 The child conceived thus is a corruptible innocent that cannot be in any way sexual and is annihilated through inappropriate education; sexual knowledge transporting the ignorant/innocent child out of childhood and into knowing adulthood, or worse still, into a vulnerable hinterland of adolescence. The child imbued with rights, afforded rather more agency, should be protected by their knowledge from the risks inherent in sexuality if they behave as rational moral actors, and should be enabled to recognise and avoid risks rather than be corrupted by them. The degree of blame laid at the feet of a child who then knowingly engages in risky behaviour is dependent upon the extent to which the child is assumed to have moral agency. In the UK these conceptions of childhood and sex education coexist and interact to this day; the moral agency and moral responsibility of both the children, adolescents and adults involved in any given act of sex education are still subject to fraught debate.28 The divisive nature of sex education, politically and ideologically, has resulted in a general marginalisation of sex education within the state education system. Parents’
27 Hall, ‘In Ignorance and in Knowledge’, p. 21. 28 Current hot topics include failures in sex education, the threat of internet pornography, rising STD rates and high teenage pregnancy rates. See for example Verity Sullivan, ‘Sex Education in the UK is Letting Our Teenagers Down', The Guardian, (24 March 2015); Anon, ‘Teachers fear for pupils safety on social media’, BBC Education and Family, (25 March 2016), http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-35881350 [Accessed 26.03.2016]. 26 disinclination and fear of their own lack of qualification to educate their children about sex have been a constant factors in the development and implementation of sex education since the late Victorian era.29 The failure of parents to educate their children has long attracted the comment of would-be health education promoters and sexual health advocates.30 Hall suggests this continuity is the product of a pervasive sense of ‘embarrassment’ and the conviction amongst parents of ‘being ill-equipped to talk about sexual issues’, awareness of ‘the inadequacy of their own sex education, and their wish that their children not suffer from the same ignorance and misunderstanding.’31 The existence of sex education within the confines of state education and the national curriculum reinforces this perception; whereby the state-sanctioned discourse on sexuality and sex education effectively produces a silence amongst parents who cede control to informed authorities, despite government policy which consistently emphasises the importance of the parental role in sex education.32
Constructing the chronology and parameters of child-related AIDS policy This thesis, though not intended as a work of policy or legislative history, nonetheless charts several intersecting policy histories, namely AIDS-related health policy and education policy. It is not my intention to rewrite those policy histories of AIDS which have already been written; instead, I offer a new perspective on how childhood was defined by, and defined AIDS-related education policy. While each chapter begins with a relevant timeline, and this introduction both begins with one and has one embedded within it [Figure 1], it is still useful to sketch a brief history of AIDS policy here. AIDS in Britain emerged at the end 1981 and was quickly responded to by a voluntary community of homosexual men who, over the course of the early 1980s, came together to raise funds for research, support their loved ones and to disseminate AIDS knowledge.33 Berridge argues 1981-1985 was a period characterised by self-help, with clinicians and scientists, haemophiliacs, and homosexuals forming policy communities aimed at meeting their own needs and developing specific areas of expertise.34 In 1985,
29 Hall, ‘In Ignorance and in Knowledge’, p. 21. 30 Ibid, p. 22. 31 Ibid, p. 23. 32Joy Walker, ‘Parents and sex education—looking beyond ‘the birds and the bees’’, Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning, 4:3 (2004), pp. 239-254. 33 Virginia Berridge, AIDS in the UK: The Making of Policy, 1981-1994, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 14-23. 34 Ibid, pp. 14-23, 43-45. 27 when AIDS was established as an issue which would affect the political elite, it was these emerging expert communities which politicians and civil servants drew on to create AIDS policy. During this period AIDS was transformed into a public health priority as the virus was isolated and the possibility of the heterosexual spread established. News of the contamination of the blood supply and heterosexual transmission began to occupy a vociferous press, ensuring that AIDS became an issue which could not be ignored and establishing the HIV positive identities which would populate AIDS narratives for years to come. Among these identities were infants and children, infected during pregnancy or birth or through contaminated blood products. As will be discussed at length in chapter 4 of this thesis, the emergence of these groups of HIV-affected children marked the beginning of the first specifically child-related AIDS policy responses. Though teenage magazines would represent AIDS to their young readership in 1985, as chapter 2 of this thesis will discuss, it was not until 1986 that the establishment of heterosexual spread of HIV pushed the Health Education Council (HEC) to specifically target adolescents as an audience. Specific AIDS-related education policy related to children began to emerge in 1987, as discussed in chapter 1 of this thesis. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, representations of HIV positive identities to children and adolescents proliferated, with child-related AIDS education policy establishing how the disease would be framed for younger audiences, if not the tone or content of these representations. Once established, the chronic disease model became a hallmark of representations targeted at teenagers, with early AIDS education focused more on efforts to destigmatise AIDS than on the controversial issue of educating the young regarding safer-sex practices. In the 1990s, as medical orthodoxies regarding the heterosexual transmission of AIDS were questioned in the adult press and uncertainties emerged,35 children’s AIDS education policy continued along its established trajectory of normalisation, destigmatisation and increasingly explicit safer-sex education.
Constructing childhood and the child through policy and legislation, 1981-1997 Children were deployed in the discourses of the New Right as an emotive talisman, a lightning rod for the anxious politics of the 1980s and 1990s; the figure of the child
35 Berridge, AIDS in the UK, pp. 237-246. 28 embodied many of the conflicts which lay at the heart of the ‘unstable amalgam’ between neo-liberalist economics and authoritarian moral conservativism which marked the Thatcher and Major governments.36 The needs of the child were offered up as the motive behind a number of conservative legislative moves which defined the limits of the state, the private sphere, the individual and the public good by defining sexual morality, parental rights and sexual, criminal and medical competence. Despite the political dominance of the morally conservative right, this period also saw progress made by the children’s rights movement. Born of the 1970s, the 1980s saw campaigns under the banner of children’s rights focused on child labour, corporal punishment and children’s rights in hospital and state care, placing the needs of an agentic (as well as passive) child firmly on the agenda.37 It is not possible, or necessary, to offer an exhaustive history here of how legislation and political discourse constructed childhood and the child between 1981 and 1997,38 instead I examine the pertinent legislative context for this thesis drawn from the primary and secondary literature [see Figure 1]. I begin first with a loose, if elliptical, chronological examination of key developments in sex education policy, then return to examine the implications of Victoria Gillick’s campaign and Section 28 more closely. Many of the policies and circulars mentioned below are vital to the chapters that follow, their effects assessed therein in greater detail.
36 John Kingdom, No Such Thing as Society? Individualism and Community, (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1992) p. 2. 37 Annie Franklin, Bob Franklin, ‘Growing Pains: The Development of the Children’s Rights Movement in the UK’, in Jane Pilcher, Stephen Wagg (eds., Thatcher’s Children? Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s, (London: Falmer Press, 1996), pp. 94-113, pp. 96-97. 38 Pilcher and Wagg’s edited collection Thatcher’s Children? discusses this subject substantially, placing the figure of the child at the heart of Thatcherite discourses. For this reason, despite the absence of any substantial discussion of HIV/AIDS in the text, chapters from the collection feature repeatedly in the discussion below. 29
•Sexual Offences Act decriminalises sex between consenting men over 21 in private 1967 •Abortion Act legalises abortion
•House of Lords debate regarding Family Planning Association funding 1976
•International Year of the Child 1979 •Conservatives win UK election under Margaret Thatcher
•Victoria Gillick brings legal proceedings against her LHA and DHSS 1982
•Victoria Gillick loses her case 1983
•Victoria Gillick brings her case to the appeal courts and wins, provision of contraceptive 1984 advice and treatment to the under 16s is rendered unlawful
•House of Lords overturn appeal court ruling, Gillick Competence becomes an accepted 1985 measure of children's agency in law and medicine
•Education (No. 2) Act transfers power to construct school curriculums from Local Education 1986 Authorities to school Governors
•DES issue a circular dictating sex education should teach children to ‘appreciate the benefits 1987 of stable married life and the responsibilities of parenthood’
•Introduction of the National Curriculum makes biological aspects of sex education compulsory 1988 •Section 28 of the Local Government Bill prohibits Local Education Authorities from ‘promoting’ homosexuality •United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child •The Children Act passes allowing children judged to have Gillick Competence to refuse 1989 medical or psychiatric intervention and to terminate legal
•National Curriculum revised and HIV/AIDS is added to statutory science curriculum for 1991 pupils aged 11 to 16
•1993 Education Bill makes the provision of sex education in schools compulsory but removes non-biological aspects from statutory science curriculum Parents are given the right to 1993 withdraw their children from sex education classes
•Circular released reiterating individual advice should not be given to pupils regarding 1994 contraception
Figure 1. Key events in the Politics of Childhood 30
As Thomson observes, sex education marks a ‘political front line’: the boundary between individual and state for libertarians, state and family for moralists, and individual and ‘the public good’ for paternalists.39 These conflicting dichotomous discourses shaped the legislation, debate and official guidance around abortion, censorship and school-based sex education throughout Thatcher’s and Major’s Tory governments, building multiple, often conflicting, visions of childhood. It is however necessary to begin this history before Thatcher’s 1979 victory. Sex education was officially addressed as part of the secondary curriculum in 1943 by the Board of Education, marking the beginning of direct government guidance in an area of education previously dominated by the social purity and social hygiene movements and their associated charitable organisations.40 Though 1943 marked a degree of change, the British state continued to demonstrate ‘a marked reluctance to legislate’ around sex education, opting for a ‘laissez-faire approach to curriculum development’, responding to pressure groups and confirming the status quo rather than defining the terms of sex education, opting instead to facilitate or limit local and charitable interventions in this area of education in response to public pressures.41 Until the social, technological and legislative changes of the 1960s, this led to a fairly cohesive partnership between health and education institutions, their work framed by the post-war consensus and the emergence of an increasingly powerful welfare state. Under these conditions Thomson argues that where sex education was provided, its form was ‘relatively uncontested’; 42 framed by a discourse of health promotion it provided ‘a range of instructional activities aimed to encourage a healthier way of life’ including some education in ‘the facts of life’.43 The conceptions of child at play within this consensus tended towards viewing children and adolescents as adults in waiting, with sex education performing a protective function; protecting innocent children from falling to an unhealthy present by providing warnings, and educating them so they could participate in a heathy future. The advent of the oral contraceptive pill and the 1967 Sexual Offences and Abortion Acts forced a revaluation of sex education as sexual discourses and identities
39 Rachel Thomson, ‘Moral Rhetoric and Public Health Pragmatism: The Recent Politics of Sex Education’, Feminist Review, 48 (Autumn 1994), pp. 40-60, p. 40. 40 Mort, Dangerous Sexualities, p. 200. 41 Thomson, ‘Moral Rhetoric and Public Health Pragmatism’, p. 43. 42 Ibid. 43 Philip Meredith, Sex Education: Political Issuers in Britain and Europe, (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 75. 31 multiplied, revealing the complexity of the subject and creating new demands for expertise in the area of sexual health education. In response to demands for expertise, the government began funding the Family Planning Association (FPA) to ‘train and resource teachers’, but left the curriculum for sex education in the hands of Local Education Authorities, sustaining the remarkable degree of national variation in this area.44 As Meredith observed, this created a governing structure for sex education characterised by ‘a series of sub-contracting operations which had served to remove responsibility from any one single body’, developments in philosophy, ideology and content taking place within the education sector but without public consultation or direct parliamentary oversight.45 While the professional consensus between health, education and voluntary agencies around the value of developing teenage agency in this area – especially young women’s agency – grew, the tide of parliamentary, public and media opinion was turning, with moves towards child-centred education increasingly framed as a ‘loony left’ and a ‘trendy teacher’ challenge to parental authority and rights.46 The perception that Britain was undergoing a period of ‘permissiveness’ which threatened the innocence of childhood led to a rise in vocal opposition from moral ‘reformers’, famously encapsulated by Mary Whitehouse and her ‘Clean-Up TV Campaign’, though other influential campaigns proliferated throughout the long 1960s produced by the various arms of ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-family’ movements.47 Opposition to innovations in sex education, or the teaching of the subject in schools at all, heightened even as research in this area proliferated; researchers’ findings which showed children and their parents wanted better school-based holistic sex education falling on deaf ears as ‘progressive’ sex education was instead held up as a sign of ‘a decline in moral standards’.48
1976 saw a sustained debate in the House of Lords regarding government funding of the FPA, the Department of Health ministers defending the FPA’s practices and ideology without aid from the Department for Education, belying a rivalry and difference of ideology between these two departments that would shape the politics of sex education
44 Thomson, ‘Moral Rhetoric and Public Health Pragmatism’, p. 44. 45 Meredith, Sex Education, p. 82. 46 Thomson, ‘Moral Rhetoric and Public Health Pragmatism’, p. 45; Stacey, ‘Promoting normality’, p. 285. 47 Durham, Sex and Politics, p. 9. 48 Meredith, Sex Education, p.7, 14. 32 throughout the 1980s and 1990s.49 This debate was followed by a series of periodic interventions by moral lobbyists, which continued after Labour was ousted from power, and sustained by backbench Tory MPs throughout the Thatcher and Major governments.50 These campaigns continued to target the FPA as an institution which undermined the family (through provision of contraceptives and progressive sex education) and also sought to curb the freedom of schools to ‘teach’ homosexuality positively; to establish parental rights in law against those of children and teachers and to challenge the authority of teachers to set the terms of the curriculum.51 Combined with attacks on Labour’s economic policy, Durham argues that interventions by moralist lobby groups caused changes in legislation where the New Right (in opposition and later in government) saw an opportunity to fall in line with ‘populist’ demands, ‘lambast the Labour Party’, stymie ‘sexual liberalism’ and achieve the broader Thatcherite mission of restructuring the education system.52 Stacey goes further, arguing that the Thatcherite government maintained the ‘association of lesbian and gay issues with Labour Party politics in an attempt to discredit them’; their attacks became more vociferous when the AIDS crisis created an ‘opportunity for renewed homophobic attacks’ wherein the association between homosexuality with ‘promiscuity, disease and risk’ created the popular assumption that the prevention of the spread of AIDS was predicated on ‘the prevention of the spreading of homosexuality itself’.53 Durham points out however that where ‘medical, health or scientific research was involved’ the Conservative government sought expert advice from ‘civil servants, the BMA or scientific bodies’ resulting in seemingly discordant policy decisions; for instance, the overturning of the Gillick ruling and the provision of support for embryo research following the Warnock Report while passing Section 28 and the 1993 Education Act.54
Debates around the provision of contraception to the under-sixteens began at least a decade before Gillick brought legal proceedings against the DHSS and her Local Health Authority (LEA) in 1982 for refusing to promise that no confidential
49 Thomson, ‘Moral Rhetoric and Public Health Pragmatism’, p. 45. 50 Meredith, Sex Education, p. 17. 51 Durham, Sex and Politics, p.13. p. 101. 52 Durham, Sex and Politics, p.13. p. 140, Thomson, ‘Moral Rhetoric and Public Health Pragmatism’, p. 47. 53 Stacey, ‘Promoting normality’, p. 285. 54 Durham, Sex and Politics, pp. 140-141. 33 contraceptive advice or treatment would be given to her underage daughters should they request it.55 She aimed to establish that medical professionals, in providing contraceptive advice and treatment to children under the age of consent, were in breach of the 1956 Sexual Offences Act by acting as accessories to unlawful sexual intercourse.56 Furthermore, she argued, medical professionals could not give advice or treatment to her daughters without her explicit consent without being in breach of her parental rights.57 The courts ruled against Gillick in 1983, judging that medical professionals were not in breach of the 1956 Sexual Offences as she had argued. Moreover, it was judged that parental authority did not constitute a ‘right’; rather it engendered a responsibility, so medical treatment of those under-sixteen without parental consent did not breach ‘parental rights’ as they had no protection in law.58 Mr. Laws, on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Security, questioned ‘the propriety of the use of the word ‘rights’ at all in relation to the position of parents in these matters’ stating that ‘if parents can be said to have any rights in relation to their child, it is only a right to carry out the duties which the parents owe to the child. Parents, […] have no ‘free-standing’ rights at all.’59 Unhappy with the judgment, Gillick appealed and successfully had the decision overturned in 1984, rendering the 1980 DHSS guidelines she had originally taken issue with illegal. Circulars were almost immediately released advising medical practitioners that informing those under 16 on matters of contraception without prior parental consent was ‘not lawful’, and the FPA withdrew two leaflets which promised confidential contraceptive advice to those under 16.60 Kenneth Clarke, then Secretary of State for Health, appealed to the House of Lords in a bid to reverse the Court of Appeals ruling, in a move which Durham points to as proof of a divide between the Thatcher
55 Jane Pilcher, ‘Gillick and After: Children and Sex in the 1980s and 1990s, in Jane Pilcher, Stephen Wagg (eds., Thatcher’s Children? Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s, (London: Falmer Press, 1996), pp. 77-93, pp. 78-79. 56 [1986] 1 FLR 229, [1985] UKHL 7, [1986] AC 112, http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKHL/1985/7.html, [Date accessed 18/08/2016]. 57 ‘Gillick V West Norfolk and Wisbech Area Health Authority and another’, All England Law Reports, 3 (1985), pp. 402-437 see [1986] 1 FLR 229, [1985] UKHL 7, [1986] AC 112, http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKHL/1985/7.html, [Date accessed 18/08/2016]; Pilcher, ‘Gillick and After’, pp. 79-80. 58 [1986] 1 FLR 229, [1985] UKHL 7, [1986] AC 112, http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKHL/1985/7.html, [Date accessed 18/08/2016]. 59 [1986] 1 FLR 229, [1985] UKHL 7, [1986] AC 112, http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKHL/1985/7.html, [Date accessed 18/08/2016]. 60 Pilcher, ‘Gillick and After’, p. 80. 34 government and the ‘moral lobby’, an example of what Thomson usefully identifies as a reoccurring divide between legislative decisions taken on the basis of ‘health pragmatism’ rather than ‘sexual moralism’.61 The House of Lords overturned the appeal court’s decision, placing medical authority above parental authority and placing the right to confidentiality and to consent to medical treatment back within reach of those teenagers judged to have what would become known as Gillick Competence.62 Gillick Competence as an idea constructs the possibility of an agentic child, an actor able to make competent decisions within the specific geography of the medical setting or in the presence of medical practitioner imbued with the power to assess (and therefore grant) agency. Upon leaving this setting and the authoritative presence of the medical professional, the child is once again rendered incapable in law, their power to make demands on adults for information about their own sexual health or contraception withdrawn and replaced with codified ignorance. Here Thomson’s model of Thatcherite sexual health education policy as devisable into ‘health pragmatism’ and ‘sexual moralism’ can be married to Monk and Blair’s observations regarding the construction of different kinds of childhood, children and children’s sexuality produced through divisions in education and health legislation: the ‘health pragmatism’ found in health legislation constructs ‘situated rationality’ for ‘adolescents’ within health settings, allowing for the possibility of healthy/controlled adolescent sexuality which can be produced through public health education for the public good – preventing teenage pregnancies, the contracting of STDs and abuse; ‘sexual moralism’, more often at work in education legislation, denies the possibility children’s rationality, constructing them within the education setting as vulnerable and ‘ideally non-sexual’.63
1986 saw the introduction of Education (No.2) Act which transferred the power to develop a sex education curriculum from local education authorities to school governors and demanded that where sex education ‘should form part of the secular curriculum’ it was provided ‘in a manner as to encourage those pupils to have due regard to moral considerations and the value of family life’.64 This Act marks the first time sex
61 Durham, Sex and Politics, pp. 140-141; Thomson, ‘Moral Rhetoric and Public Health Pragmatism’, pp. 40-57. 62 Pilcher, ‘Gillick and After’, pp. 88-89. 63 Blair, Monk, ‘Sex Education and the Law in England and Wales’, pp. 45-47. 64 Education (No. 2) Act, (1986), p. 21, p. 48. 35 education was explicitly referred to by statute.65 The Act allowed governors to dictate the content of sex education – if they decided the subject should be taught – but created the requirement for parental consultation in the curriculum construction process, made parent governors mandatory and allowed governors to grant parents the right to withdraw pupils from sexual education lessons.66 The Act did not remove funding from controversial voluntary bodies such as the FPA or the Brook Advisory Centres altogether – as per the demands of the moral lobby – but did see an end to the ‘subcontracting arrangements that had characterised the political control of sex education in the past’, usurping the power of LEAs and voluntary bodies.67 This constructed parents as the primary consumers in an increasingly marketised education system,68 the powerful guardians of their children with children as passive innocents to be dictated to by parents, and with school governors and teachers at the behest of the latter two. Having established the power of parents and the passivity of children, debate established what threatened the former and the latter; parental authority (writ ‘family life’) was undermined by progressive teaching practices and content on contraception implemented without parents’ consent; while children were threatened by ‘subversive sex education’ which aimed to teach ‘homosexual relationships as in every way […] acceptable’.69 The 1986 Act was closely followed by a circular issued by the Department of Education and Science in 1987 which outlined sex education in terms far beyond the ‘due regard to moral considerations’ upheld by the 1986 legislation, with pupils ‘encouraged to consider the importance of self-restraint’ and ‘helped to recognise the physical, emotional and moral risks of casual and promiscuous sexual behaviour’ and ‘helped to appreciate the benefits of stable married life and the responsibilities of parenthood’.70 The text also advised teachers regarding ‘contraceptive advice to girls under 16’, clarifying they were not protected by their professional status (as doctors
65 Ann Blair, Daniel Monk, ‘Sex Education and the Law in England and Wales: The Importance of Legal Narratives’, in Shaping Sexual Knowledge: A Cultural History of Sex Education in Twentieth Century Europe, ed. by Lutz D. H. Sauerteig, Roger Davidson, (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 37-51, p. 37. 66 The requirement that some of a school’s governors must be the parents of pupils attending the school was in proportion to the size of the school, but always in greater numbers than were teacher-governors. Education (No. 2) Act, (1986), pp. 3-4, 24; Lynda Measor, Coralie Tiffin, Katrina Miller, Young people's views on sex education: education, attitudes and behaviour, (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 19-20. 67 Thomson, ‘Moral Rhetoric and Public Health Pragmatism’, p. 48. 68 Blair, Monk, ‘Sex Education and the Law in England and Wales’, p. 38. 69 Lord Buckmaster, ‘Official Report of Standing Committee B’, Education Bill (Lords) Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 99: 125 (1st – 10, 1986), Col. 442; Meredith, Sex Education, pp. 30-33. 70 DES 1987:4. 36 were) and that ‘giving an individual pupil advice on such matters without parental knowledge or consent would be an inappropriate exercise of a teacher’s professional responsibilities and could, depending on the circumstances, amount to a criminal offence.’71 Guidance on homosexuality was also given belying the fears of some that homosexuality could be learned through sex education:
There is no place in any school in any circumstances for teaching which advocates homosexual behaviour, which presents it as the ‘norm’ or which encourages homosexual experimentation by pupils.72 Admittedly the 1987 guidance did not carry statutory status, but given the dearth of other advice and the threats of criminal litigation it carried, and the wake of confusion that followed Victoria Gillick’s campaign, its significant impact upon the terms of teaching discourse and the production of educational materials should not be underestimated. The 1987 circular stands as a clear antecedent to the infamous Section 28 of the Local Government Bill passed a year later in 1988. The introduction of the National Curriculum in 1988 saw aspects of sex education – albeit those limited to the biological – included in compulsory science. Governors lost their powers over curriculum design with regards to the compulsory elements included within the curriculum. These compulsory elements were focused on disease and reproduction, leaving the more holistic approach advocated by health education experts within the non-statutory guidance. This reduced the power of parents and governors, placing certain elements beyond their control and disallowing any parental right to withdraw their children from mandatory biological sex education.73 1988 was also the year when Section 28 of the Local Government Bill, perhaps the most infamous of all Conservative sex education policies, was ratified. Originally conceived in 1987, Stacey places Clause 28 within longer histories of moralistic agitation against sexual health education outlined above, but also points to it as symptomatic of the upsurge in homophobic rhetoric which characterised the early years of the AIDS crisis in Britain.74 The Bill, though poorly conceived and in places legally redundant, was far from toothless. While the Section 28 did not technically prohibit the discussion of
71 Department of Education and Science, 1987b: Section 26. 72 DES 1987b: Section 22. 73 Jackie Green, ‘School governors and sex education: an analysis of policies in Leeds’, Health Education Journal, 53 (1994), pp. 40-51, p. 41. 74 Stacey, ‘Promoting normality’, p. 285. 37 homosexuality in schools, banning instead the ‘promoting’ of ‘homosexuality’ by LEAs specifically, it created enough anxiety and confusion as to render this subtlety moot – certainly it was interpreted by many at the time (and is remembered by many now) as a prohibition on the teaching of homosexuality in schools.75 The aim of Section 28 was to protect ‘family life and standards’ from the threat of powerful ‘deviant outsiders’.76 It framed children as a vulnerable aspect of the ‘sacred institution of the family’;77 the possibility that children might themselves identify as members of those labelled ‘deviant’ absent, their sexualities rendered asexual, passive and vulnerable until adulthood and heterosexuality could be achieved. The construction of homosexuality as a powerful corrupting force by the discourses which surrounded Section 28 effectively rendered homosexuality an impossible identity for children, whom the legislation simultaneously constructed as the vulnerable potential victims of deviant others. A year later the construction of children as vulnerable was reconfirmed by legislation ostensibly designed to further their rights: the Children Act of 1989. The Act demarcated the roles of parents and the State – social workers, medical practitioners, the law courts – in relation to children, but also the geographies of these relationships, constructing the limits of children’s agency situationally and according to age and capacity (following the principles of Gillick Competence).78 The family was upheld as the best place for children, and while provisions were made for social workers – cast in a supportive role – to undertake to adhere to the wishes of a child judged capable of making decisions when that child was in state care or in the court, no provision was made for children within their family to offer criticism or dissent to parental rule.79 The Act extended children’s agency within such limited settings, as Winter and Connolly argue, that it did little more than enshrine children’s ‘right to remain within the confines of the family’, extending parental rights against the state through their children rather than children’s rights against their parents.80
75 Stacey, ‘Promoting normality’, p. 286. This confusion was in part the product of local councils and LEAs interpretation of the legislation and press reporting on the Bill. See for example Audrey Gillan, ‘Section 28 gone… but not forgotten’, The Guardian, (17 November 2003), www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/nov/17/uk.gayrights [Accessed 12/09/2016]. 76 Anon, Birmingham Evening Mail, 10 March 1988, p.6 cited in Stacey, ‘Promoting normality’, pp. 287- 292. 77 Stacey, ‘Promoting normality’, p. 287. 78 Karen Winter, Paul Connolly, ‘‘Keeping It in the Family’: Thatcherism and the Children Act 1989’, in Thatcher’s Children? Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s, ed. by Jane Pilcher, Stephen Wagg, (London: Falmer Press, 1996), pp. 29-42, p. 35. 79 Winter, Connolly, ‘Keeping It in the Family’, pp. 39-40. 80 Winter, Connolly, ‘Keeping It in the Family’, pp. 35-39. 38
In 1991 the National Curriculum was revised, and HIV/AIDS added to the statutory science curriculum. This provision of statutory, albeit limited, HIV/AIDS education to pupils from age 11, within schools, would not last more than two years as the 1993 Education Bill finally gave moral lobbyists what they had been agitating for: the parental right of withdrawal. The 1993 Education Bill made the provision of sex education by schools compulsory, but relegated non-biological aspects of sex education, including contraception, STDs and HIV, to the non-statutory curriculum.81 The threat of litigation predicated by Section 28 was also replaced by urges to ‘inform parents of ‘precocious’ questions and suspicions that pupils may be in breach of the law or at ‘moral risk’,’82 marking the classroom as a space where children had no right to confidentiality, and teachers had no real jurisdiction beyond that gifted them by parents or within the strict dictates of the National Curriculum. Thomson notes that one key consequence of the combination of the politicisation of sex education and the statutory granting of parental right to withdrawal was a series of localised campaigns geared towards encouraging parents to exercise their new right to withdraw children from sex education classes as a means of protest, forcing localised changes in the non-statutory curriculum which had national reverberations. 83 More national, if nebulous, consequences included a reduction in innovation in the area of sex education and the fearful self-imposed censorship of non- statutory curriculums by teachers at pains to avoid parental withdrawals and bereft of the state-funded local advisors they previously relied upon.84
The textual history of childhood Much like the legislation discussed above, children’s media reflects the anxieties and desires of its adult producers, allowing us access to what the adult producers believed to be important or ‘good’ for an imagined child. It reveals what adults envision childhood and the child to be at the moment of production because, as Lesnik-Oberstein and others
81 Measor, Tiffin, Miller, Young people's views on sex education, pp. 21-22. 82 Thomson, ‘Moral Rhetoric and Public Health Pragmatism’, p. 53; Department for Education 1994b: Sections 39 and 40. 83 Thomson, ‘Moral Rhetoric and Public Health Pragmatism’, p. 53. 84 Lesley Hall, ‘”Birds, bees and general embarrassment”: Sex education in Britain from Social Purity to Section 28’, in Public or Private Education? Lessons from History, ed. by R Aldrich, (London: Woburn, 2004, pp. 98-115, p. 110; Measor, Tiffin, Miller, Young people's views on sex education, p. 23. 39 have explained, it requires adults to first ‘construct’ a child as imagined audience.85 Children’s media tells children what they are and could be, often going so far as to explain what they ought to think and do. As Rose argues, ‘children’s fiction draws in the child, it secures, places and frames the child’, rendering the creation of it an exercise in establishing the adult’s own reality first, then adulterating it through the manipulation of the child (and through them the future) second.86 Children’s media, in this conception, appears to be the product of the adult subject’s desires; desires which themselves are shaped in the adult by the overriding discourses of a given time, culture or geographic location.87 Children’s media offers its adult authors the ability to challenge or assimilate a given ideology into their own identity through the creation of an imagined ideal innocent child requiring protection as they grow towards adulthood, or an unfortunate flawed child requiring guidance. The former acts in its simplest form as a perfect avatar to adult aspiration – as in Lacan’s mirror stage – the later, somewhat more complexly, may be directed as a vulnerable identity towards an ideal end.88 In either conception, the child is always an incomplete means to an end, a teleological emissary to the future. The benefit of this Lacanian approach lies in the attention it draws to the ideals constructed both within and external to texts produced for children. It allows an interrogation of the text’s narratives, identities and idealised audience in search of their normative functions. Unfortunately, the emphasis that this Lacanian approach places on the constructed nature of the child can obscure the agency of the audience while suggesting that the ideal selves constructed through texts, and desired by authors, only exist in the singular. Children’s media is often both produced by multiple authors and didactically offers multiple possible acceptable identities for children to adopt rather than a singular ideal. Children’s texts are also regularly created with a wide and varied audience in mind, an audience which always has a degree of agency which Lacanian approaches marginalise. Scholars have mitigated these flaws by utilising various
85Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, ‘Essentials: What is Children’s Literature? What is Childhood?’, Understanding Children’s Literature: Key Essays from the International Companion Encyclopaedia of children’s Literature, ed. by Peter Hunt, (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 15-29, p. 15. 86 Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan and the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 2; Kershaw, Educating for the Apocalypse, pp. 2-4. 87 Mark Bracher, Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change: A Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press: 1993), pp. 7-23. 88 Bracher, Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change, pp. 23-25; Jacques Lacan, , ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. by Bruce Fink, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), pp. 75-82. 40 theories of intertextuality following Bakhtin, acknowledging the dialogic nature of texts and cultural narratives where multiple voices and discourse may conflict and coexist.89 Intertextual approaches acknowledge that texts ‘lack fixed authorships and meanings’, rather they are bound in a ‘dynamic relationship to ongoing social and political transformations.’90 This places an emphasis on the context into which a text is produced and also on how it is experienced by its situated audience, acknowledging texts are produced not just for/by the author, but also by their audience. This conception admits that textual meaning may just as easily mirror its varied audience as be changed, resisted, embraced or appropriated by it. As Hall reminds us in regard to popular culture, popular texts are neither the product of a ‘pure’ reflection of what the audience wants nor a form of cultural expression which functions to ‘superimpose’ authorial desires upon them.91 Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to access the voices of children who have interacted with texts in the past. The problematic nature of memories collected through oral history interview is well documented,92 and responses collected from children and adolescents in the past must be excavated with particular caution as the complex nexus of power relations between adult interviewer and child may not be accounted for in primary documents.93 Diaries and letters offer some limited access to the thoughts and responses of children and adolescents to media and education, but again these must be treated with all the usual caution. Despite all these difficulties, one must proceed, as Myers points out, with full comprehension of pedagogic texts as deliberate public interventions reliant on an ‘empathetic compact between author and reader’, the product of a ‘two-way traffic between producer and consumer’ and the context which fosters the texts themselves.94 Investigating HIV positive identities represented in children’s media,
89 Dominick Lacapra, ‘Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts’, History and Theory, 19:3 (October, 1980), pp. 245-276, p. 255. 90 Mariela Vargova, ‘Dialogue, Pluralism, and Change: The Intertextual Constitution of Bakhtin, Kristeva, and Derrida’, Res Publica, 13 (2007) pp. 415-440, p. 415; Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, The Dialogic Imagination, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259–422; Pam Morris, ‘Re‐routing Kristeva: From pessimism to Parody’, Textual Practice, 6:1 (1992), pp. 31-46. 91 Stuart Hall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular’’, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, Ed. John Storey, (London: Pearson Education Limited, 2006), pp. 442-453, pp. 442-445. 92 Kenneth R. Kirby, ‘Phenomenology and the Problems of Oral History’ Oral History Review, 35:1 (Winter/Spring 2008), pp. 22-38, pp. 23-27. 93 Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 67-68; Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 3rd edition), pp. 271-272, pp. 280–281. 94 Mitzi Myers, ‘The Erotics of Pedagogy: Historical Intervention, Literary Representation, the ‘Gift of Education,’ and the Agency of Children’, Children’s Literature, 23 (1995), pp. 1-30, p. 19. 41 then, is not merely an excursion into some largely unexplored annals of HIV/AIDS’ cultural history, but an investigation of the married anxieties of adults faced with constructing children and then equipping them for a hostile present and future.
Constructing HIV positive identities: theorising realities In a speech to the International AIDS meeting in 1989, Samuel Broder, head of the United States’ National Cancer Institute, announced that AIDS was a chronic illness and that its treatment should follow the model used for cancer.95 This redefinition of AIDS from an acute to a chronic illness model did not have immediate or universal effects. Nor did the existence of the chronic model eliminate the HIV positive identities associated with the older acute ‘plague’ model. Ideas of AIDS as a highly virulent disease mainly affecting maligned groups such as homosexuals, prostitutes and intravenous drug users persisted into the 1990s in Britain as variations in the experience and representation of HIV and AIDS allowed older models of AIDS as an illness to persist alongside new conceptions. Investigations focusing on HIV positive individuals have been increasingly successful at unpicking the intersecting identities that coalesce into an individual’s experience of HIV-positivity as an aspect of identity. There are three main ideas drawn from identity scholarship that form the basis of a toolkit for this thesis’ investigation of children’s media: intertextuality, narratology and intersectionality. Elements of these constructivist approaches, tempered by a conscious acknowledgement of the agency of historical actors, form the foundation of my analytic.
Intertextuality, as discussed earlier, acknowledges the ‘work-like’ aspects of texts, those dialogical elements which supplement ‘empirical reality by adding to, and subtracting from’ it, the ‘dimensions of the text not reducible to the documentary’ – the underlying motives, imagination and interpretation of producer and audience detectable in the discourses, ideologies and narratives bound by the text.96 Bakhtin observed a dialogic quality to be innate to fictional texts, describing the manner by which novels, in particular, explore multiple ideologies as a consequence of their variety of registers, narratives, and characters. He extended this analysis, using dialogism to describe the
95 Jean Scandlyn, ‘When AIDS became a chronic disease’, Western Journal of Medicine, 172 (2000), pp. 130-133, p. 130. 96 Lacapra, ‘Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts’, p. 250. 42
‘relation of exchange’ and production between society and the self, ‘a text and its audience or context’, observing the multiple ideologies proffered by texts and the manner by which certain discourses may come to dominate.97 Similarly, the work-like function of an identity is ‘productive and reproductive’; it exchanges, ‘deconstructs and reconstructs the given, […] repeating it but also bringing into the world something that did not exist before in that significant variation, alteration, or transformation.’98 Bakhtin argued that novels are ‘created by and in answer to culture, they address past, present and predicted future discourses and ideological positions’.99 I argue that the same is true of identities and deploy Bakhtin’s techniques accordingly. Regarding identities as texts allows the interpretation of the cultural work they perform, the situating of them contextually, and an acknowledgement of their empirical evolving reality for those living with them. A caveat here is vital: texts are not reducible to their constituent work-like and empirical elements, nor do they reveal the mystery of their production if their various pertinent contexts are illuminated and their authors interrogated. They can only ever represent a relational moment in time, a culmination of what was and is as they were created. Moreover, as Irwin explains, history and society do not exist ‘external to textuality, to be brought to bear in interpretation’ but are themselves texts, ‘already and unavoidably inside the textual system.’100 Consequently, as Allen following Kristeva points out, ‘we must give up the notion that texts present a unified meaning and begin to view them as the combination and compilation of sections of the social text’.101 Thus, even if we track the social, cultural and economic production context of texts, the fact remains that texts, like identity, are gestalt.102
97 Kershaw, Educating for the Apocalypse, pp. 33-35. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, The Dialogic Imagination , Trans. Caryl Emerson, Michael Holquist, (University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259-422, pp. 275-280. 98 Lacapra, ‘Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts’, p. 250. 99 Kershaw, Educating for the Apocalypse, pp. 33-35, Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, pp. 275-280. 100 William Irwin, ‘Against Intertextuality’, Philosophy and Literature, 28:2 (October 2004), pp. 227-242, p. 229. 101 Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 37. See also Kristeva, Julia, ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. by Leon S. Roudiez, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 64–91. 102 It is the gestalt nature of identity which has led me to regard identities specifically as ‘text’ rather than objects or artefacts. That said more material methodologies were useful interpretive frameworks and ‘The Whole Socio-Economic Conjuncture’ offered by Adams and Barker helped structure the early stages of my research for this thesis. Robert Darnton, ‘What Is the History of Books?’ Daedalus, 111:3, (Summer, 1982), pp. 65-83; Robert Darnton, ‘“What is the history of books?” Revisited’, Modern Intellectual History, 4:3 (2007), pp. 495–508; Thomas R. Adams, Nicholas Barker, ‘A New Model for the Study of 43
Narratology examines the modes by which narratives structure our perceptions of our world and the cultural artefacts that make it up, particularly focusing upon its effect upon our perception of temporality and spatiality.103 Narratology draws attention to what White, following Barthes, dubs a ‘meta-code, a human universal on the basis of which transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted’; that is, the ordering of reality into a narrative.104 While narratology admits the pervasiveness of the narrative mode, it simultaneously acknowledges its constructed and dialogic nature, problematising its use particularly in any field making claims to represent an objective reality, and potentially interrogates any and every narrative which colours our experience in search of an underlying purpose.105 The narrative mode is a means of encoding discourse, its presence and shape in any given representation dependent on the purpose of a given depiction of reality.106 It seems pertinent here to ask – just as narratology would of a narrative – what use is narratology to a history of representation of HIV positive identities to children? The utility of narratology is quickly illustrated by a brief discussion of the type of texts that will ultimately make up this study. Beyond the realms of policy and formal sex education are a slew of narratives about sex, some overtly constructed to guide behaviour, others more subliminally normative and embedded in children’s media. The strategy of implanting educational and health messages in popular entertainment media in hope of positively influencing attitudes, knowledge, awareness, and/or behaviours around a given issue, ‘entertainment-education’, is an increasingly recognised and
the Book’, in Potencie of Life: Books in Society. The Clark Lectures 1986-1987. The British Library Studies in the History of the Book, ed. by N. Barker, pp. 5-43. 103 I am using narratology here in part as a short hand for a collection of theories of narrative and practices of narrative analysis. Narratology has been defined as the ‘science of narrative’, but its theoretical and methodological use across a variety of fields - including literary theory, cultural studies, linguistics, history etcetera – is not satisfactorily described by this definition. Ansgar Nünning, ‘Narratology or Narratologies? Taking stock of recent developments, critiques and modest proposals for future uses of the term’, in What is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, ed. by Tom Kidt, Han-Harald Müller, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), pp. 239 – 276, pp. 239-241. 104 Roland Bathes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’, Image, Music, Text, transl. Stephen Heath (New York, 1977), p. 79-124, Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 1; Hayden White, ‘The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory’, History and Theory, 23:1 (February, 1984), pp. 1-33, p. 1. 105 As White points out, this reading of narrative shares a great deal with the works of Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Todorov and Kristeva, who ‘studied narrative in all of its manifestations and viewed it as simply one discursive "code" among others, which might or might not be appropriate for the representation of "reality," depending only on the pragmatic aim in view of the speaker of the discourse.’ White, ‘The Question of Narrative’, p. 2. 106 White, ‘The Question of Narrative’, p. 2. 44 analysed practice with a long history.107 Drawing on narratology, Moyer-Guse points out that while some of these narratives might be deliberately persuasive, constructed by their authors consciously to convey certain health and education messages, in other cases an entertaining storyline added for dramatic appeal might merely ‘incidentally promote’ healthy behaviour through positive portrayals and discourage ‘risky behaviours’ through negative portrayals.108 The pervasion of certain narratives is such that entertainment media designed for children, consciously or unconsciously, echoes the beliefs and views of the adult creators, educating the intended audience within the boundaries of certain discourses. The consciousness of the author as to their audience’s perceived susceptibility to influence often also leads to the absence of certain narratives within entertainment media – for instance, as previously discussed, pleasure and desire in narratives concerning sex. As Crowther points out, agnotology – the study of culturally produced ignorance – is fundamental to a full comprehension of the way education and entertainment media may both promote and maintain ignorance as well as knowledge.109 As Proctor and Schiebinger remind us, ignorance is ‘often just as important’ as knowledge.110 Similarly intersectionality, like agnotology, often draws our attention to the gaps within a given narrative, often in the shape of characters unacknowledged or histories inadequately dealt with, and it is to this final facet of my methodological toolkit to which I now turn. Intersectionality describes the multiple intersecting and relational positions of privilege and disadvantage that act upon an agent in everyday life. To scholars investigating the cultural dimensions of HIV-positivity it has become increasingly important to document the intersecting dimensions of privilege and disadvantage at play in each person’s life beyond their serostatus. Intersectionality, drawing together work in fields investigating gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, age and class, has proved of utmost importance to the scholar wishing to examine the formation and representation of HIV positive identity. As a concept, intersectionality has been deployed both to draw
107 Emily Moyer-Guse, ‘Toward a Theory of Entertainment Persuasion: Explaining the Persuasive Effects of Entertainment-Education Messages’, Communication Theory, 18 (2008), pp. 407–425, p. 407. 108 Moyer-Guse, ‘Toward a Theory of Entertainment Persuasion’, pp. 408-409. 109 Barbara Crowther, ‘The Partial Picture: Framing the Discourse of Sex in British Educative Films of the Early 1930s’ Shaping Sexual Knowledge: A Cultural History of Sex Education in Twentieth Century Europe, ed. by Lutz D. H. Sauerteig, Roger Davidson, (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 176-196, p. 178. 110 Robert N. Proctor, Londa Schiebinger (eds.), Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. vii. 45 out the specific power relations which act upon a given subject because of their membership to an identified group, and to critique the often ‘essentializing tendencies’ of identity politics.111 Drawing on intersectionality, it becomes possible to explore identity in a more comprehensive and nuanced way which takes into account the differing organisational logics of different social divisions – race, gender, age, class, sexuality etcetera – and the distinctive way in which different inequalities are signified, framed and manifested.112 In practice, this allows for the discussion of the lived experience of a given identity as part of a ‘creative, constructive process in which the relationships between positionings, identities and political values are all central and not reducible to the same ontological level’ but are fully enmeshed within other ‘categories of signification’.113 With regard to the construction of identities, and to bring narratology and intertextuality into the discussion again, intersectionality draws attention to the competing, co-occurring dialogues which make up the narrative through which we construct and understand the self – or a representation of an other – locating them in the structures of power which produce and maintain them. In practice, the use of an analytical toolkit made up of intersectionality, intertextuality, and narratology allows for the close scrutiny of the individual components which make up an HIV positive identity without losing sight of the identity as a whole and the cultural context which constructs, reconstructs and is constructed by the identity’s components and the identity itself. For example, the specificity of the experience and identity of an HIV positive mother, crucial to understanding the history and narrative she might be deployed to represent, is given its due by this approach. Under such observation, the representational use of the identity ‘HIV positive mother’ would not be dissolved into its intersectional components, nor fixed in a given moment or context; rather the identity would be treated as a dialogic text, following Bakhtin. Crucially, this approach directs attention to the author deploying or producing a given text viewing construction and dissemination as a deliberate placement of ideas into ‘a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgements,
111 Ann Phoenix, Pamela Pattynama, ‘Editorial: Intersectionality’, European Journal of Women's Studies, 13:3 (2006), pp. 187-192, p. 187. 112 Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘Intersectionality and Feminist Politics’, European Journal of Women's Studies, 13:3 (2006), pp. 193-209. 113 Phoenix, Pattynama , ‘Editorial’, pp. 188-189. 46 and accents’ where ideas move ‘in and out of complex interrelationships’ to create and/or bolster specific ideologies.114
Identity as Aetiology – tracking the media mediation of AIDS A variety of interrelated and distinct HIV positive identities populate the cultural history of HIV/AIDS. The cultural construction of the stereotypical HIV positive person began as HIV itself was framed as a new disease. As Rosenberg articulates, a ‘[d]isease does not exist until we have agreed that it does – by perceiving, naming, and responding to it’, and thus, neither do the identities created by its influence.115 The processes by which the social aspects of a disease are generated are diverse, stemming from the biological reality of the disease (affected demographic, virulence, symptoms, trajectory, vectors of transmission, methods of control, et cetera), received opinion on its aetiology, and our reaction to it.116 Depending on its characteristics and the context into which it is received, a disease may create, augment and/or reinforce the perception of a variety of identities. Within the academic literature, the media’s response to AIDS is often described as producing innocent victims of the disease and deserving deviants, often following the theoretical arguments outlined in theories relating to deviance and stigma, including the popular but markedly flawed theories on ‘moral panic’.117 However, as has been recognised elsewhere in the literature, it is not enough to acknowledge that HIV, like other diseases, performs cultural work and creates multiple new identities; the myriad intersecting identities that erupt into existence around this disease are more complex than the innocent victim/ deserving deviant dichotomy that is often proffered as its cultural legacy.118 Each narrative that creates a representation of an HIV positive person or a person with AIDS draws on numerous intersecting discourses, affected by and affecting those that came before and after. These discourses are in dialogue with one another, and the interplay between the power relations they destroy, produce and
114 Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’ p. 276. 115 Charles E. Rosenberg, ‘Disease in History: Frames and Framers’, The Milbank Quarterly, 67:1 (1989), pp. 1-15, p. 2. 116 Rosenberg, ‘Disease in History’, p. 2. 117 Stanley Cohen, Folk devils and moral panics: the creation of the Mods and Rockers, Third Edition, (London: Routledge, 2002). 118 So persuasive is the media’s mediation of AIDS as a disease that its affect is palpable within the academic literature. Scholarship, regardless of objective pretentions is always produced within or in answer to its cultural time and place. Often scholarship is produced in answer to a perceived injustice. As a result, the bifurification of categories proffered by the media is often reproduced in the process of scholastic redress, even within work which takes aim at the innocent/deviant dichotomy. 47 reproduce is complex and often unclear. Furthermore, HIV-positivity holds its own embodied reality for those living with it, their agency and lived experience of the virus and its implications affect the narratives disseminated in the public realm. Sociologists of health and disease in particular have analysed the effect the trajectory of HIV has on the self, the various ‘medical uncertainties’ which characterised this disease generating ‘corresponding subjective ambiguities’ in the self and in the identities constructed and assimilated by subjects.119 The process of resistance and integration of new identities into the self has been usefully described as ‘biographical reinforcement’ and ‘biographical disruption’.120 The former describes the way in which identities may be absorbed into the self as part of older persisting identity narratives; the latter describes the way in which the acquisition of new identities might abruptly end or radically reconfigure existing identity narratives. These new identities, in turn, contribute to what Squire terms a ‘representational epidemic’ of HIV positive identities being disseminated across popular media, health education, art and literature.121 Through this process actors’ identities may be understood as both produced by and producing HIV positive identities dialogically.
The media’s representation and dissemination of certain HIV/AIDS narratives has been interpreted by both scholars and AIDS activists as the production of a ‘moral panic’ around the spread of AIDS.122 Moral panic theories – in their apparent ability to prove a given behaviour ‘irrational’ – are seductive. As Garland put it, ‘moral panic’ is ‘a negative label applied to those who engage in negative labelling, the analyst’s revenge on the forces of social reaction.’123 In investigating the mechanism by which AIDS- related stigma is produced and maintained within the public discourse many go in search of a single aggressor, the multifaceted context in which both aggressor and victim are produced disappearing into a narrative of prejudice and stigma. Watney identifies a key criticism from which several follow: that moral panic theory is ‘obliged in the final instance to refer and contrast “representation” to the arbitration of “the real”’
119 Corinne Squire, ‘“Neighbors Who Might Become Friends”: Selves, Genres, and Citizenship in Narratives of HIV’, The Sociological Quarterly, 40:1 (Winter, 1999), pp. 109-137, p. 111. 120 Daniele Carricaburu, Janine Pierret, ‘From biographical disruption to biographical reinforcement: the case of HIV positive men’, Sociology of Health & Illness, 17:1 (1995) pp. 65-88, pp. 65-66. 121 Squire, ‘Neighbors Who Might Become Friends’, p. 111. 122 Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths, and Modern Sexualities, (E-Book: Taylor & Francis, 2002), pp. 44-46. Watney discusses the use of the ‘moral panic’ theories to explain the representation of AIDS at length in Watney, Policing Desire, p. 39-44. 123 David Garland, ‘On the concept of moral panic’, Crime Media Culture, 4:9 (2008), pp. 9-30, p. 21. 48 and that this attempt at objectivity then necessitates a crippling omission of any understanding of representation as the site of ‘permanent ideological struggle’ and of ‘the real’ as subjective.124 All flaws considered, earlier work which utilised ‘moral panic’ theories to track the creation and destruction of identities in the media and other public realms still have merit. These earlier studies, with their focus on the intersection between the private and public self on a grand scale, acknowledge the reality of media mediated AIDS and are indicative of how these dichotomous representations are experienced by those they represent as baseless panics that misapprehend or inadequately render lived experience. Kruger offers an alternate interpretive framework. He observes that discourses around AIDS may be divided loosely into two major narratives: the macrocosmic and the microcosmic. The former is concerned with an ‘epidemiological or population narrative’ often following the ‘historical trajectory of the epidemic’ in search of an ‘origin’ then tracking the epidemic’s ‘progress’, the ‘spread of the disease’ and finally the ‘explosion of cases’ within a particular population – an ‘at risk’ group – which will finally, in the ‘worse-case scenario’, result in an ‘apocalyptic spread of disease’ wherein the virus leaves the boundaries of the ‘risk groups’ for the ‘general population’.125 In the latter narrative, an individual’s relation to the illness is represented, charting from the point at which contact with the virus is made to the positive test result, the development of symptoms, the AIDS diagnosis and finally death. Within this microcosmic narrative of AIDS ‘[p]assivity is imputed at all stages… except the initial stage, where, too often, a certain “culpable” activity is associated with the exposure to HIV.’126 Epidemiological and personal narratives reinforce one another, the personal tracing the individual experiences of illness and death that make up the population narrative, which in turn charts the communication of the virus and death:
[One embodies] a pattern of inexorable individual decay, the other a pattern of ravenous, uncontrolled growth attendant upon that decay. In their mutual dependence, the two narratives echo scientific accounts of the life-cycle of HIV where in the deaths of individual immune system cells are correlated to the replication and spread of the viral agent.127
124 Watney, Policing Desire, p. 41. 125 Kruger, AIDS Narrative: Gender and Sexuality, Fiction and Science, (Garland: New York, 1996), pp. 75-76. 126 Kruger, AIDS Narratives, p.73. 127 Kruger, AIDS Narratives, p. 77. 49
The confluence of dichotomous ideas which form the macro/micro and innocent/deviant narrative paths which HIV positive identities tread work in tandem to produce AIDS as a media mediated disease with a variety of attendant selves. In turn, these HIV positive identities have come to symbolise common HIV/AIDS narratives.
Drawing on identity theories, Vielehr investigated the salience of an HIV positive identity to young HIV positive gay men in San Francisco. His work demonstrated that HIV positive identities are not only experienced and constructed as intersectional and hierarchical but also as situational, the significance of one’s serostatus to the self being heavily dependent on context.128 Identity theories indicate that one’s social identity is made up of multiple identities, reflections of one’s roles in society, organised hierarchically through a process of comparison and self-reflection against a generalised ‘other’. Individuals acquire these identities either by adopting and performing them or by being hailed as them by others. The meaning and effect of any given identity vary according to a multiplicity of variables from co-occurring and intersecting identities, personal history, embodied experience, social context, personal preference and the social acceptability of a given role.129 In the case of a ‘deviant’ or stigmatising identity, such as HIV-positivity, the incorporation of a new identity can be a potentially disruptive process the performance of which is often resisted and rejected. The media often represents this disruption first and foremost as an erasure of other co-occurring and intersecting identities.130 This process of resistance and integration of a new identity into the self has been usefully described as ‘biographical reinforcement’ and ‘biographical disruption’. The former describes the way in which an identity may be absorbed into the self as part of an older persisting identity narrative; the latter describes
128 Peter Schuyler, Vielehr, The salience of HIV positive identity for young gay men living with HIV, (May 2012) MA dissertation for San Francisco State University. 129 Vielehr, The salience of HIV positive identity, pp. 5-6, See also, P. L. Callero ‘Role-Identity Salience’, Social Psychology Quarterly, 48:3 (1985), pp. 203-215; S. Stryker, P. J. Burke, ‘The Past, Present, and Future of an Identity Theory’, Social Psychology Quarterly, 63:4 (2000), pp. 284-297; S. Stryker, R. T. Serpe, ‘Identity Salience and Psychological Centrality: Equivalent, Overlapping, or Complementary Concepts?’, Social Psychology Quarterly, 57:1 (1994), pp. 16-35; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity, (New York: Routledge, 1990); M. P. Kelly, D. Field, ‘Medical sociology, chronic illness and the body’, Sociology of Health & Illness, 18:2 (1996), pp. 241-257. 130 There are numerous examples of this narrative in popular texts, some famous examples include: Gloria Milklowitz, Goodbye Tomorrow, (Lion Teen Tracks: London, 1987); Alice Hoffman, At Risk, (G P Putman: USA, 1988); Jonathan Demme (Dir), Philadelphia, (TriStar Pictures: USA, 1993). 50 the way in which the acquisition of a new identity might abruptly end or radically reconfigure existing identity narratives.131 In practice, with regard to the incorporation of an HIV-positivity, this could be the assimilation of HIV/AIDS as a chronic illness into one’s identity as a haemophiliac, viewing it as another stage in a biography of chronic disease; or perhaps, when positive serostatus is viewed as a deviant or othering identity, the continuation of one’s identity as an outsider in terms of sexuality/race/gender. Here assimilation is more akin to the addition of a new identity that furthers or multiplies the othering effects of an existing maligned identity, compounding existing stigma experienced by an individual.132 This phenomenon has been attended to by a variety of scholars, described as ‘compound stigma’ within social work texts and as a mechanism which creates ‘othered others’ by media scholars.133 In the case of disruption, HIV-positivity might replace previous conceptions of health and responsibility with disease and risk. In the case of motherhood, for example, an identity constructed around idealised ideas of femininity, fertility and care of infants is disrupted by general HIV stigma and more specifically the potential to pass the virus between mother and foetus, reversing normative perceptions of the womb and the mother as symbols of care and safety.134 In order to overcome the disruption created by the introduction of a new identity into a given narrative or biography, mitigating action and controls must take place. In the case of the individual experiencing the introduction of a new identity into the self, this can involve anything from keeping the new identity a secret, as is often the case
131 Daniele Carricaburu, Janine Pierret, ‘From biographical disruption to biographical reinforcement: the case of HIV positive men’, Sociology of Health & Illness, 17:1 (1995) pp. 65-88, pp. 65-70. 132 Peter J. Smit, Michael Brady, Michael Carter, Ricardo Fernandes, Lance Lamore, Michael Meulbroek, Michel Ohayon, Tom Platteau, Peter Rehberg,Jürgen K. Rockstroh, Marc Thompson, ‘HIV-related stigma within communities of gay men: A literature review’, AIDS Care. 24:3-4 (2012), pp. 405-412. 133 The idea of ‘compound stigma’ and its effects on interactions between social workers and HIV- affected families is discussed extensively in the final chapter of this thesis. The idea of the ‘othered other’ and assimilation anxiety related to stigma is discussed extensively in Amy C. Chambers & Hannah J. Elizabeth, ‘It’s Grimm up North: Domestic Obscenity, Assimilation Anxiety, and Medical Salvation in BBC3’s In the Flesh,’ in.), Heading North: The North of England in Film and Television, ed. by Ewa Hanna Mazierska, (Palgrave, January 2017 – forthcoming) following ideas laid out in Aldana Reyes Xavier, ‘Beyond the Metaphor: Gay Zombies and the Challenge to Heteronormativity’, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 13:2 (2014), pp. 1-12. 134 Deirdre D. Johnston, Debra H. Swanson, ‘Invisible Mothers: A Content Analysis of Motherhood Ideologies and Myths in Magazines’, Sex Roles, 49:1/2 (July, 2003), pp. 21-33, p. 21. Deborah Ingram, Sally A. Hutchinson, ‘Defensive mothering in HIV positive mothers’, Qualitative Health Research, 9:2 (1999) pp. 243-258, pp. 246-254; Deborah Ingram, ‘HIV positive mothers, and stigma’, Health Care for Women International, 20:1 (1999), pp. 93-103. 51 with HIV-positivity, or the embracing of the new identity.135 The media representations of this process, while reflecting the several possible ways HIV-positivity might be resisted or incorporated into the personal biography of an HIV positive person, have a normative effect. HIV positive identities were represented in the narratives disseminated by the media as hierarchical, situational and intersectional. However, those narratives disseminated by the media reflected certain dominant discourses and, as Foucault would indicate, helped to maintain certain structures of power. Furthermore, as Foucault reminds us, the production of reality is an ongoing struggle, with society’s elementary modes of organisation simultaneously mandated and incorporated by shifting sanctioned aetiologies.136 The popular narratives of disease, Kruger argues, allow ‘an ordering of events’ constructing a sense of ‘meaning’ about them, creating a ‘reality’ which seems to have an authored order and coherence, ‘as though its cause and ultimate reason... might be uncovered’ an ‘intentionality of AIDS’ which in turn allows for ‘moralized understandings ... that provide the rationale for plans of action’ locating blame and innocence within the confines of certain behaviours and characters.137 Numerous scholars have pointed to the early constructions of HIV as a ‘gay plague’ as evidence of both the constructed nature of disease, its relation to social control and the fallibility of the medical and scientific profession as itself a product of social construction. Indeed, as Epstein points out in Impure Science, the medical profession’s conjecture that the recreational use of ‘poppers’ by homosexual men was somehow suppressing their immune responses – despite the same chemicals’ prolonged use to no ill effect by cardiac patients – or that sexual contact with multiple partners might exhaust the ‘immunodefensive capacities’ of homosexuals by exposing them to a range of diseases, was sustained well after heterosexual cases began to emerge because of the cultural salience of a narrative which laid blame at the feet of persons already designated deviant by normative society.138 Similarly, the Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Syndrome (GRIDs) label established in early days of the epidemic far outlived its usage by the
135 Alonzo, Reynolds, ‘Stigma, HIV and AIDS’, p. 309. 136 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, Trans. Alan Sheridan, (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 109; Eliot Freidson, Profession of medicine: a study of the sociology of applied knowledge, (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1970) , p. 251; Peter Conrad, ‘Medicalization and Social Control’, Annual Review of Sociology, 18 (1992), pp. 209-232, p. 214; Rosenberg, ‘Disease in History’, p. 2 137 Kruger, AIDS Narratives, p. 81. 138 Stephen Epstein, AIDS, Activism and the politics of Knowledge, (California: University of California Press, 1996) pp. 46-47. 52 medical profession, its salience as a framing narrative discouraging alternate aetiologies and placing an emphasis on homosexual and drug-related vectors of transmission.139
Gender, like aetiology and sexuality, forms another key factor both in the construction of HIV positive identities and the embodied experience of the disease. Feminists have demonstrated that ‘gender constitutes a crucial factor for understanding the HIV/AIDS phenomenon, regardless of which aspect of the pandemic we try to elucidate.’140 As Wilton emphasised, the manner by which ‘representational practices both reflect and construct social and psychological “reality”’, including the construction of gender and heterosexuality, has impacted the epidemic, affecting the way women access care and experience HIV and AIDS.141 Similarly Holland et al. argue heterosexual femininity to be an ‘unsafe sexual identity’, HIV positive or otherwise, as illustrated by the disempowering effect gender has on the negotiation of safer-sex sexual practices and the representation of female identities.142 In a similar vein, Holloway argues that the hegemonic construction of heterosexual masculinity as ‘an instant, not to be interrupted (biological) force’ is implicated in the practice of ‘unsafe’ sexual practices wherein the condom becomes an obstacle to the unassailable coital imperative.143 Furthermore, others have observed a gendered bias in the construction of the risk/blame nexus that casts heterosexual women as more infectious than embodied scientific realities would seem to support. As Sacks notes, women’s representation in the epidemiological medical literature primarily takes the form of being construed as a risk to others, specifically to men and future children.144 Interestingly lesbians, having originally been cast as members of the ‘risk
139 Sander L. Gilman, ‘AIDS and Syphilis: The Iconography of Disease’, October, 43 (Winter, 1987), pp. 87-107, p. 90. 140 Alice Ludvig, ‘Intersectionality’, p. 229. 141 Tamsin Wilton, (1997) EnGendering AIDS: Deconstructing Sex, Text and Epidemic. London: Sage, 1997), p. 6. 142 Janet Holland , Caroline Ramazanoglu, Sue Sharpe and Rachel Thomson, The Male in the Head: Young People, Heterosexuality and Power, (London: Tufnell Press, 2004), p.6. 143 Ludvig, ‘Intersectionality’, p. 230; Wendy Hollway, ‘Gender Difference and the Production of Subjectivity’, in Feminism and Sexuality, ed.by Stevi Jackson, Sue Scott New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 62–73. 144 Valerie Sacks, ‘Women and AIDS: an analysis of media misrepresentations’, Social Science and Medicine, 42:1 (1996), pp. 59-73. 53 group’ in the early 1980s because of their sexual identity, were later constructed as ‘low risk’ despite the discovery of several non-sexual vectors of disease transmission.145
Conclusions This introduction began by outlining the specifics of a study occupied by the representation of HIV/AIDS to children by focusing first on childhood and the construction of an ideal child that takes place during the creation of media for children. It then moved on to discuss the intersecting histories of children’s sexuality and sex education, outlining its history in Britain with particular reference to the politicisation of childhood during the rise and consolidation of the New Right as well as the risk/blame discourse that dominated sexual health education. The discussion then moved on to a more focused examination of identity construction, explaining and demonstrating the utility of intertextuality, narratology, and intersectionality by drawing out key identities. This analytic was then threaded through a review of cultural histories of disease and sociological studies of illness, specifically drawing on gendered and narrative analyses of HIV-positivity to demonstrate the mode by which innocent and deserving victims were constructed by the media and examined by the scholarship. The histories of AIDS already written have been unavoidably and necessarily political, so bound up is this disease in the intersections of identity politics. As has been discussed, even those histories which, for example, document the scientific and medical history of the disease and claim a form of ideological neutrality are nevertheless implicated in the construction of ideological discourse around AIDS. Consequentially, in writing this introduction, my question often became not “what has been written” but “for whom was this written?” It seems important to acknowledge that identifying a relevant literature for a study on the representation of HIV positive identities to children involves an ideologically bound selection process. The selection of literature I have chosen to engage with was motivated by a desire to write a certain kind of history; a history which while attending to the constructed nature of identity acknowledges the agency of actors, past and present; a history which does not describe children’s lives per se, but focuses instead on the discourses and texts which surround, construct and
145 Diane Richardson, 'The Social Construction of Immunity: HIV Risk Perception and Prevention among Lesbians and Bisexual Women', Culture, Health & Sexuality, 2:1 (January – March, 2000), pp. 33-49, p. 33. 54 respond to them; a history of the reactive production of childhoods by anxious adults in the age of AIDS.
55
Chapter 1: Timeline of Key events
•EAGA Expert Advisory Group on AIDS meets for first time 1985
•Education (No. 2) Act transfers power to construct school curriculums from Local Education Authorities to school Governors •HEC dissolution begins so it can be replaced by HEA 1986 •BMA and FPA both set up AIDS working groups
•Teaching About HIV and AIDS blocked from release by DES and undergoes revisions •DHSS Don’t Die of Ignorance campaign 1987 •AIDS and You booklet first edition released
•Introduction of the National Curriculum makes biological aspects of sex education compulsory •Section 28 of the Local Government Bill prohibits Local Education Authorities from 1988 ‘promoting’ homosexuality •Teaching about HIV and AIDS released
•United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child •The Children Act passes 1989 •AIDS and You board game released
•National Curriculum revised and HIV/AIDS is added to statutory science curriculum for pupils aged 11 to 16 nd 1991 •AIDS and You 2 Edition booklet released
•1993 Education Bill makes the provision of sex education in schools compulsory but removes non-biological aspects from statutory science curriculum. 1993 •Parents are given the right to withdraw their children from sex education
•Circular released reiterating individual advice should not be given to pupils regarding contraception nd 1994 •Video game version of AIDS and You 2 Edition Computer Game released
56
Chapter 1: Constructing childhood pragmatically: The discursive production and dissemination of HIV and AIDS education material by established public health institutions 1985-1997
The advent of the AIDS crisis saw institutions previously tasked with educating adults about sexual health, or children about ‘the facts of life’, thrust into the awkward and publicly prominent new role of sex educators to the nation. During the 1980s and 1990s, the parameters of public sexual health education were redrawn and AIDS as a disease was reframed from an acute to a chronic illness. Institutions such as the British Medical Association (BMA) and Family Planning Association (FPA) were well placed to produce up-to-date and authoritative adult education materials on HIV and AIDS as the public health message evolved from one of nebulous risk to more explicit messages on safer-sex. However, the complex and difficult task of representing the sexual and morbid aspects of HIV and AIDS and their prevention to children proved significantly more challenging. In addition to the associated difficulties that institutions encountered because responding to children’s AIDS-related needs necessitated their embroilment in the politics of public health, sexuality, childhood and education, the production of coherent and comprehensive HIV/AIDS education policy and material for children was hampered by bureaucratic power struggles. In an atmosphere of utmost urgency, potential educators within and outside Whitehall shared and fought for the authority to produce HIV/AIDS and safer-sex education policy and material for under-eighteens while grappling with anxiety over presenting children with explicit content; circumnavigating or embracing prohibitions against the inclusion of any content on homosexuality; and constructing competing and conflicting ideas of the child as a vulnerable innocent or knowing agent. This chapter explores how these complex difficulties were managed, manifested and manipulated by public health institutions, through the production of HIV positive identities and conflicting ideas of childhood. This tracks the initial response of public health institutions to children’s AIDS-related education needs: manifesting in the late 1980s as the redeployment of adult public health education texts as materials designed to educate adult mediators so they, in turn, could teach children about AIDS; then in the early 1990s as the production of texts to use specifically with 57 children; before finally, in the mid-1990s, resulting in the production of texts designed to be consumed directly by children independently.
The problem with Teaching about HIV and AIDS The mix of bureaucratic, sexual and educational politics that inhibited the publication and distribution of the Health Education Authority (HEA) Teaching about HIV and AIDS education pack in 1988 by the FPA provides an illustrative example of the factors that made the official production of HIV/AIDS and safer-sex education materials problematic. The Department for Education and Science (DES) perceived the education of the child to be their exclusive purview and a primary aspect of its remit and officials and Ministers did not welcome attempts by the HEA and FPA to intervene in this field. The difficulties involved in creating government-sanctioned AIDS education for children, epitomised by an exchange of letters between the HEA and the DES, and their repercussions, usefully outlines many of the key issues explored in this chapter and poses several pertinent questions about how, when and why AIDS was framed for the consumption of children and how children and childhood were conceptualised during this process. On the 11th May 1988, a damning letter from the DES concerning a forthcoming AIDS education teaching pack produced at the behest of the HEA was circulated amongst senior members of the FPA and HEA. 146 The FPA had been instrumental in the pack’s production and were given the contract for the pack’s dissemination and any accompanying training teachers might require.147 Written by a senior civil servant D B W Thompson on behalf of the DES, the letter to Dr Spencer Hagard (senior member of the HEA) ostensibly ‘set out for ...the record ...reservations about the [HEA] pack “Teaching about HIV and AIDS”’, a resource pack intended for school teachers and youth workers.148 The letter systematically undermined the HEA’s and FPA’s authoritative expert positions regarding the provision of sexual health and HIV-related education to children and adolescents. While Thompson explained ‘the Department recognises the experience and expertise of the HEA in developing materials suitable for the public health campaign’, he refuted any claims the HEA and FPA were making with
146 The National Archives (TNA): FP2/2/2, Letter from N B W Thompson to Dr Spencer Hagard, 11th May 1988. 147 ; The Wellcome Archive (TWA): SA/FPA/C/B/6/2 [2 of 2], Project Proposal to the Health Education Authority from the Education Unit of the Family Planning Association, (1988) 148 TNA: FP2/2/2, Letter from Thompson to Hagard, 11th May 1988. 58 regard to expertise in school-based education, in defence of the DES’ own authority in this area.
Firstly Thompson’s lengthy letter argued, ‘Sex education with the 12-13 age range is extremely sensitive, and some of the material in Unit 1 is too advanced for the age group and certainly too explicit; arguably it could be harmful’.149 This deftly accused the HEA and FPA of harming an imagined child through their inexpert provision of ‘explicit’ knowledge, while constructing an idea of the child as innocent and vulnerable; their apparent susceptibility to ‘harmful’ knowledge increasing as their age decreased. This presented sexual knowledge as somehow inherently dangerous to the young and aged-based censorship as a sensible recourse to combat it. The letter moves on to declare the ‘section on homosexuality’ to be ‘inappropriate’ and the discursive elements of the teaching pack, designed to encourage children’s critical engagement, to be unhelpful arguing a ‘...clear presentation of the facts must be the first step in any effective programme of AIDS education’.150 This again hints at the idea of knowledge as potentially dangerous, but it also suggests that acknowledging the agency of children through child-based learning techniques or empowering the child as a future sexual citizen was not a desired outcome of sex education for the DES. Rather scientific fact- based sex education, delivered reluctantly and pragmatically only when necessary and ‘appropriate’ and in a manner least likely to create controversy, was championed throughout. This conservativism was framed as a question of morality, a matter of maintaining voter’s (parents) trust and finally as being in the interests of public health:
...We certainly do not want to alienate large numbers of parents by exposing children unnecessarily early to explicit material... Ministers are clear too that the pack does not give due weight to the moral dimensions of sexual behaviour and the importance of family life. ...Staying with one faithful sexual partner is, of course, medically also the highest safeguard against AIDS.151 Sex education is framed here as potentially protective, but only when delivered as a single morally inflected narrative, one trundling towards an inevitable future of monogamous heterosexual family life. The valuable nuclear family, threatened here by the unwise sex education of children without parental consent, formed a key building
149 TNA: FP2/2/2, Letter from Thompson to Hagard, 11th May 1988. 150 TNA: FP2/2/2, Letter from Thompson to Hagard, 11th May 1988. 151 TNA: FP2/2/2, Letter from Thompson to Hagard, 11th May 1988. 59 block of neo-conservative political thought, offering a form of anti-statism governed by ‘traditional values’.152 The child constructed here is a being without agency or sexuality; a fragile potential citizen in development, to be protected from deviation for the sake of the future. The letter from Thompson ends with a final undermining strike to the authority of the HEA and FPA, questioning the HEA’s decision to collaborate with the FPA on the project:
Finally, may I repeat our concern about the intention to commission, without competitive tender, the FPA to disseminate Teaching about HIV and AIDS. We feel that this would be counter-productive because many schools, particularly the religious foundations, and indeed parents, could be deterred from allowing their children to participate.153 The attack on the HEA’s decision to collaborate with the FPA here was two-pronged: firstly the idea that the FPA might court unwanted controversy for the pack and deter parents or schools from using it drew on the admittedly turbulent history of the FPA. The second element, the reference to the commercially uncontested nature of the collaboration, hinted at the progressive erosion of the relationship between the FPA and the government on the back of successful lobbying by conservative interest groups in the early 1980s – before the AIDS crisis allowed the FPA to reconsolidate their position. The right of parents to withdraw their children from sex education classes was of course not granted until the 1993 Education Act, but nonetheless the threat of parental disapproval was powerful. Thompson’s attention to parents is reflective of Ministerial concerns and the weight given to parents’ dual role as care-givers and voters. In the furore which followed the circulation of Thompson’s letter to the HEA, so great was the FPA’s offence that the organisation sought legal advice about the possibility of pursuing a defamation case, though they later opted to use the incident to create opportunities to lobby.154 Well-schooled in the art of lobbying and experienced in critically engaging with policy,155 the FPA regarded the subsequent meetings organised
152 Philip A. Thomas, ‘The family, ideology and AIDS under Thatcher’, Feminist Legal Studies, 1:1 (1993), pp. 23-44, p. 27. 153 TNA: FP2/2/2, Letter from Thompson to Hagard, 11th May 1988. 154 TWA: SA/FPA/C/B/6/2 [Part 2, Restricted Access], Letter from FPA solicitors to FPA, 8th August 1988. 155 The FPA Education unit produced several critical responses to draft education policies and circulars throughout the 1980s and 1990s, publically and privately criticising government policies and DES circulars to forward the FPA’s agenda. TWA: SA/FPA/C/B/6/2 [Part 2, Restricted Access], Annotated draft of DES Sex Education Circular Number 11/87, (15 September 1987). 60 with the DES and HEA to smooth ‘ruffled feathers’ as a ‘chance of consolidating and even advancing our position [...] on both a ministerial and an executive level.’156 This was made possible by the long-standing collaborative relationship between the FPA and the HEA’s predecessor the Health Education Council (HEC) and FPA Chairman Alistair Service’s senior membership of the HEC and later the HEA. The response from within the HEA was far less politic than the measured response the FPA eventually opted for. Chairman of the HEA Sir Brian Bailey defended the HEA and their choice of the FPA as advisers by undermining Thompson’s letter in terms of accuracy and the author’s authority to speak on behalf of the DES. With evident frustration Bailey points out:
You recall registering your concern “at the outset”. You fail, completely, to add that the DES letter dated 27th November 1987 clearly indicated this concern had now been accommodated... I share your concern that we try to avoid a similar situation arising in the future. Perhaps the first tangible step in that laudable direction would be to acknowledge more accurately than does your letter, as to how this unfortunate situation arose in the first place.157 The next meeting of the HEA convened only four days later and Bailey’s main query therein was ‘to know from the ministers why the Authority was now in this situation as the correct process had been followed properly with the DHSS and the DES’ especially as the HEA had ‘been fully co-operative when earlier objections were raised.’158 The undisguised annoyance shown by the HEA towards the DES’ objections to Teaching About HIV and AIDS was not surprising: after a lengthy consultation process the teaching pack had been rubber-stamped by the DES in 1987, printed and ‘technically published’ with copies ‘displayed at book fairs’ before DES objections halted its distribution in 1988.159 Despite the obvious chagrin expressed in both the letter above and at the meeting on 17th, the decision was taken to make ‘significant changes’ and to meet the DES request to clarify the ‘justification’ for the ‘inclusion of teaching about homosexuality’.160 Though the DES succeeded in effecting a change in Teaching about HIV and AIDS it also responded to the pressure from the FPA and HEA by
156 TWA: SA/FPA/C/B/6/2 [Part 2, Restricted Access], Letter from FPA to DES MP, 30 September 1988; Letter circulated amongst senior FPA committee members, 8th August 1988. 157TNA: FP2/2/2, Letter from Sir Brian Bailey to N B W Thompson, 13th May 1988. 158 TNA: FPA2/2/2, HEA Minutes, Part III, 17 May 1988. 159 TNA: FPA2/2/2, HEA Minutes, Part III, 17 May 1988. 160 TNA: FPA2/2/2, HEA Minutes, Part III, 17 May 1988. 61 disassociating itself from both Thompson and the content of his letter, indeed he ‘left the Civil Service’ rather swiftly following the incident.161 The publication and dissemination of the HEA’s teaching pack Teaching About HIV and AIDS went ahead with FPA help in 1988 and saw several editions before it was retired.
This incident is representative of the perpetual power struggle that typified relations between the creators and disseminators of HIV positive identities to adults as well as children. While the content of the DES letter usefully reveals key aspects of the controversies surrounding sex education policy – those areas which stimulated anxiety and the inevitable friction created by competing conceptions of the child as either innocent or agent – the incident itself also reveals a little of the messy bureaucratic contest which both helped and hindered the production of AIDS education materials. For example, the dual membership of Alistair Service at the FPA (where he was chairman) and HEA (where he was vice-chairman) allowed the FPA lobbying power that placed them in a prime position for the production and dissemination of policy and teaching materials about HIV/AIDS. As demonstrated above though, this close relationship with the FPA also left the HEA open to accusations of conflicts of interest. As an institution, the HEA was created to be both part of, yet separate from, government; tasked with handling HIV/AIDS public health education at a safe distance,162 giving ministers a buffer from the fallout created by controversial decisions while maintaining their authority to intervene. Berridge usefully described this particular bureaucratic strategy as a ‘respectable out’, wherein ministers could withdraw from direct involvement with difficult sexual issues.163 This allowed the HEA to court assistance from controversial partners such as the FPA, but limited its power as it ultimately had to answer to the DHSS and the DES. The appearance of distance was necessary because of the controversial nature of HIV/AIDS and sexual health education more generally, as this chapter will reveal. While Whitehall’s acknowledgement at the end of 1985 that AIDS posed a crisis in public health requiring a coordinated response is significant, the emergence of AIDS as a policy issue for other institutions such as the FPA and BMA is of equal importance
161 TWA: SA/FPA/C/B/6/2 [Part 2, Restricted Access], Letter from FPA to member of parliament (23 June 1988). 162 Its creation was partially the result of the dissolution of the quango the Health Education Council, but this will be discussed in more detail later. 163 Berridge, AIDS in the UK, p. 7. 62 given their subsequent influence on and inseparability from the government’s initial and long-term responses.164 Other histories have rightly acknowledged the huge influence of ‘policy from below’ which took place in the early days of the AIDS crisis amongst activist groups such as the Terrence Higgins Trust and the London Lighthouse,165 yet few have scrutinised those existing organisations, that while outside government, must be viewed as members of an official rather than activist establishment.166 Institutions like the BMA and the FPA were organisations both expected and able to face the kind of public health crisis AIDS presented, integral as they were to the provision of frontline services and the education response. Invited to join the Expert Advisory Group on AIDS (EAGA) in 1985, representatives of the FPA and BMA drew on expertise developed in their dual roles as members of organisations involved in both the practice of medicine and dissemination of public health information.
Sex, education, AIDS, and legislation – a battle for jurisdiction As the tense exchange of letters outline above illustrated, the DES, the HEA and the FPA were big players in the HIV-education arena by 1988. Indeed these institutions shared both territory and members. These organisations are joined in this chapter by the HEA’s predecessors the HEC, the DHSS and the BMA. This allows the chapter to focus on how those in positions of authority handled the creation and dissemination of HIV positive identities designed for the consumption of children and adolescents, focusing on the institutions expected to respond in the face of the initial AIDS crisis, those created later because of it and the policies and health education materials they produced. As this chapter will reveal, the production of HIV/AIDS education policy and materials by multiple actors (individuals and institutions) engaged in personal, ideological and institutional conflicts resulted in multiply authored texts which simultaneously created and annihilated constructions of the child as an innocent and an agent, their dialogic nature often obscuring ideological coherency.
164 Virginia Berridge, Philip Strong, ‘AIDS in the UK: contemporary history and the study of policy’, Twentieth Century British History 2.2 (1991), pp. 150-174, pp. 153-160 165 See Virginia Berridge’s chapter in AIDS in the UK on the initial AIDS response and ‘bottom up’ policy making for a discussion of this or her more recent article on AIDS activism. Virginia Berridge, ‘AIDS and the rise of the patient? Activist organisation and HIV/AIDS in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s’, Medizin,Gesellschaft und Geschichte 21 (2002), pp. 109-24; Virginia Berridge, The Making of Policy, 1981-1994, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 13-36. 166 Berridge, Strong, ‘AIDS in the UK’, pp. 153-160; Daniel M. Fox, Patricia Day, Rudolf Klein, ‘The Power of Professionalism: AIDS in Britain, Sweden, and the United States', Daedalus, 118 (1989), pp 93- 112, pp. 95-99. 63
This tells a story of the ‘official’ response to AIDS that differs from those previously recounted, looking at policy making from the middle rather than above or below. This takes in the machinations of policy-making and lobbying by public health institutions and the articulation of sex education policies (however partial or distorted) that emerged in the mid to late eighties and early nineties in the form of AIDS- education materials aimed specifically at under-eighteens. This investigation will uncover which HIV positive identities populated early official sources of AIDS education for children, how these changed over time and what relation the education material produced for the consumption of under-eighteens bore to the material produced for adults and the population as a whole more generally. This, in turn, will reveal how AIDS-related education policy and materials produced for use in schools constructed specific ideas of childhood and the child. The chapter also tracks what some have unsatisfactorily described as the ‘heterosexualisation’ of AIDS, where by the disease moved from an affliction of a deviant other to ‘a disease of the ‘heterosexual Self’.167 It will argue that while such a shift may be tracked in the representations of HIV/AIDS to the adult population in England and Wales, the construction of teenagers as members of the ‘at risk’ group, with potential HIV positive identities, is more complex than the narrative of heterosexualisation allows. For the most part, in the official annals of HIV/AIDS educational media production, the under-eighteens were treated as only ever potentially at risk, while those who were viewed to be truly ‘at risk’ and HIV positive – such as homosexuals and the children of HIV positive mothers – continued to be cast as deserving deviants and innocent victims existing on the outside of the imagined audiences of adolescents the BMA, FPA and HEA created. This dissonance between the official discourses in public health promotion for the general population, versus the teenage population, will be explored through an analysis of some of the many repeated decisions to render youths ignorant of safer-sex practices or vectors for HIV transmission in order to protect the young from dangerous sexual knowledge. The analysis also exposes the methods by which AIDS educators attempted to equip adult facilitators with the ability to judge, on
167 Lisa Adkins, ‘Taking the HIV test: self-surveillance and the making of heterosexuality’, in Contagion: historical and cultural studies, ed. by Alison Bashford, Clair Hooker, (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 183-200, pp. 192-193; Deborah Lupton, ‘The condom in the age of AIDS: Newly respectable or still a dirty word?’ Qualitative Health Research, 4:3 (1994), pp. 304-320. 64 a case by case basis, how dangerous or necessary sexual knowledge might be to the children under their tutelage. Under scrutiny, the production of HIV positive identities for the consumption of youths reveals three types of representational artefact. Those representations which were expected to be consumed by the general public at large but which youths would inevitably encounter; those representations which populated texts specifically designed for younger audiences; and representations of the HIV positive and ‘at risk’ identities which adult mediators were expected to consume on the behalf of youths in order to reveal tailored narratives of AIDS to their young charges. More succinctly the three key categories that made up HIV/AIDS education for the young were HIV positive identities produced for the general public, for the educators of youths and specifically produced for youths. This chapter largely focuses on the latter two categories– considerable scholarship exists on the former – demonstrating the substantial differences between the representations of HIV positive identities which populated the educational media expected to be directly consumed by children, and those representations expected to be consumed via an adult mediator.
Legislation which constructed controlled and confirmed teenage identity and sexuality existed well before the advent of the AIDS crisis and the realisation that adolescents required special provisions within the public health response. Children were ever- present characters in New Right discourses on the state of society, and it is often hard to identify the policies that truly concerned children from those merely using them as figures to evoke the nostalgia of lost childhood in order to damn the present and implicate liberalisers in imperilling the future. Similarly, to read policy related to education and children’s rights – for instance – simply as policy directed at children and childhood would be to blind oneself to the other political ends met by these child- focused policies. Children were constructed by adults as knowing agents or innocent victims, as potential citizens or empty vessels for knowledge (cast as protective or dangerous) according to the political ends of the adult fashioning them. 65
The Family Planning Association’s ‘crisis’ response [T]he FPA has become so involved with crisis work on AIDS that the more routine family planning work is hard to fit in.168 The FPA is an institution that has undergone many incarnations; in 1987 this included producing AIDS education materials and facilitating frontline AIDS services alongside ‘routine family planning’. By the advent of the AIDS crisis, the FPA was both an established provider of family planning medicine through its sexual health clinics, and a sophisticated lobbying machine. The history of the FPA is one of an entwined, if at times uncomfortable, relationship with the government on a local and national level, be it through clinical partnerships with Local Health Authorities (LHAs) and Area Health Authorities (AHAs)169 or collaborations with, and membership of committees in government departments such as the DHSS, HEC and later HEA. With regard to the provision of sexual health education to children and teenagers, the FPA had moved away from direct face-to-face interaction with younger members of the public by the 1980s; rather it had become an organisation that specialised in providing training for professionals involved directly in sexual health education.170 The FPA’s Education Unit was created in 1972, ‘as a professional training, education and consultation service on all aspects of personal and sexual relationships.’171 From the early 1980s the Unit began offering ‘train the trainers’ courses for professionals training other educators in all aspects of sexual health education.172 The focus of much of the analysis of the FPA in this chapter falls on the Education Unit and its influence across both the FPA as an institution and AIDS education policy and practice more generally. The FPA’s aims and policies, expressed in the Unit’s actions and policies were influential and were adopted by both the HEA and the BMA as good practice and a way to sidestep the sort of censorship and interference discussed above. The adoption of FPA policies and practices was so comprehensive that at times it becomes impossible to separate the aims and actions of
168 TWA: SA/FPA/C/B/6/2 [Part 1, Restricted Access] Letter from FPA education unit to Director of Information at FPA regarding DES Health Education from 5 to 16 draft circular, (16th February 1987). 169 Audrey Leathard, The Fight For Family Planning: The Development of Family Planning Services in Britain 1921-74, (London: The Macmillan Press, 1980), pp. 190-202. 170 TWA: SA/FPA/C/B/6/2 [Part 1, Restricted Access], Minutes for meeting between DHSS, DES and FPA, (June 21 1985). 171 Beryl Heather, Sharing: A Handbook for those involved in training in personal relationships and sexuality, (London: The FPA Education Unit, 1987), p. i. 172 TWA: SA/FPA/C/B/6/2 [Part 1, Restricted Access], Family Planning Education Unit, Education and Training Resources 1985-1986. 66 the FPA, BMA and HEA as the three groups shared members and worked closely together on several issues including AIDS. The BMA and FPA gave evidence and outlined their strategy for AIDS at the DHSS special committee meeting on AIDS, at the Secretary of State for Health’s request before the HEA had even formed.173 Preparing evidence for this committee had a formative effect on both organisations, initiating a formalisation of their AIDS-related work and administration through the creation of devoted AIDS groups, working parties and task forces that, in the case of the British Medical Association, instigated the creation of the BMA’s AIDS Foundation in 1987.
The initial response of the FPA to the AIDS crisis was threefold. They called for more funding – for family planning and sexual health services more generally; they asserted their expertise – in producing sexual health education materials for use with trained experts and in training the educators themselves; and they sought to network with other health(-education) professionals engaged in tackling the AIDS crisis. It is difficult to date the beginning of FPA AIDS-related work or even which group within the FPA coordinated its first response as an ‘AIDS group’, an ‘AIDS taskforce’ and an ‘AIDS meeting group’ all began responding to the crisis in the winter of 1986-7.174 As a frontline sexual health institution engaged in clinical services and sexual health education, they began responding to the crisis when it became clear their service users included members of HIV positive and HIV-affected communities and when other institutions (such as the DHSS and HEC) began requesting their expertise. In the winter of 1986 they consolidated their responses through policy statements produced by various arms of the FPA, by giving evidence to the Social Service Select Committee on AIDS and by planning meetings with the Joint AIDS Committee.175 The policy statements that the FPA Staff AIDS group generated were not merely descriptive of general FPA policies and practices, but also reflected a considered attempt to predict the ‘types of statements needed’ from the FPA by outside
173 TWA: SA/FPA/C/B/31/02, Letter to Alistair Service from Richard Clark on behalf of the Social Services Committee, (13 November 1986). 174 TWA: SA/ASG/A/1, FPA Staff meeting on AIDS minutes, (10 November 1986); FPA Staff AIDS Group Agenda, (19 January 1987); TWA: SA/FPA/C/B/31.01, Letter from Alistair Service, FPA General Secretary to AIDS Taskforce, ‘Summary of FPA Involvement in Work with AIDS’, (8 April 1987). 175 TWA: SA/ASG/A/1, FPA Staff meeting on AIDS minutes, (10 November 1986); FPA Staff AIDS Group Agenda, (19 January 1987). 67 organisations requesting their help to combat AIDS coherently.176 By January 1987 guidelines for the FPA and Well Woman clinical services regarding AIDS had been drafted. These guidelines included medical practice guidelines such as infection control and confidentiality, practical duties such as the distribution of condoms and signposting of more specialist AIDS services.177 Educative responsibilities such as ‘providing health education material to a population probably at low risk of having the virus but potentially at risk’ were also outlined.178 These particular guidelines were built on existing and developing expertise, frontline experience and knowledge, research accumulated after requests from within the FPA and by government departments such as the DES, DHSS and HEC and through networking with groups of experts developing outside the FPA such as the AIDS Virus Education Research Trust (AVERT).179 The FPA’s perception of who might be affected by HIV in part reflected their main service users. Though acknowledging ‘homosexuals’, ‘bisexuals’, recipients of infected blood, prostitutes and ‘intravenous drug abusers’ as risk groups, women infected with HIV or ‘at risk’ of the virus formed their first specified target audience, reflecting both their expertise and their main service user group.180 Early guidelines described ‘intravenous drug abusers’ prostitutes and ‘bisexuals’ as posing ‘a serious threat’ to heterosexual populations as they were seen as vectors whereby the virus could cross population groups.181 This perception of certain HIV positive identities as somehow more threatening than others is detectable in later materials produced by the FPA and other organisations, colouring the advice and education they produced for the consumption of children and adolescents. The FPA’s Education Unit did not immediately produce AIDS-related training materials for educators working specifically with adolescents. Initial training courses reflected a perceived hierarchy of needs, demands from outside organisations and the existing expertise within the FPA’s Education Unit. AIDS-related courses, part funded by the DHSS and designed in consultation with an expert from the Terrence Higgins
176 TWA: SA/ASG/A/1, FPA Staff meeting on AIDS minutes, (10 November 1986) . 177 TWA: SA/ASG/A/1, Memorandum from Marie Goldsmith circulated to FPA Staff AIDS Group, (10 February 1987); Angela Mills ‘AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) and Family Planning and Well Women Services: Provisional Guidelines’ (London: The Family Planning Association and The National Association of Family Planning Doctors, 29 January 1987), p. 1, p. 10. 178 TWA: SA/ASG/A/1, Memorandum from Marie Goldsmith, (10 February 1987, p. 1, p. 10. 179 TWA: SA/ASG/A/1, Notes from FPA staff AIDS Group Meeting, (6 February 1987); SA.ASG.A.4, Notes from FPA/FPIS meeting with Mrs Annabel Kanabus of AVERT, (22 January 1987). 180 Mills ‘AIDS and Family Planning and Well Women Services’, p. 3. 181 Mills ‘AIDS and Family Planning and Well Women Services’, p. 3. 68
Trust, targeted FPA ‘tutors and staff’, ‘community nurses and social workers’, ‘AIDS Coordinators and Health Education Officers’ for LHAs, ‘doctors, nurses and reception staff’ and ‘school nurses and health visitors’.182 AIDS education provisions targeted at educators followed these initiatives swiftly, with conferences organised for ‘university staff’ and ‘headteachers’ in March and May of 1987 respectively, though admittedly these moves were regionally specific rather than nationwide.183 1987 saw plans laid for teacher training and the production of teaching materials around HIV and AIDS, with practices tested and new techniques learned during earlier training initiatives with frontline service staff.184 Besides consolidating its position within Whitehall through collaborations with the DES, DHSS and HEC, the FPA’s concerted networking helped facilitate the creation of an umbrella group, still in existence, The Sex Education Forum. Precipitated in response to the perception of an increased need for a consolidated sex education – in response to the AIDS crisis and a proliferation of sex education policy making and public interest – several institutions outside government came together under the guidance of the National Children’s Bureau to form the Sex Education Forum in 1986.185 This response did not initially incorporate an understanding of teenagers as members of an ‘at risk’ group or children as members of a future ‘at risk’ or HIV positive identity, but rather established shared aims and beliefs regarding the need and purpose of sex education [Figure 2].
182 TWA: SA/ASG/A/1, Joyce Rosse, ‘AIDS Education and Training: Update on the Education Unit’s Involvement’, (16 February 1987), p. 1. 183 TWA: SA/ASG/A/1, Rosse, ‘AIDS Education and Training’, p. 1. 184 Teachers and LEAs were of course organising health education around HIV and AIDS before these initiatives were delivered, but these were again regionally diverse. TWA: SA/ASG/A/1, Rosse, ‘AIDS Education and Training’, p. 2. Teachers and LEAs were of course organising health education around HIV and AIDS before these initiatives were delivered, but these were again regionally specific. 185 TWA: SA/FPA/C/B/6/2 [Part 1, Restricted Access], Memo, 27 July 1987. By 1987 the Forum consisted of Association to Aid the Sexual and Personal Relationships of People with a Disability, Brook Advisory Centres for Young People, Catholic Marriage Advisory Council, Health Education Authority, Health Visitors Association, Family Planning Association, Marriage Education Panel – Church of England, MENCAP, National Children’s Bureau; National Council of Women of Great Britain, National Marriage Guidance Council and Research on Sex Education, the Methodist Division of Education and Youth. 69
The following statement summarises the beliefs, aims and objectives of the Forum: As organisations with extensive experience of providing support and information about personal, social and sex education to young people, parents, teachers and others concerned about sex education:
We believe that sex education should: 1. Be an integral part of the learning process, beginning in childhood and continuing into adult life. 2. Be for all children, young people and adults, including those with physical or learning or emotional difficulties. 3. Encourage exploration of values and moral issues, consideration of sexuality and personal relationships, development of communication and decision making skills. 4. Foster self-esteem, self-awareness, a sense of moral responsibility and the skills to avoid and resist abuse and unwanted sexual experiences.
We aim to: 1. Encourage the provision of relevant and appropriate sex education in formal and informal settings for all children and young people. 2. Further the awareness of the importance of sex education as part of the formal and informal school curriculum. 3. Encourage appropriate initial and in service training of all teachers and other professions involved in sex education of young people.
Our objectives are to: 1. Stimulate informed public debate about education in sexuality and personal relationships. 2. Work with parents, teachers and school governors to clarify the aims of sex education and elicit their support for the development of this area of the curriculum. 3. Support parents in the sex education of their children. 4. Support teachers and others working with children and young people by gathering and disseminating information about appropriate teaching resources and support services.
Figure 2. Beliefs, Aims and Objectives of the Sex Education Forum, 1987
These aims, beliefs and objectives, shared by so many sex education organisations, including the FPA, may be traced in the policies and materials explored throughout this thesis. Importantly, the stance taken by the Forum regarding the children’s need for sex education, and its utility to them as children
– rather than as knowledge held in trust until adulthood – is presented as an 70 objective achieved through actively stimulating agency. The children and adolescents constructed by these beliefs, aims and objectives have an agency to be nurtured by adults delivering sex education that they are duty bound to produce.
The FPA-HEA representation of HIV positive identities to the under- eighteens The FPA’s influence on the production of teaching materials about HIV/AIDS for adults and youths was significant enough that the HEA’s youth-focused educational response to HIV/AIDS at times become inextricable from the FPA’s. Consequently, it is useful to discuss how the two institutions worked in tandem, drawing this chapter’s focus to the key representative text of their working relationship; Teaching about HIV and AIDS. Here it is useful to sketch a short history of the HEA and its relationship with institutions other than the FPA both within and outside government.
The HEA, formerly the Health Education Council (HEC), assumed ‘national responsibility for public education about HIV and AIDS’ on the 26th of October 1987. The decision to dissolve the HEC and reconstitute it as a special health authority within the NHS meant the new institution would be answerable to the NHS Management Board and the Secretary of State,186 but as the altercation with the DES outlined earlier indicated, it was answerable to many other authorities as its activities strayed into a variety of territories. The announcement of the HEC’s dissolution by the Secretary of State on 21 November 1987 marked the end of a long process begun in the winter of 1986.187 The change created an opportunity for old members of the HEC to set goals, assert new authority and fight for a new remit under the HEA mandate. The ‘Broad Aims of the HEA’ were
To increase knowledge and understanding in society of the factors which contribute to health and disease. To increase knowledge and understanding in society of how health might be promoted and disease reduced.
186 Ian Sutherland, Health Education – Half a Policy: the Rise and Fall of the Health Education Council, (Cambridge: National Extension College: 1987) pp. 234-235. 187 TNA: FP1/18, Health Education Council, Letter to all members of the council from Brian Bailey (Chairman), 2 December 1986. 71
To influence individuals and organisations to take whatever action lies within their power to improve health and reduce disease.188 The third aim is most striking as it carries the most overt declaration of the normative intent behind health education. In the context of the final aim, the desired effects of the agency granted to citizens by the latter two become clear – education places the onus for one’s own health on the individual. This relationship between education, knowledge, self-surveillance and blame would carry through into AIDS-related health education. Prior to its reconstitution as the HEA, the HEC had engaged in some AIDS education activity and produced some teaching materials with the FPA and AVERT,189 but as the HEA was conceptualised as a dedicated institution for public health education around AIDS, specific considerations were undertaken in its structure and mandate for combating the disease.190 Specifically, with regard to AIDS, the HEA aimed:
To provide basic information to the public aimed at increasing knowledge, changing attitudes and behaviour by effective methods, particularly the media, aimed at - Dispelling myths about the spread of the virus - Providing guidance to people who may be at high risk - Addressing the special needs of selected groups191
Evident then, in the HEA’s initial AIDS strategy, is a division of knowledge according to the audiences that would eventually make up the representations the institution (and those like it) would produce for the consumption of children and adolescents; knowledge required for the ‘at risk’ and HIV positive, and knowledge necessary for the general populace at large. Though not explicitly related to young people here, the idea that the provision of knowledge should be tailored to meet the ‘special needs of selected groups’ must be read as a precursor to the later emphasis on adult-mediated and individualised provision of sexual knowledge for young people. Indeed the HEA strategy made ‘adequate information for young people in full time education’ and ‘16- 24 year olds not in schools’ a priority – though what is meant by ‘adequate’ here was left open to interpretation.192 More generally, the idea that knowledge about AIDS
188 TNA: FP2.2.1, Health Education Authority, Organisation Structure: Report to the Chief Executive, 29 June 1987. 189 TWA: SA/ASG/A/1, Joyce Rosse, ‘AIDS Education and Training: Update on the Education Unit’s Involvement’, (16 February 1987), pp. 1-2. 190 TNA: FP2.2.1, HEA, Initial AIDS Strategy, 18 June 1987, pp. 1-2. 191 TNA: FP2.2.1, HEA, Initial AIDS Strategy, 18 June 1987, p. 5. 192 TNA: FP2.2.1, HEA, Initial AIDS Strategy, 18 June 1987, p. 7. 72 should be constructed for the consumption of specific groups, while others could and should be left ignorant of certain aspects of the disease and its transmission, is evident in the foundational ideas upon which the HEA would build its sex-education response. The aims of the HEA were formed through a consultation process involving both the HEC before dissolution and the DHSS and DES. This consultation was in part informed by the evidence provided to the Social Services Committee as part of the Committee’s Inquiry on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. This accounts for some of the similarities in strategy seen between the HEA and the BMA as the inquiry had a formative effect on both BMA policy (as a key contributor) and HEA practice.193
Teaching about HIV & AIDS – an FPA, HEA (& DES?) endeavour Teaching about HIV & AIDS was a teaching pack developed for publication by Doreen Massey, then Director of Education at the FPA and the former assistant director of Schools and Further Education for the HEA. Of the eight other producers behind the teaching materials which became the workbook, seven were members of the HEA.194 Indeed, judging by the cover matter of the revised edition (published after much stalling as outlined above), one could easily mistake the publication for an entirely HEA- produced endeavour, as only the HEA’s institutional symbol is displayed [Figure 3]. Published in 1988 and revised in 1989, the teaching pack’s publication and dissemination by the FPA fell at a time when the biological aspects of sex had been added to statutory biology curricula, but teaching on HIV/AIDS had not yet been added to this compulsory curriculum. This meant school governors, given the power to design curricula since 1986, could still choose not to provide sex education on HIV/AIDS. HIV/AIDS was added to statutory biology in 1991 but 1993 saw a reversal of this decision when all non-biological aspects of sex education were removed from biology
193 On 12 November 1986 the Executive Committee of the BMA Council approved the setting up of a Working Party on AIDS to submit written evidence to the Social Services Committee. British Medical Association Archive (BMAA), B.43.1.1, 1986-1988 Working Party on AIDS, Board of Science and Education Working Party on AIDS (WPA), 1986-87, Minute book, ‘Agenda’, (27 November 1986); BMAA, B.43.1.1, WPA Minute book, (Monday 15 December 1986). 194 The pack was trialled in schools and amended according to teacher’s feedback. Beside the FPA and HEA it was produced through consultation with ‘AIDS Councillors, The National Association of Headteachers (Health Education Group), [and] The National Confederation of Parent/Teacher Association’. The guide also acknowledges ‘comments from the Department of Education and Science and the Department of Health and Social Security’ in the 1989 edition. Doreen Massey, Teaching about HIV & AIDS, (London: Health Education Authority, 1989), p. 3. 73 and parents were granted the right to withdraw their children from sex education classes by the 1993 Education Bill.195
The rapid rate of change in education legislation in the 1980s and 1990s caused significant confusion amongst educators and is representative of the proliferation of voices, discourses and ideologies which informed education policy and practice. The teaching pack reflects this plurality, the workbook alone gave voice to multiple sources of education and ideology and the ephemera which made up the additional sources the pack provided to teachers had a variety of origins including the FPA, BMA, HEA and Brook. Moreover, the pack contained a long list of additional sources such as posters, leaflets, videos, slides and teaching packs which could be obtained from an extensive list of organisations including AIDS activists groups, charities and the media to inform teachers and aid HIV/AIDS education.196
195 This is discussed at length in the introduction to this thesis. 196 Health Education Authority, AIDS Resource List, (London, Health Education Authority, 1996, 1988). 74
Figure 3. Teaching about HIV & AIDS teaching pack cover, 1988197
The workbook was straightforward and simply produced, forgoing colour and the temptation of complex graphical enhancements – unlike the BMA provision discussed later – the text was geared towards ease of printing, versatility and low-cost photocopying. Under simple subheadings such as ‘The Need’, ‘The Materials’ and ‘Aims and Objectives’, the workbook and its relation to the aims of the HEA and wider government health education strategies were explained. The objectives outlined in the pack include:
197 Doreen Massey, Teaching about HIV & AIDS, (London: Health Education Authority, 1988), Cover matter. 75
to provide information and to correct misinformation about AIDS and the transmission and prevention of HIV infection to encourage responsible behaviour in relation to sexuality, through the development of personal and interpersonal skills, having regard to moral and legal considerations.198 These aims mirror those expressed in the HEA’s core aims as laid out in their early AIDS strategy. The considerations involved in choosing when to dispel myths and when ‘moral and legal considerations’ should be given greater weight is outlined in the pack through a meditation on the thorny issue of target age:
Chronological age is... far less important than maturity and previous knowledge. Teachers will therefore need to choose the appropriate materials for different age groups according to their own circumstances.199 In adherence to a common narrative in sex education that constructs knowledge as destroyer of innocence (and so childhood), ‘maturity and previous knowledge’ are conflated here, the latter assumed to imply or even create the former. Adolescence, as a state created through the acquisition of knowledge, is constructed as an unstable processional identity subordinate to the coalesced knowledge and judgment of the adult teacher, who given all the facts will ‘choose the appropriate materials’.200 The choice of what, and when, to bestow children with knowledge remains with the teacher, regardless of the maturity of the child in question, the agency of the child subjugated. This warning to employ individual judgement is followed by a three-page discussion of education legislation and the legality of teaching certain subjects. Extracts from DES circulars, policy documents and relevant education acts on the subject are provided, creating a highly discursive, if somewhat confusing text.
The teaching pack began with a three-page discussion of policy and government advice related to sex education and children’s rights, designed to equip teachers with the knowledge of what they were legally obliged to teach in statutory biology (sexual biology), could teach with parental permission (HIV/AIDS and other STDs, personal, social and health-based sex education) and were not supposed to ‘teach’
198 Massey, Teaching About HIV & AIDS, p. 3 199 Massey, Teaching About HIV & AIDS, p. 4. 200 These ideas are discussed in greater detail in the second chapter of this thesis. They are also usefully discussed in Nancy Lesko, Act Your Age!: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence, (London: Routledge Falmer, 2001), pp.3-4. 76
(homosexuality).201 Far from providing a rulebook, the abundance of material furnished the parent or teacher with enough information and context to engage with the relevant education policy critically. Moreover, by including the more morally conservative non- statutory circulars, the HEA and FPA also avoided accusations of left wing or ‘trendy’ bias from the moral lobby or the DES, allowing the articulation of a more discursive child-centred agenda elsewhere in the teaching guide. The influence of the DES on the teaching pack nonetheless looms large in these pages, and elsewhere in the pack its power to set the educational agenda is also felt. For instance where the following statement from the DES is given regarding a lesson aimed at the 12-13 age group on defining ‘terminology related to AIDS’ and ‘how HIV is, and is not, transmitted’202:
This lesson and Lesson 5 ...deal with a number of questions which 12 year olds might not be sufficiently mature to consider realistically. Some teachers may, therefore, wish to use them with the third rather than the second year.203 Thus while the choice of what to teach was ultimately left to the individual teacher, and while the teaching pack was designed in consultation with a raft of experts, the guiding hand of key influential departments within government was keenly felt throughout the text, encouraging teachers to delay the giving of certain information until children were older. Designed according to the principles of a spiral curriculum and aimed at encouraging ‘active learning’, the pack repeatedly emphasised adapting the materials where ‘appropriate’ and also the incorporation of the more social aspects of HIV/AIDS education (as opposed to the sexual/biological aspects) more holistically in general schooling.204 The inclusion of the social aspects of HIV and AIDS was facilitated by the provision of leaflets and an extensive list of suggested resources for the HIV/AIDS education of the educator, following the principles laid out by the FPA and the Sex Education Forum regarding ‘training the trainers’. Much like the BMA resources that will be discussed later, the purpose here was to create an informed adult mediator, able to police the boundaries of potentially dangerous sexual knowledge, but also to provide education as ‘appropriate’ to protect their youthful audience from the moral and physical pitfalls of (future) sexuality. The teaching pack then was both a tool to be used
201 Massey, Teaching About HIV & AIDS, pp. 5-7. 202 Massey, Teaching About HIV & AIDS, p. 12. 203 Massey, Teaching About HIV & AIDS, p. 12. 204 Massey, Teaching About HIV & AIDS, pp. 7-8. 77 directly with pupils via the adult mediator and a guide to the further education of that adult. This constructed the idea of an idealised adult mediator, informed about AIDS, able to consider the needs of their young audience rationally and capable of navigating the legislation, stigma and anxiety which made teaching about HIV and AIDS so fraught. Conversely, the ideal child is presented as a vessel, empty of ideas about HIV and receptive to whatever knowledge and morality their adult educator deems ‘appropriate’. The teaching manual provided three modules each with five, six and four 35 minute lessons for class sizes of around 30 pupils. Each module was ‘designed to be used progressively with pupils from the ages of 12/13 years to students of 16+ years of age.’205 Every module began with a table of aims [Figure 4] and ended with a pupil assessment sheet.
Figure 4. Module 1 and 2 outlines206
Module 1, aimed at the 12-13 age group, mainly worked to clarify terms such as ‘semen’, modes of transmission, such as ‘intravenous drug use’ and ‘attitudes towards homosexuality’.207 It is silent on the subject of the lesbian or heterosexual age of
205 Massey, Teaching About HIV & AIDS, p. 4. 206 Massey, Teaching About HIV & AIDS, p. 9, p. 18. 207 Massey, Teaching About HIV & AIDS, pp. 9-14. 78 consent but at particular pains to clarify the law regarding sex between men.208 As an audience, the 12-13 age group is constructed as one in need of information, and clarification, without much space for discussion of who might be motivated to engage in acts which might transmit the virus, or indeed why. These pupils were not constructed entirely passively. Teachers were advised to create discussion groups between pupils and to ‘prepare themselves to answer questions and discuss anal and oral sex as well as vaginal intercourse if this is raised during feedback’, presumably under the assumption that should such subjects come up they would adequately demonstrate pupils ‘previous knowledge’ greenlighting a need for adult intervention and clarification.209 HIV positive identities are not discussed directly at this stage, rather sexual activities to be avoided are identified in Lesson 5 (which the DES suggested avoiding with some 12-13 year olds). When the question ‘How can the spread of HIV and therefore AIDS be limited?’ is asked, suggested 210 answers include ‘saying ‘no’ to sex’, ‘not using illegal drugs’ and ‘staying with one faithful partner’. This last is unusually clarified with ‘(who is uninfected by HIV)’ – a clarification often absent from HIV/AIDS education literature which preached monogamy or abstinence as a protection against the virus.211 The implicit narrative of risk and blame implied by the idea that certain risky activities (described without context) are avoidable becomes more explicit in the modules intended for older pupils, their lessons populated by HIV positive and ‘at risk’ identities, though with a great deal more nuance. Modules 2 and 3 were aimed at equipping teenagers with the ability to recognise and avoid risky activities through ‘responsible decision making’ by ‘saying no to unwanted sex and drugs’ and ‘discussing influences on behaviour’.212 These aims demonstrated a move towards equipping teenagers with a sense of agency and an understanding of consent, constructing the possibility of a knowing and responsible teenage identity, but one firmly placed in the ‘at risk’ category. Lesson 1 of module 2 was devoted to a discussion of ‘pressures on young people to behave in particular ways’ and ‘how pressures might be resisted’, constructing an idea of adolescence as a time of risk, but also potentially self-knowledge, which is in evidence throughout the rest of the
208 Massey, Teaching About HIV & AIDS, pp. 9-14. 209 Massey, Teaching About HIV & AIDS, p. 12. 210 Massey, Teaching About HIV & AIDS, p. 16. 211 Ibid. 212 Massey, Teaching About HIV & AIDS, pp. 18-39. 79 lessons provided in the guide.213 The suggested ‘risks’ and ‘pressures’ encountered by teens include heterosexual intercourse, drug use and alcohol consumption, the possible membership of teenagers to a group labelled ‘at risk’ is implied as a consequence of failing to resist these pressures. Lesson 5 of Module 2 is the first to articulate the connection between HIV/AIDS and an HIV positive identity in a discussion regarding ‘labels sometimes attached to homosexuals’ and ‘opinions about homosexuality in the context of HIV and AIDS’.214 The suggested activities in the lesson are aimed predominantly at troubling the assumption that homosexuals will be HIV positive, with discussions of homophobia, myths associated with HIV, and press representations of homosexuals and the HIV positive all suggested as fruitful areas for teaching. While the ‘teachers’ notes’ make it clear that ‘homosexual feelings’ might ‘be for life’, at no point is it articulated that any of the teenage pupils themselves might be homosexuals and subject to homophobia or AIDS-related stigma.215 Though homophobic bullying is articulated as a consequence of HIV-related stigma, this stigma is situated in relation to an other whom sympathetic and knowledgeable teens must intervene to protect.216 Module 3 continues in a similar vein to module 2, discussing prejudice around homosexuality and HIV extensively. Curiously, other possible HIV positive identities are largely absent from this anti-stigma education. Drug users are offered little sympathy and narratives around prostitution or the global AIDS epidemic are almost entirely absent. Heterosexual transmission is largely framed as an avoidable consequence of consenting to unwanted sex or promiscuity, the result of bullying sexual partners or irresponsible personal behaviour. Here teenagers are framed as both passively ‘at risk’ and potential perpetrators of sexual violence or misbehaviour, a narrative later echoed in the teenage magazines discussed in chapter two. Even with certain absent narratives – the race, class and gendered dimensions of sexual consent and HIV/AIDS go largely undiscussed – this guide offered teachers a great deal of material to work with and is unusually geared towards clarification on homosexuality. The content of each pack varied and teachers were able to request further teaching materials if they wished. Ultimately though, the use of the highly
213 Massey, Teaching About HIV & AIDS, p. 20. 214 Massey, Teaching About HIV & AIDS, p. 29. 215 Massey, Teaching About HIV & AIDS, p. 15. 216 Massey, Teaching About HIV & AIDS, p. 29. 80 adaptable tools Teaching About HIV & AIDS provided was down to the individual choices of the teacher and the responses they gained from their young audience. As a tool, Teaching About HIV & AIDS had the potential to create lessons where informed children could engage their teachers and classmates in debates on sexuality, contraception and prejudice, asking questions about the definition of intercourse, non- penetrative sex and the HIV-antibody test. These more explicit and socially contextualised lessons required teachers willing to answer questions to seek extra training, read and request extra materials and to have a class populated by curious students with ‘previous knowledge’ as the manual discouraged teachers from volunteering unrequested information. It also required governors, in consultation with parents, to agree to sex education that went beyond the biological and the inclusion of HIV/AIDS, homosexuality and non-penetrative sex. In short, the text constructed teenagers as potentially curious, responsible and receptive learners, gaining agency over their future sexuality and citizenship through a discursive and mature discussion of HIV/AIDS and sex. But it also constructed them as subject to the will of adults, ultimately powerless in the face of parents, teachers and governors – a reality reflected in the laws that governed school life in the late 1980s. Acknowledging the power of adults to set the limits of teenagers’ education (and therefore agency) Teaching about HIV & AIDS included a lesson plan for a ‘parents’/governors’ session’.217 This lesson aimed to ‘familiarise parents and governors with materials to be used with young people in the school’, ‘to increase knowledge… about HIV and AIDS’, ‘to discuss …issues about HIV and AIDS relating to themselves and the children in the school’ and importantly, ‘to seek views of parents and governors on these teaching materials’.218 Along with adhering to legislation and guidance by consulting guardians and governors, this lesson created the opportunity to educate parents, who in turn could educate their children. This would satisfy repeated calls in sex education guidance to place parents at the centre of their children’s sex education,219 despite research indicating parents generally felt neither equipped nor willing to deliver such lessons, and that children would rather learn independently from written texts or
217 Massey, Teaching About HIV & AIDS, p. 39. 218 Ibid. 219 Lesley Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Changes in Britain Since 1880, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 173; AnnMarie Wolpe,’Sex in Schools: Back to the Future’, Feminist Review, 27:1 (1987) pp .37-47, p. 37-44. 81 have sex education classes in school.220 Among those calling for sex education to be delivered at least in part by parents was the British Medical Association. Its research and materials were targeted at a wide audience of MPs, the press, doctors, health workers, teachers and the general public and the heart of its AIDS campaign was characterised by a push for education:
Educating people about cutting out or reducing the risk is the only effective weapon against the disease. Education about AIDS should start in junior school and at homes so that children can grow up knowing the behaviour to avoid to protect themselves from exposure to the AIDS virus. Parents, educators and community leaders have a responsibility to provide this information to the young.221 It is to the BMA’s attempts to facilitate just such a response to AIDS that this chapter now turns.
Indecision and Consensus: the British Medical Association’s Response to AIDS By 1987 the BMA’s educative activities involving AIDS had become so extensive that an internal foundation devoted to AIDS education within the BMA was set up. Using political connections already established during the early response to AIDS, the BMA AIDS Foundation represented a well-connected and resourceful new arm of official AIDS education. Self-described as having ‘unparalleled expertise in parliamentary work’ the Foundation represented itself as ‘uniquely placed to meet the needs of United Kingdom legislators for information about HIV infection and AIDS.’222 This would manifest in the provision of research, consultation on and review of government AIDS and sex education policies and circulars, the creation of widely disseminated policy documents to other AIDS service providers, the creation of AIDS factsheets for policy makers and health workers and a wide variety AIDS education work targeted directly at the general public. By 1988 the BMA Foundation for AIDS was well established, if not as powerful and well placed as it professed; its public AIDS provisions heavily influenced by the productive relationship between it and the government. It is to this relationship, the BMA’s attitude to the educating a non-medical audience and the production of AIDS education materials for children, that I now turn.
220 This is discussed in detail in the next chapter. 221 BMA, AIDS and You, (1987), p. 61. 222 BMAA: C.5.2.1 – ‘Information for legislators’, BMA Foundation for AIDS Annual Report 1987-1988, pp. 2-4. 82
The British Medical Association had several initial responses to AIDS, both medical and social, and these were framed by its status as both a medical authority and a powerful institution outside the bounds of the British Government. Those early responses by the BMA which may be loosely dubbed ‘medical’ can be listed as a push for research, the contribution of the BMA and its members to the production of scientific and medical literature around the disease and the various forms of knowledge exchange the BMA and other related organisations engaged in such as conferences, concerted efforts to network internationally and to develop diagnostic and treatment consensus.223 Simultaneous to these medical responses were the BMA’s reactions to the perceived and predicted social effects of AIDS. While the boundaries between the BMA’s ‘scientific’ and ‘social’ responses were certainly blurred, some social responses do stand out: the BMA placed heavy emphasis on education and it advised and designed initiatives aimed at changing the sexual behaviour of the British public, promoting condom use and warning against unprotected sex with multiple partners. It agonised over ensuring confidentiality and the maintenance of an ethical doctor-patient relationship in the face of the difficulties AIDS presented and it argued to prevent AIDS becoming a notifiable disease along both epidemiological and ethical lines – though here consensus was far from absolute among its members.224 What united the BMA’s myriad early responses to AIDS was a sense of uncertainty about the disease itself, the myriad repercussions of any action the BMA might take and the varied duties of the BMA to its members, to public health and to its patients.225 The sense of anxiety palpable in archival documents of the BMA that concern AIDS in the early 1980s manifested in disjointed and often tentative responses to the disease. Every initiative the institution planned to tackle AIDS was couched in terms of urgency, insufficiency and fear of how it might be perceived and
223 BMAA: B.43.1.1 WPA 1986-1988 Minute Book, BMA WPA, ‘APPENDIX IV Draft: National Institute of Health, Consensus Development Conference Statement,: The Impact of Routine HTLV-III Antibody Testing of Blood and Plasma Donors on Public Health’, (July 7-9, 1986). 224 BMAA: B.43.1.1 WPA 1986-1988 Minute Book, BMA WPA, ‘AIDS Briefing APPENDIX III’, Problems Associated with AIDS written evidence for submission to Social Services Committee, Provisional outline of issues to be covered, (27/11/1986). 225 As Berridge points out, this uncertainty led to a series of ‘gaffes’ which went against the prevailing medical and liberal consensus. These included a senior member, Dr John Dawson, producing ‘BMA advice that anyone who had had more than one sexual partner in the last four years should not donate blood’ to outcry and the detriment of transfusion uptake and the blood supply. Berridge, AIDS in the UK, pp.135-136. 83 misinterpreted by the government and public alike. The below statement regarding the communication of scientific risk and uncertainty is typical:
As with almost every aspect of AIDS, the facts, opinions, and uncertainties of science are rapidly translated into public beliefs and social policy.226 Another key facet in the BMA’s response to AIDS was the continued ambivalence within the institution and amongst its members over whether HIV should be made a notifiable disease. This question cast long shadows over the institution’s responses to the disease as a whole, both social and scientific. The notifiable question continuously reoccurred in the work of the BMA’s Working Party on AIDS (WPA) forcing them to codify a response for MPs and the public, creating the appearance of a BMA consensus, but beyond the WPA, the question was raised and debated for years at the BMA Annual Representative Meetings (ARM).227 The conflicts around the notifiable question, created by age-old ethical quandaries around the rights of individual patients versus the duties of the state and medical practitioner to protect public health have their antecedents in the past in the instigation, responses to, and repercussions of, the Contagious Diseases Acts.228 Publically the BMA’s response to the idea of making HIV a notifiable disease was resoundingly negative, 229 but the internal conflicts within the BMA around the subject coloured its response to HIV and influenced other institutions ceding to the BMA as a higher authority on the disease, making an awareness of this indecision vital to any analysis of the BMA’s representation of HIV positive identities to children and adolescents. As an institution the BMA was wholly aware of its ability to shape the cultural and scientific response to AIDS; both directly in terms of setting the medical and social policy agenda around the disease, and indirectly, through incautious representations of the disease to the media. For example, the BMA agonised over the effectiveness and effects of the use of the viral antibody test during blood donation.
226 BMAA: B.43.1.1 WPA 1986-1988 Minute Book, BMA WPA, ‘APPENDIX IV’, pp. 1-2. 227 BMAA: A.1.1.82, BMA, Agenda of the Annual Representative Meeting 1986, (23-26 June, 1986), p. 17; A.1.1.83, BMA, Agenda of the Annual Representative Meeting 1987, (29 June – 2 July 1987) pp. 32- 33; B.43.1.1, WPA, 1986-1988 Minute Book, ‘Working Party on AIDS Minutes’, (4th February 1988); B.43.1.2, 1987-1988 Working Party on AIDS, Minute Book, ‘1988 ARM Meeting Resolutions on HIV: Defeated Clauses’; A.1.1.85, BMA, Minutes of Annual Representatives Meeting 1988,(4-7 July 1988), pp. 30-32. 228 Mort, Dangerous Sexualities, pp. 70-71, 216-217. 229 BMAA: B.43.1.1 WPA 1986-1988 Minute Book, BMA WPA, ‘AIDS Briefing APPENDIX III’. 84
...the introduction of these tests is not unambiguously good. Questions can be raised about their interpretation and their extension to purposes other than protection of the blood supply. […] Policy has been made, or recommended, on the basis of an assumed scientific certitude that in fact may not exist. Conversely, scientifically sound information has been ignored or distorted by policymakers. Scientists have often failed to communicate their findings in ways that are useful for public policy.230 Subtly emphasising the dangers of extending the antibody tests to ‘purposes other than protection of the blood supply’ – presumably the testing of all those deemed ‘at risk’ which some BMA members urged– the above statement deftly uses the subject of testing to critically examine uncertainty around AIDS more generally. The statement apportions blame for confusion equally amongst the ‘public’, ‘policymakers’ and ‘scientists’ emphasising a certain degree of powerlessness on the BMA’s part. Drawing itself as outside both the ‘public’ and ‘policymakers’, the BMA presented itself as at the mercy of both, struggling in the face of AIDS and these two irrational audiences to implement and communicate responses that would adequately combat the disease. This division into distinct groups, and the tone of pessimistic powerlessness in the statement, is typical of the BMA’s articulation of its responsibilities and proposed responses to AIDS. While hopelessness in the face of AIDS was not total, those initiatives proposed to combat AIDS were always followed by caveats of inadequacy.231 Pessimistic in the face of a disease without a cure and a difficult audience for its education efforts, the BMA was both at pains to be seen to be doing the right thing and to create the perception that something could be – and was being – done in order to avoid a public panic and the loss of its authority as an institution. Education was continuously presented as ‘currently’ the only effective ‘weapon’ in the BMA’s arsenal in ‘the fight against AIDS’:
230Archive of the BMA, B.43.1.1, BMA Working Party on AIDS, ‘Appendix IV: National Institute of Health, Consensus Development Conference Statement, The Impact of Routine HTLV-III Antibody Testing Of Blood and Plasma Donors on Public Health, (July 7-9, 1986)’ Draft: Report Memorandum of Evidence to the Social Services Committee Inquiry on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, (27 November, 1986), pp 1-2. 231 Archive of the BMA, B.43.1.1, BMA Working Party on AIDS, ‘Appendix II: British Medical Association, Problems Associated with AIDS, Provisional outline of Issues to be Covered’, Draft: Report Memorandum of Evidence to the Social Services Committee Inquiry on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, (27 November, 1986), p. 3. 85
At present, education on the transmission of HIV is the only weapon we have to combat its spread. We cannot yet offer a cure. The US Surgeon General has said “Information is the only vaccine we have”.232 The subtext being, that such a weapon was inadequate, but the best available until a cure for the disease was discovered.
Educating the ‘public’ The initial educational response the BMA implemented to ‘combat’ AIDS was targeted at medical professionals, then policymakers – partially in response to the government’s request – then finally the public. As indicated above, the government’s request for information on HIV/AIDS necessitated the creation of the WPA within the BMA in 1986, which led to the creation of the BMA AIDS Foundation (BMAAF) in 1987. Until this point, the BMA’s response to AIDS had been far from coordinated, with varied facets of the organisation providing expertise to respond to the different elements of the emerging crisis. The creation of the WPA and then the BMAAF allowed good practise taking place on a regional level to be analysed and taken up at an institutional (and national) policy level, though as stressed above, no policy aimed at combating AIDS was taken up without some measure of dissent within the institution. There is not space here to analyse the long list of the BMA’s early educational responses to AIDS aimed at members of the medical professions – though they no doubt influenced responses later rolled out to the public – it will instead be more fruitful to move directly to the BMA’s creation and dissemination of AIDS education materials meant for the consumption of the ‘public’ and later what the BMA ambiguously dubbed ‘young people’.
Under the heading ‘Target groups’ the BMA laid out an educational response to AIDS which divided the public into ‘Young people’, ‘Sexually active people (heterosexual)’, ‘Sexually active people (homosexual)’, ‘Drug users’; and finally, ‘Everyone’.233 The ‘Everyone’ label carried the following explanation: ‘AIDS is not confined to the homosexual community or to drug users. Everybody must be given straightforward
232 Archive of the BMA, B.43.1.1, BMA Working Party on AIDS, ‘APPENDIX II: British Medical Association, Problems Associated with AIDS, Provisional outline of Issues to be Covered’, Draft: Report Memorandum of Evidence to the Social Services Committee Inquiry on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, (27 November, 1986), p. 3. 233 BMAA, B.43.1.1, BMA Working Party on AIDS, ‘APPENDIX II: British Medical Association, Problems Associated with AIDS, Provisional outline of Issues to be Covered’, Draft: Report Memorandum of Evidence to the Social Services Committee Inquiry on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, (27 November, 1986), p. 3. 86 facts if we are to combat the spread of HIV.’234 There are notable absences within the taxonomy of education target groups offered by the BMA here; haemophiliacs, bisexuals, prostitutes and ‘men who have sex with men’ fall outside the ‘Target groups’.235 Some of these absent members of the public appear in the BMA’s ‘Risk groups’:
The main risk groups for infection with HIV are male homosexuals, people who abuse drugs by injection, haemophiliacs, people from certain areas of sub-Saharan Africa or Haiti, sexual partners of people in these groups, and newborn babies of infected mothers.236 The absence of the understanding that not all men who have sex with men identify as homosexual is suggestive of the BMA’s medically situated response. The BMA appears to have been unable to move beyond a medical model of sexual identity wherein object choice dictated sexuality, assuming men who had sex with men could be labelled homosexual and easily taxonomised for targeted AIDS education efforts. The separation of, and variation in, ‘target’ and ‘risk’ groups is significant. In judging whether particular information about AIDS and safer-sex was necessary for a given audience the BMA made assumptions about the existing knowledge of its audiences, differentiating the dissemination and omission of knowledge to those assumed to be already ‘at risk’, likely to become ‘at risk’ and at little or no risk. After the BMA had established its medical authority regarding AIDS amongst its peers and policymakers, it began to implement the advice it had imparted to government and the focus of its educational programmes shifted to the HIV positive and ‘risk groups’. While there are numerous examples of educational materials produced by and in conjunction with the BMA, the AIDS and You booklet is a particularly useful early example [Figure 5]. First published in March 1987, the booklet was reprinted three times, reinvented as a board game in 1989, revised and republished in 1991 and repurposed again as a computer game in 1994. By tracing its production, dissemination, reception and various reincarnations, the changes the BMA’s contribution to AIDS education underwent will be illuminated.
234 BMAA, B.43.1.1, ‘APPENDIX II’, p. 3. 235 BMAA, B.43.1.1, ‘APPENDIX II’, p. 3. 236 Archive of the BMA, B.43.1.1, BMA Working Party on AIDS, ‘APPENDIX II: British Medical Association, Problems Associated with AIDS, Provisional outline of Issues to be Covered’, Draft: Report Memorandum of Evidence to the Social Services Committee Inquiry on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, (27 November, 1986), p. 4. 87
The production of the AIDS and You booklet arguably began well before the idea for a booklet for the public was floated before the BMA’s Board of Science and Education in October 1986.237 Embodying the values the BMA was attempting to manifest in the government’s policy through lobbying, its text is a patchwork of BMA policy statements and previously produced educational materials targeted at medical practitioners and policy makers. As a result, the booklet was as much an educational tool as it was a BMA show piece and manifesto for the delivery of ‘appropriate’ AIDS education to the public. Though intended for use by the public, the forward to the booklet declares it to be ‘intended for doctors and other health care professionals’, although some two pages later it is suggested that the intended audience included ‘anyone concerned about the prevention of AIDS or care of patients.’238 This ambiguity allowed producers to shirk censorship and recrimination for their use of ‘explicit language’ and the ‘potential offence’ this might cause by gesturing to the potential for a medical mediator between the text and the public.239 These contradictory declarations of intent indicate the difficulty the BMA and other AIDS-educators experienced balancing the requirements of sex education with anxiety over saying too much to a supposedly ignorant public. Ever present in the BMA’s AIDS education provision was a fear of appearing to sanction, or possibly even promote, sexual acts which were considered unsavoury. The medical practitioners previously targeted by the BMA’s AIDS education materials had represented a safe incorruptible audience of adults presumed to be already aware of a wide plethora of sexual activities and protected by scientific distance and rationality. The public, on the other hand, were presumed to be ignorant, lacking scientific distance, prone to prejudice and vulnerable to shock; and perhaps in the case of the young, straying from safe (heterosexual) monogamous sex when other options were revealed to them.
237 BMAA,B.35.1.19 Board of Science and Education Committee Minutes 1986-1987, (31 October 1986), p. 10. 238 This intention was also clearly stated in committee minutes. BMA, AIDS and You, (1987), pp. 2-4. 239 BMA, AIDS and You, (1987), p. 2. 88
Figure 5. AIDS and You: An illustrated Guide, 1987
In AIDS and You this disquiet manifested as more than misdirection regarding the intended audience of the 1987 booklet; in the adult editions of AIDS and You morally inflected prejudice was often presented as fact and knowledge was divided into chapters intended for ‘specific groups’ of positive, negative and ‘at risk’ audiences. In the educational games for children and adolescents, censorship of the original AIDS and You texts rendered much of the games’ content useless, all knowledge not considered ‘appropriate’ for the under 16s removed.
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Risky knowledge for risky identities: Censorship and prejudice in AIDS and You
The areas where prejudice manifested and silences occurred in AIDS and You’s various incarnations were in those explanations concerned with non-procreative and male ‘homosexual’ sex produced for audiences assumed to be ‘at risk’.240 This is not to suggest that the text was wholly a work of heteronormative health education, rather I am emphasising here that the anxiety and ambivalence discussed above is clear throughout the text and most obvious where these subjects were broached. In the 59 pages of the first edition of the AIDS and You a variety of ‘at risk’ identities, HIV positive identities and ‘risky’ behaviours are represented.
The 1987 edition of AIDS and You as a whole was repetitive, often contradictory, frequently ambiguous, and in places failed to provide information previously given when it would have been pertinent to the subject under discussion.241 For example, in a section discussing ‘safe’ behaviours the booklet states if one has sex within a ‘faithful, life-long sexual relationship with a partner who has behaved in the same manner – then you cannot get the AIDS virus from sexual intercourse’ ignoring the possibility that a wholly monogamous partner could have become infected through a means other than sexual intercourse.242 This kind of confusing and partial statement was in part the product of the structure of the text which applies some of the spiral curriculum techniques which were increasingly being advocated by the government and educators243 – wherein information is incrementally added to and pertinent points repeated – while simultaneously attempting to limit the provision of dangerous knowledge to subsections of the text targeted at the ‘at risk’ or ‘AIDS sufferer’. From the outset of its education activities the BMA had attempted to provide AIDS education material geared to specific audiences, charging their educators and the
240 Lesbians go unmentioned and the 1987 edition of AIDS and You is largely silent on the subject of vaginas. 241 Despite these shortcomings, the book was awarded the 1987 Plain English Campaign Award for Healthy Education. 242 BMA, AIDS and You, (1987), p. 12. 243 Based on the ideas of Jerome Bruner, the technique of delivering knowledge in increasing complexity via a ‘spiral curriculum’ enjoyed increased support from the late 1970s and was a hallmark of the National Curriculum when it was introduced in 1988; R.M. Harden, ‘What is a spiral curriculum?’, Medical Teacher, 21:2 (1999) pp. 141-143, p. 141-142. 90 government’s to equip ‘sexually active people’ with knowledge constructed according to the audience’s membership to a specific group:
Sexually active people (heterosexual): They need to know what AIDS is and how it is transmitted; information on whether it would be wise to be tested, and where these tests are available; the use of condoms to cut down risk should also be explained. Sexually active people (Homosexual): Straight-talking information... using the terms homosexual people use and describing clearly the sexual activities which put people at risk. ... Everyone: AIDS is not confined to the homosexual community or to drug users.244 Here the BMA constructed audiences and identities as easily divided into heterosexual and homosexual, HIV positive, ‘at risk’ and worried well. The knowledge provided for the general reader (presumably the white British, married, monogamous heterosexual, middleclass, non-IV drug using worried well) and the ‘at risk’ or HIV positive audience differed remarkably as a result. These divisions and limitations had the effect of creating others – the HIV positive and the ‘at risk’ – within the text by associating certain specific knowledges, behaviours and dangers with them. These structural peculiarities also meant the text lent itself to later adaption and censorship for the purpose of rendering it appropriate for a younger target audience. The pages pictured in Figure 6 are a typical example of the content and illustrations for general readers that made up the first edition of AIDS and You. On the left-hand page, the text explains: ‘You get AIDS by having sex with an infected person or injecting drugs with infected needles or syringes’. While on the right-hand page the text elaborates: ‘You get the AIDS virus through sex with an infected person or through infected blood.’ In a more detailed illustrated list the text explains:
A person gets the AIDS virus by having sex with a person with the virus if intimate contact is made with that person’s blood, sperm or other bodily fluids. The virus can enter a person body through the vagina, anus (back passage) or penis.
244 BMAA, B.43.1.1, ‘APPENDIX III: AIDS Briefing’, BMA Working Party on AIDS, (July 7-9, 1986)’ Draft: Report Memorandum of Evidence to the Social Services Committee Inquiry on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, (27 November, 1986), p. 3. 91
Several additions of new information are occurring here; new HIV positive identities are introduced – infected blood-donors and mothers – and new ways for the virus to enter the body explained, constructed as inseparable from their attendant HIV positive identities. The missing entry points that are later implicated in the transmission of the misnamed ‘AIDS virus’ include the mouth and torn or cut skin.245 The ambiguous terms ‘sex’, ‘intimate contact’ and ‘other bodily fluids’ are later explained and taxonomised variously as vaginal, oral and anal sex; ‘wet kissing’, ‘fingering’ and ‘fisting’; and breast milk, plasma, saliva, faecal matter and vomit [Figure 7 and Figure 8].246 The increasingly specific nature of the text’s language is noteworthy not only because it demonstrates an adherence to a spiral curriculum method of building upon knowledge, but also because the level of detail is sporadic, this specificity occurring when the audience is assumed to be HIV positive or HIV-affected (the family members, doctors or health workers of the HIV positive).
245 BMA, AIDS and You, (1987), p. 15. 246 BMA, AIDS and You, (1987), pp. 14-15, 43, 52-53. 92
Figure 6. Getting AIDS - A typical double-page spread247
The notable elisions made between AIDS and the ‘virus’ are constant throughout the text and the above example is typical; the difference between the virus and AIDS is only explained on page 56 of the booklet,248 presumably indicating how far down the list of vital knowledge this distinction is. Unfortunately, these elisions are implicated in much of the stigma produced around, and experienced by, the HIV positive as social death249 – wherein the healthy, but HIV positive, are treated as ill and infectious at best, and already dead at worst.
The list of ‘men and women at risk’ and presenting a risk to others in AIDS and You is bracketed by an emphasis on monogamy and contains the following identities:
247 BMA, AIDS and You, (1987), p. 6-7. 248 BMA, AIDS and You, (1987), pp. 58-59. 249 This concept is discussed in the introduction to this thesis. 93
…a drug user, a bisexual a homosexual, a prostitute, a person from a place where AIDS is a big problem (the West Indies, Central Africa, California or New York), a sex partner of anyone in these groups.250 Beyond sex with these ‘at risk’ identities, as previously explicated, certain other behaviours are also implicated in the text in the production of ‘at risk’ or HIV positive identities. In Figure 7 ‘vaginal’, ‘oral’, and ‘anal’ sex, sharing sex toys, engaging in a sex act ‘which cuts skin’ and sharing needles are all presented as activities which could place the uninitiated in harm’s way – rendering them ‘at risk’ or HIV positive.251
Figure 7. A taxonomy of dangerous behaviour252
While ‘Always use a condom’ is declared here, the utility of barrier-methods (condoms or gloves), which are emphasised elsewhere, is never extended in the text to non- penetrative sexual acts or acts where the penis is absent. This gamut of activities is joined later by ‘wet kissing’, ‘fisting’, ‘water sports [sic.]’ and ‘fingering’ only when the presumed audience is the HIV positive [Figure 7 and Figure 8].253 This has the
250 BMA, AIDS and You, (1987), p. 20. 251 BMA, AIDS and You, (1987), p. 15. 252 BMA, AIDS and You, (1987), pp. 14-15. 253 BMA, AIDS and You, (1987), p. 27. 94 effect of suggesting that only the HIV positive (and presumably male homosexual) would engage in these acts and that any danger they might present cannot be mitigated by the use of condoms or other barriers. The effect of adding activities to the ‘dangerous’ list is an essential prohibition of the acts and a stigmatisation of those who practise them. The catalogued acts could just as easily represent a list of non-procreative sexual pleasure seeking activities that fall outside the presumed heterosexual norm.
Figure 8. 'Risky' sex acts254
This scientifically dubious selection of taboo sexual acts and apparent unavoidable danger of HIV-transmission becomes all the more suspicious when one remembers AIDS’ 1982 identity as Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Syndrome (GRIDs), or the assumption that AIDS might be connected to the use of amyl nitrate to enhance the sexual experience.255 Certainly, some of the acts listed above are described as dangerous
254 BMA, AIDS and You, (1987), pp. 26-27. 255 Though the GRID label did not persist for long in the scientific literature, the prejudice it belied and endurance of the ideas it evoked – connecting homosexuality with contagion – should not be underestimated. See Gerard Oppenheimer’s discussion of the original scientific paper which coined the 95 by the producers of the text with little or no basis in medical fact. For instance, the state of medical knowledge contemporary to the text’s publication did not support the presence of watersports or wet kissing on a list of risky activities, but might have supported placing rimming (oral-anal stimulation) on the list, demonstrating a squeamish reticence which silenced discussion of certain acts while it implicated others erroneously in HIV transmission.256 It would appear then that sex acts which fell outside those presumed to be commonly practised within a heterosexual monogamous relationship, were described as dangerous more out of anxiety about the acts themselves rather than any scientifically provable risk. Elsewhere in AIDS and You gloves are suggested as a useful barrier when cleaning up after an ‘AIDS-patient’ and the following explanation is also given to emphasise the fragility of the virus and the robustness of skin:
Once the virus is dry, and outside the body, it dies. Even in a wet state, it does not live long when exposed to the air. So spilt body fluids i.e. blood, or sperm pose less risk. A few spots of blood on unbroken skin are a tiny hazard...257 Continuing in the same vein, the booklet makes clear the delicacy of the virus and the efficacy of cleaning products in its destruction, yet the simple expediency of either cleaning sex toys before sharing them or using a condom with them to render such an activity safe remains unsaid [Figure 8 and Figure 9]. The authors of the text were not ignorant of the ways in which sex acts might be rendered less dangerous, or the extent to which certain acts carried more or less risk. This distaste for the acts is made more obvious by the absence of any attempt to suggest ways these acts might be performed more safely within the text, despite the clear presence of such knowledge elsewhere in the booklet. This demonstrates the underlying prejudices which were at work in both the
GRID label in Gerard Oppenheimer, ‘Causes, Cases, And Cohorts: The Role of Epidemiology in the Historical Construction of AIDS’ in AIDS: The Making of a Chronic Disease, ed. by Daniel M Fox, Elizabeth Fee, pp. 49-83, p. 62.. See also Stephen Epstein, AIDS, Activism and the politics of Knowledge,(California: University of California Press, 1996) pp. 46-47; Michael S. Gottlieb et al., ‘Gay- Related Immunodeficiency(GRID) Syndrome: Clinical and Autopsy Observations’, Clinical Research 30 (1982), p. 349A. 256 A review of the scientific literature concerning the sexual transmission of HIV published in 1988 cited research spanning 1985-1987 which did not support considering ‘water sports’ or ‘deep kissing’ risky. While it was admitted HIV could be isolated in saliva and urine, activities which involved these bodily fluids alone were described as ‘extremely inefficient’ for viral transmission. The review went on to explain ‘The deposition of urine or faeces on the exterior of an individual's body likely poses very little risk of infection even if the virus were present since no accessible entry point is available for the virus.’ R.J.L. Coates, M.T. Schechter, ‘Sexual Modes of Transmission of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)’, Annals of Sex Research, 1 (1988), pp. 115-137, pp. 124-128. 257 BMA, AIDS and You, (1987), p. 58. 96 medical and educational outputs of the BMA. This behaviour-based construction of HIV positive identities – risky acts produce risky identities – was rendered much less ambiguous in representations produced for the consumption of youths. Knowledge of risky acts was rendered as risky as the identities themselves and consequently censored.
Figure 9. Destroying the virus258
Part of the process by which AIDS and You became a game was a sanitation of the text for a younger audience; with certain ‘dangerous’ acts and their contingent HIV positive identities erased from the text altogether. The knowledge that such acts and identities existed presumably deemed too dangerous to be contained by the stigmatising ‘risky’ label which discouraged them in the booklet intended for adults. It is to this game and its production that I now turn.
The Production and Dissemination of the BMA’s AIDS and You Game The mastermind behind turning the AIDS and You booklet into an educative board game was Laurie Dervish-Lang, a senior Health Education Officer for Bromsgrove and Redditch Health Authority.259 Educational learning games were far from a new concept in 1988. Nor was the AIDS and You Game was not the first AIDS-related learning
258 AIDS and You, (1987), p. 58. 259 Laurie Dervish-Lang, ‘Developing AIDS and HIV teaching materials for school children, AIDS: A Challenge in Education, ed. by David R Morgan, (Institute of Biology, London and Royal Society of Medicine Services, 1990), pp. 45-50, pp. 45-46. 97 game, but it does seem to have been the most sophisticated and internationally popular of the sex education learning games which emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s.260 Dervish-Lang identified the original text as a rich source for AIDS education, with its brief explanations and ‘novel pictograms’ it ‘provided lots of material for use with a wide range of children with different educational and social backgrounds.’261
Figure 10. AIDS and You board game, 1989
With World AIDS Day 1988 as the vehicle, Dervish-Lang tested a trial version of the game in a college in Bromsgrove, reporting the success it found to the BMA who then sponsored its development.262 The game was designed to foster discussion and ‘awareness’ through ‘non-competitive’ play, educating children about ‘safe and unsafe sexual and social behaviour’ as well as encouraging ‘positive feelings towards those who are infected.’263 The final edition of the board game released in 1991 was
260 Other game examples include: The Grapevine: the sex education board game for ages 12 and above, (Leicester: First edition – New Grapevine, 1985) (Leicester: Second edition – Youth Work Press, 1992); Graham Thomas, AIDS EDUCATION GAME: HIV SIMULATION, (Cambridge: Daniels Publishing, 1992); TWA: RPH 525:2, Wellcome, HIV & AIDS: a resource pack for use with 11 to 14 year olds, (1995). 261 Dervish-Lang, ‘Developing AIDS and HIV teaching materials for school children’, p. 46. 262 Ibid. 263 Ibid. 98 accompanied by a teaching pack, the revised second edition of the AIDS and You booklet (1991 version) and a short edited volume, AIDS: A Challenge in Education. Like the HEA/FPA provision Teaching about HIV & AIDS, the AIDS and You game had become a teaching pack that placed as much emphasis on teaching the teacher as it did on child-based learning [Figure 11].
Figure 11. AIDS and You board game with Teaching Pack
Neither edition of the board game added much in the way of new material to the AIDS and You text, however, the emphasis the game placed on encouraging ‘positive feelings towards those who are infected’ reflected a change in the BMA’s education provisions more generally. This was achieved in the game mainly be leaving out the more 99 stigmatising elements of the original text, for instance, where the cartoon illustration was not suited to the representation of the illness [Figure 11].
Figure 12. Imagery deemed too insensitive to appear in the 1991 edition of the AIDS and You booklet
Mirroring the destigmatising aims of the game, the ‘extensively revised’ 1991 edition (published jointly with the HEA), ‘incorporated’ ‘more positive attitudes to those with AIDS or HIV infection’, again mainly by removing the more insensitive illustrations.264 This represents a change in emphasis in the BMA’s AIDS education provision more generally towards combating AIDS stigma as well as promoting safer-sex. Often this resulted in somewhat discordant warnings against certain unsafe behaviours – which inferred blame for those who seroconverted – combined with coddling calls to treat
264 British Medical Association, AIDS & YOU: An Illustrated Guide To HIV and AIDS, (British Medical Association and Health Education Authority: London, 1991), p. iii. 100
‘victims’ of the virus as you would anyone else through a process of clumsy AIDS myth-busting. Admirable though the call to end AIDS stigma was, the HIV positive identities upheld as examples of those deserving of the audience’s pity were invariably children who had been exposed to the virus passively rather than those presumed to have engaged in ‘risky’ activities. This subtly reinforced the hierarchical dichotomy of ‘innocent’ and ‘deserving’ HIV positive identities, those who are passive victims and those who are deviants whose seroconversion was an inevitable result of their wilful otherness. This dichotomy is reinforced further by the game’s simplification of the holistic approach attempted in the booklet wherein it presents activities as SAFE and UNSAFE, reframing behaviours divorced from all social contexts as avoidable [Figure 13 and Figure 14]. Curiously the board game presented contracting the virus as entirely active and avoidable. When the possibility of contracting the virus through, for instance, a blood transfusion is discussed it is framed by a discussion titled ‘How do the HIV positive put others at risk’, locating blame always with an active participant in any given situation. The UNSAFE playing cards did not include unavoidable activities such as contracting the virus at birth, through breast milk, blood-products or organ transplant. Meanwhile the SAFE cards focused on a collection of mundane or socially responsible/acceptable activities, familiar to the young audience either as part of their daily lives (e.g. sharing sports equipment) or as activities which had been highlighted in the media’s AIDS coverage and become the focus of AIDS-related myths (e.g. donating blood).
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Figure 13. Unsafe and avoidable acts265
The result of this bifurcation is a representation of an aetiological model of HIV positive identity based on a past avoidable transgression. Significantly the short list of possible UNSAFE activities provided in the game includes two acts not included in the 1987 edition of AIDS and You (though they do appear in the 1991 edition): ‘Mixing blood in a blood in a blood brother/sister relationship’ and ‘Inexperienced/unqualified tattooing or ear-piercing, e.g. at school’. These additions reflect ongoing panics in the media at the time of production around the risks of allowing HIV positive children to attend school and the perception in the academic literature that the above activities were 266 endemic aspects of children’s play. Such panics were peculiar to AIDS and bore little relation to the actual risks involved in such activities. Although the risk was negligible (as the authors would have been aware), the fear felt by adults certainly was not.
265 BMAA, B.35.3.51, Laurie Dervish-Lang, ‘Unsafe’, AIDS and You Game: An Educational Resource from the BMA Professional and Scientific Division, ed. by David Morgan, (Cambridge, British Medical Association: 1989), resource sheets, p. 5. 266 I have found no research on the prevalence of ‘blood brother’ pacts or children engaging in amateur piercing or tattooing in British schools, but the idea that this activity should be prevented was stated repeatedly across public health education policy, scholarship and materials. See for instance Philippa Russell, ‘“For adults only?”: Confronting the implications of AIDS for children and young people’, Children & Society, 1:1 (1987), pp. 19-33, p. 30. 102
For adults, AIDS created an unassailable excuse to discourage children from engaging in activities that unsettled or frightened their carers. Clearly this included activities that posed a real tenable risk (‘unprotected sex’) and those that the adult producers would rather not have to worry about (‘mixing blood’) or talk about long enough to explain how they might be rendered safe (‘sharing sex toys’). But more significant perhaps even than what is included on the UNSAFE activity list is what has been left off it.
Figure 14. Safe and socially acceptable267
In striking the balance between explicit explanations of sex and avoiding offence, the producers of the AIDS and You GAME felt caution was the better part of valour; absent is all content pertaining to homosexuality or any specifics of what protected or unprotected sex might be. The language is left extremely ambiguous; no
267 BMAA, B.35.3.51, Dervish-Lang, ‘Safe’, AIDS and You Game, resource sheets, p. 4. 103 sexual organs feature, and no explanation of what sex itself might be is included. On the surface, this would appear to make the game fairly useless as a teaching tool, but the board game was intended to be used as a guide to learning, with facilitators able to ‘adapt the game and use it for individual circumstances.’268 This potentially would have allowed the more holistic approach to AIDS found in the booklets to be represented to children through an adult mediator, but avoids the chance of government intervention by never actively encouraging teachers to address thorny (and potentially prohibited) issues such as homosexuality, multiple partners and the actualities of sex. It also lessened any difficulties around making the game age appropriate, the obfuscating language allows the game to be ‘acceptable at all levels of secondary education’ with little adaption or ‘preparation time’.269 The AIDS and You video game on the other hand, was designed with a sliding age scale in mind, with educators able to selectively programme the game removing and adding SAFE and UNSAFE activities as required [Figure 15].
Figure 15. AIDS and You: an edition for more independent learning, 1994270
Based on the board game, the second edition still contained the SAFE/UNSAFE activity cards that made up the first edition, but within the computerised version new activities and more explicit explanations had been added. The computer game allowed
268 BMAA, B.35.3.51, Daniels Publishing, AIDS & You Game Order Form. 269 BMAA,.35.3.51, Daniels Publishing, AIDS & You Game Order Form. 270 TWA, EPH 524, Laurie Dervish-Lang, AIDS and You GAME: 2nd Edition, (Cambridge: British Medical Association and West Sussex District Health Authority, 1994). 104 for a more independent learning experience once a password-protected card selection had been made by an adult according to ‘the age of pupils, a specific topic’ or ‘a cross- section of cards’.271 The game had two modes, allowing pupils to decide if an activity was SAFE or UNSAFE generally ‘in relation to getting HIV’ or ‘whether or not a person who has HIV/AIDS would be likely to transmit the virus through the activity.’272 This second aspect of the game was to a lesser extent available to players of the board game, but the computerised version explicitly instructs players to ‘imagine you have HIV and decide... whether you put others at risk by doing different activities.’273 This creates a more immersive experience, asking children to engage with an imagined future where they not only might engage in UNSAFE activities but also pose a risk to others. The ordering of the two modes is important, first avoidable risks are presented, and then the child is transported to a future where they have failed to heed warnings and have contracted the virus. This marks a change in the BMA’s representation of HIV positive identities more generally wherein the HIV positive become a warning to unwary risk- takers. Of the new cards available in the computerised version, some are merely activities which were present in the booklet, but taken out in the board game edition of the game. For instance ‘Oral Sex’, deemed unsafe in the 1987 first edition of the booklet, and unsafe without a condom in the 1991 second edition, is added to the UNSAFE card pile without clarification in the computerised game. Again the decision was made that it was better to discourage an activity by dubbing it unsafe, rather than to suggest ways it could be made safer. Several additions are made using material from the second edition of the AIDS & You booklet, for instance ‘Sex During Menstruation’ is added to the UNSAFE pile.274 The computerised edition also boasts explanations of why a sexual activity might pose a risk in greater detail than those featured in the previous board game edition, limiting the need for an adult mediator and encouraging more independent learning. Much like the second edition of AIDS & YOU upon which the video game is based, a sense of scale in terms of risk is evident in the explanations that accompany the cards. While ‘Oral Sex’ must be declared uncompromisingly UNSAFE to win the game and the use of condoms remains undiscussed – presumably to
271 TWA, EPH 524, Sarah Easterbrook et al., ‘Installation manual’, AIDS and You GAME: 2nd Edition, (Cambridge: British Medical Association and West Sussex District Health Authority, 1994), p. 6. 272 Easterbrook, ‘Installation manual’, p. 6. 273 Easterbrook, ‘Installation manual’, p. 11. 274 Easterbrook, ‘Installation manual’, p. 27. 105 discourage the activity altogether – the activity is described in the explanatory notes as ‘fairly low risk’, but the player is entreated to remember ‘semen and vaginal fluid can contain HIV. There is a greater risk if either partner has sores in the mouth or genital area.’275 Despite these more frank discussions, anal sex (with or without a condom), fingering and fisting still remained absent from either card pile. This is not surprising given reticence around these subjects still pervaded adult media, but is still worth observing as it demonstrates yet another instance when sexual knowledge was deemed more dangerous than the possibility that adolescents might go ignorantly into a potentially risky sexual encounter. As discussed earlier, the BMA attempted to provide AIDS education material geared to specific audiences, charging their educators to provide ‘sexually active people’ with knowledge according to their membership of specific groups. Audiences were presumed to be easily divided into the heterosexual and the homosexual, the HIV positive, the ‘at risk’ and the worried well. The imagined audience of teens the AIDS and You games targeted were somewhere between the latter two; and adult anxiety about teenager’s potential ‘at risk’ status was as much about the risk of adolescents straying from the path of heterosexual monogamy and future (rather than present) risky behaviours than their real risk of contracting HIV in the present. The increased agency and sexual knowledge the games provide was limited by a total disavowal of the existence of any sexuality other than heterosexuality and a persistent silence around the personal, social, cultural and economic reasons one might engage in an UNSAFE activity. Regarding the silence around homosexuality, this could be read as constructing adolescents as naturally heterosexual and so not in need of information on other sexualities, but in the context of Section 28 it is far more likely that these omissions were the result of the perceived fragility of teenage sexuality: that is, the idea that the mere mention of other sexualities or non-procreative sexual activities was tantamount to teaching and encouraging them. By presenting those ‘at risk’ always as active deviant identities (disobedient sexually precocious teens, drug users and the sexually promiscuous) and those deserving of sympathy rather than fear as passive innocent identities (children) the games were able to instil a sense of agency in their players, over their sexual activity and their sympathies, without ever suggesting that promiscuity, IV-drug use or any number of other ‘risky’ activities were anything
275 Easterbrook, ‘Installation manual’, p. 26. 106 other than morally reprehensible and othering activities. While such views were far from universal; the fear of controversy was a powerful motive for self-censorship for public-facing institutions like the BMA. Unused to its new role as public sex educator, and unsure of its audience, the BMA repeatedly chose to censor rather than disseminate complete knowledge.
Conclusions The government’s move in the mid-1980s to foster a proliferation of HIV/AIDS education materials through the creation of the HEA and through funding numerous non-government health education organisations demonstrates a pragmatism regarding unpopular but necessary health policies. These efforts later ran the risk of being rendered moot by education policies which devolved the decision of whether to tell children about sex and HIV to school governors and parents as policy making in this area bowed to numerous motives. By devolving the power of curriculum design from the LEAs in 1986 to school governors and later by giving parents’ the right to withdraw children from sex education altogether in 1993 the Thatcher and Major governments were able to deliver a market in sex education, differentiating their education policies from those of Labour and at least partially satisfying the needs of health pragmatism without sacrificing the votes of their more morally conservative voters. The resultant texts and policies were produced by committee and intended to balance health pragmatism with the ideological ends of producers, creating texts which were at times ideologically confused and clumsily stitched together. This chapter began by examining the HEA/FPA teaching pack Teaching about HIV and AIDS, exploring its fraught production and the ways this text encapsulated the messiness of health and sex education policy making. Based on principles the HEA and FPA shared and the delivery of education through a spiral curriculum, the pack framed every suggested exercise and piece of new information in relation to relevant government policy or guidance, creating a plurality of voices simply by revealing the absence of consensus in sex education. This also maintained the government’s authority to shape education and championed ministerial decisions by directly quoting policies and circulars, while manifesting a textual ‘respectable out’ in the constant entreaties to teachers and parents themselves to make the decision regarding how to interpret policy and represent HIV and sex education to children. The HEA, as an institutional 107 manifestation of the ‘respectable out’ produced textual manifestations of the ‘respectable out’ for teachers.
Comparatively more explicit than the BMA’s AIDS and You based teaching games, the HEA’s Teaching about HIV and AIDS paid particular attention to the issues which surrounded homosexuality, equipping potential educators with the knowledge to teach their pupils about it while suggesting they might wish to avoid the subject altogether. This constructed an audience of knowledgeable and rational teachers, able to decide how to tailor teaching to deliver ‘appropriate’ knowledge to their young charges. Meanwhile, children were constructed in the text as potentially curious and active learners but nonetheless unable to foresee the pitfalls that might befall them and therefore dependent on adult guidance. The teenager was constructed as morally vulnerable, occupying a potentially sexually aggressive or amenable role, pursuing or acquiescing to sex irresponsibly in the present rather than responsibly in the future. This led them to occupy potentially ‘at risk’ identities if not adequately deterred from exercising their sexuality. The HIV positive identities constructed in Teaching about HIV and AIDS were largely constructed to be presented to older adolescents, with younger teenagers given information on risky behaviours without the social or cultural context that provided nuance later in the text. Those aspects of the HEA teaching manual which dealt more explicitly with the social and cultural factors which might lead a person to occupy an ‘at risk’ identity or to become HIV positive remained largely silent on potentially controversial aspects of sex education such as the physicality of sex, drug use, and safer sex. Indeed there was a silence on the subject of sexual organs, sexual pleasure, and sex acts pervading Teaching about HIV and AIDS. Rather than directly providing controversial information, the HEA advised teachers to review the booklets which came with the pack, providing teachers with the means to convey a variety of sexual knowledge, rather than dictating its acquisition or dissemination.
The BMA’s games were designed with easy censorship in mind. Unused to educating the general public and uneasy with the controversy which surrounded sex education for the under-18s, the BMA’s 1989 AIDS and You Game was a highly flexible text absent of the explicit sexual information which later appeared in the 1994 video game and the HEA’s 1989 teaching pack. Anxieties similar to those which manifested as Clause 28 108 are present in the BMA’s archive and its AIDS education provisions intended for the public and in every incarnation of AIDS and You. The public constructed by the BMA in their internal discussions and education provisions, is one that is presumed to be too ignorant, suggestible and vulnerable to panic or deviancy if not handled carefully by experts. This unease is at its most obvious in those AIDS-education provisions intended for children and adolescents, the presumption being that of all the vulnerable members of the public, youths were the most likely to stray from the safe path of monogamous heterosexuality if provided with too much agency and dangerous knowledge. The internal discussions within the BMA and the resultant education provisions make it clear; knowledge was dangerous and only specific people needed certain knowledge. Adult members of the HIV positive community were generally seen as already in possession of dangerous knowledge – presumably having utilised said knowledge to stray from the safe path in order to contract the virus – and so could be educated in a far more explicit manner than the uninitiated. In the AIDS and You booklets this division of knowledge into dangerous and safe knowledge manifested in a division of chapters intended for positive, negative and ‘at risk’ audiences. While knowledge did engender agency – the ability to avoid activities through which one might infect or become infected – it also conveyed an ‘at risk’ identity followed closely by blame for future transgressions made inevitable by the refusal to disavow the identity which placed one at risk. This is because one’s membership to a given audience was conveyed aetiologically in these texts rather than according to one’s own identity. In this way knowledge, or at least the need to possess certain knowledge, becomes an incriminating indicator of an ‘at risk’ or HIV positive identity within the BMA’s provisions. Consequently the booklets were divided into knowledge that was necessary for all and knowledge that was necessary for the ‘at risk’ and HIV positive. This division became problematic when it was acknowledged that teenagers were members of both the ‘all’ group and the ‘at risk’ group, and that children might grow up to join its ranks. The resultant AIDS-education provisions produced by the BMA addressed teenagers first as members of the wider population, in need of limited education about AIDS and the HIV positive, but an education limited to those risks likely to be encountered by members of the population who fell outside the traditional risk groups and a toothless attempt to mitigate AIDS-stigma. This education stopped short of addressing teenagers and children as ‘at risk’ or future members of the HIV positive 109 population the way it did adult members of the ‘at risk’ groups. In weighing up the potential risk of seroconversion faced by most teenagers and children versus the dangers of sexual knowledge and the consequent sexual agency it conveyed, the BMA seems to have placed the threats engendered by knowledge above those posed by the virus. Consequently, certain activities, and the ‘at risk’ and HIV positive identities they constructed go unrepresented in the BMA’s AIDS-education provisions designed for the consumption of children. These absences form a trend across the more formal annals of HIV/AIDS education designed for the consumption of children and adolescents, as well as the more general population.
If certain risky activities and the ‘at risk’ identities they created were too risqué too be represented to children and adolescents, then does this mean that certain HIV positive identities were never encountered by children in their formal sexual health education? Certainly the BMA, the FPA and the HEA were at pains to equip teachers with the ability to educate children about sexual behaviours other than penetrative sex between a man and a woman within a monogamous relationship, but they stopped short of actually providing materials which incorporated homosexuality or sex for pleasure’s sake into the fabric of their curricula. The ‘at risk’ identities which children and adolescents consumed did occasionally include the normal gamut of ‘others’ the mass media routinely identified as part of the hysterical AIDS coverage of the early and mid-1980s (homosexuals, prostitutes, foreigners, drug users) but only as peripheral subjects, preferring to dwell instead on the idea of teenagers themselves as ‘at risk’ and to moralise about the mistreatment of the ‘innocent victims’ of AIDS – haemophiliacs, blood transfusion recipients and infants born HIV positive. The next chapter analyses how this top-down education was replied to and rebelled against in the pages of Just Seventeen and MIZZ magazine. These new teenage girls’ magazines took the periodicals market by storm in the mid-1980s, constructing an imagined audience of potentially knowledgeable adolescents who were both independent agents and consumers. This led the magazines to redress the stigma of the adult press in 1985, add nuance to the HEC and HEA AIDS adverts targeted at teens in the late 1980s, and eventually to commodify safer-sex knowledge as one of the many ways of making new teenage femininities available to their savvy school girl readership. 110
Chapter 2 Timeline of Key Events
•Sexual Offences Act decriminalises sex between consenting men over 21 in private 1967 •Abortion Act legalises abortion
1981 •First cases of AIDS in Britain documented in Lancet
•First issue of Just Seventeen 1983 •Victoria Gillick loses her case
•Victoria Gillick brings her case to the appeal courts and wins, provision of contraceptive 1984 advice and treatment to the under 16s is rendered unlawful
•House of Lords overturn Gillick ruling, Gillick Competence becomes an accepted measure of children's agency in law and medicine 1985 •First issue of MIZZ •AIDS first represented in MIZZ and Just Seventeen
•Health Education Council and Department for Health and Social Security disseminate 1986 AIDS adverts through MIZZ and Just Seventeen
•Section 28 of the Local Government Bill prohibits LEAs from ‘promoting’ 1988 homosexuality
•John Major becomes Conservative Prime minister 1990
•National Curriculum revised and HIV/AIDS is added to statutory science curriculum for pupils aged 11 to 16 1991 • MIZZ releases the MIZZ book of AIDS
•1993 Education Bill makes the provision of sex education in schools compulsory but removes non-biological aspects from statutory science curriculum Parents are given the 1993 right to withdraw their children from sex education classes.
•Conservative back-bench MP Peter Luff attempts to place age restrictions on teenage magazines through the introduction of the Periodical (Protection of Children) Act, 1996 colloquially known as the Luff Bill, the Bill fails
•Tony Blair becomes Labour Prime Minister 1997
111
Chapter 2: The Construction of HIV positive Identities in Teenage Girls’ Magazines, 1983-1997
Introducing the Right Honourable Peter Luff MP On 6 February 1996 Conservative back-bench MP Peter Luff stood in Parliament and, after a preamble on the ‘value’ of ‘childhood innocence’, decried the sexual content of British teenage girls’ magazines.276 In his speech Luff laid out a proposal for a ‘Bill to require publishers of periodicals to display prominently on the front cover of their publications their own assessment of the youngest age for which they consider that publication to be suitable’.277 The Bill, commonly known as the Luff Bill, was motivated by Luff’s personal disquiet over the sexually explicit content of a magazine – Its Bliss, which his eleven-year-old daughter had wanted to read. His Bill initially received widespread cross-party support and was symptomatic of ongoing and highly politicised debates around the sexual knowledge and education of children. Indeed, when placed in the context of policy responses to the successive moral panics about the sexualisation of children and the perception of an increasingly permissive society that marked the 1980s and 1990s, the Luff Bill appears to be fairly typical. More specifically, its inception during a moral panic about a perceived increase in the sexual content in teenage girls’ magazines marked a peak in sex-related adult anxiety about this particular media. Panic was originally sparked by press outrage over advice provided by TV Hits’ Agony Aunt ‘Mandy’, who, in response to a letter requesting information on oral sex, replied with the requested information in terms that were later regarded to be too explicit and tantamount to encouraging sexual activity below the age of consent.278 Luff’s Bill was intended to ‘ensure’ the content of young people’s magazines was ‘age- appropriate and factually accurate’ as well as ‘to ensure general decency among magazines’.279 Though purportedly a Bill with personal origins for Luff, it fell within the Conservative purview; drawing on recognisable contemporary New Right mantras
276 Peter Luff, HC Deb, Periodicals (Protection of Children), (6 February 1996), cc. 146-152, c.146. 277 Luff, (6 February 1996), c. 146. 278 See Nikki Groocock-Renshaw, ‘Got a problem?’, TV Hits, 87 (November, 1995) for the relevant problem page entry, but teen magazines had been under scrutiny for their sexual content for some time. See Alice Freeman, ‘How the girl’s glossies have gone all the way to seduce their young readers: Teen mags that are sold on sex’, Daily Express, (February 24, 1995), p. 19. 279 Kaye Wellings, The Role of Teenage Magazines in the Sexual Health of Young People, (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine: Department of Public Health and Policy, November, 1996), p. 5. 112 such as the importance of the nuclear family, the sanctity of parental authority and the dangers of teenage sexuality, while simultaneously taking advantage of the publicity generated by this passing moral panic. Luff’s speech constructed a dichotomy between Parliament’s ‘duty’ to ‘create the healthiest climate possible for our children to grow up in’ and the amoral ‘drift into salaciousness and smut’ apparently encouraged by the magazines. He achieved this by suggesting teenage magazines were among those culpable for the abandonment of an ‘age of lost innocence’, declaring that regulation and surveillance ‘could help prevent further deterioration’ induced by a pursuit of ‘immediate gratification’.280 Luff was drawing on narratives that constructed society as increasingly permissive and decried the amoral influences of the mass media, which he saw as Hell-bent on undermining ‘the value and importance’ of the ‘God-given gift’ of sex.281 Of particular concern were the problem pages which he viewed as most ‘often the worst offenders... written in language more usually seen on the walls of public conveniences’, giving ‘explicit advice on sexual technique’ situated within a context of teen-idol features wherein celebrities ‘boast of losing their virginity at 12, 14 and 11.’282 While allowing that there was some verity to the argument that teenage magazines provided ‘important advice not offered elsewhere by schools or by parents’, Luff contended that the presence of celebrity sexual boasting, scantily clad male centre-folds, and a general pre-occupation with underage sex indicated ulterior sinister motives.283 Another accusation made by Luff against the magazines was that the texts were ‘sexist’; this was based on his perception that ‘the only impression any girl reading such magazines could be left with is that her personal fulfilment will come only from looking good, wearing the right clothes and getting a good sex life’.284 As this chapter will argue, what Luff described here was not sexism, but rather some of the new femininities marketed to the teenage girl in the 1980s and 1990s. In response to these identities, Luff displayed the typical anxiety of many adults, discomforted by the proliferation of new knowing (often sexual) teenage femininities, where young women were constructed as active agents rather than as innocents.
280 Luff, (6 February 1996), column 146-147. 281 Luff, (6 February 1996), column 147. 282 Luff, (6 February 1996), column 146-148. 283 Luff, (6 February 1996), column 146-148. 284 Luff, (6 February 1996), column 147. 113
Despite initial backbench interest in Luff’s Bill, it failed to gain government backing and Luff eventually withdrew the Bill himself in July 1996. Despite its ultimate failure the Bill bolstered debates concerning the subject of sex education across a range of media platforms, it also stimulated the creation of the Periodical Publishers Association’s (PPA) ‘toothless’ Teenage Magazine Arbitration Panel (TMAP).285 TMAP was designed to function as a ‘self-regulatory body’ ensuring the ‘sexual content of teenage magazines’ was ‘presented in a responsible and appropriate manner’, according to a list of new guidelines informed in part by the Luff Bill.286 Dr Fleur Fisher, chair of the British Medical Association’s Foundation for AIDS and vice-chair of the International HIV/AIDS Alliance chaired the panel, which was comprised of experts from the public health and magazine sectors.287 TMAP’s guidelines reflected practices that had been adopted by magazine producers prior to the Luff Bill and adroitly demonstrated the difficulties faced and anxieties felt by adults who were in the business of representing sex and safer-sex practices to teenagers.288 The Luff Bill failed to pass but its legacy and origins make it an appropriate starting point for this discussion of the shape and far-reaching ideological, cultural and political repercussions of adult anxiety about the role of magazines in the sexual education of children specifically, and the apparent moral ambiguities of children’s mass media generally. Between 1988 and 1996, five distinct Health Education Authority AIDS education campaigns disseminated their messages through adverts placed in teenage magazines, acknowledging their unique power to reach young people.289 In 1994 Just Seventeen sold around 260,000 copies a week while MIZZ had a circulation of 183,818 in 1995.290 These facts alone would be enough to make teenage magazines worthy of
285 I describe the panel as ‘toothless’ in an echo of education pundit and expert Sue Palmer’s description of the body. Her assessment seems fair given the panel has only upheld two complaints to date. See Roya Nikkhah, ‘Teen magazines are sexualising readers, says watchdog’ The Telegraph Online, (14 March 2009), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/4990907/Teen-magazines-are-sexualising-readers- says-watchdog.html (Date accessed 14/07/2016); also TMAP’s website Unknown, ‘Arbitrations’, http://web.archive.org/web/20120401055408/http://www.tmap.org.uk/cgi-bin/wms.pl/668 (date accessed 14/07/2016). 286Unknown, ‘Home’, The Teenage Magazine Arbitration Panel, http://www.ppa.co.uk/tmap/home/ (Date accessed, 14/10/2013). 287 Fleur Fisher, The Teenage Magazine Arbitration Panel First Annual Report, 1996-97, p. 3. 288 Periodical Publishers Association, ‘TMAP guidelines for coverage of sexual subject matter in teenage magazines’, (February, 1996), pp. 1-2. 289 Becky Field, Kaye Wellings, Promoting Safer Sex: A History of the Health Education Authority’s Mass Media Campaigns on HIV, AIDS and Sexual Health 1987-1996, (London:, Health Education Authority), pp. 87-89. 290 Anon, ‘Just Seventeen Reduced to Monthly’, Marketing Week, (14 February 1997), https://www.marketingweek.com/1997/02/14/just-seventeen-reduced-to-monthly/ [Accessed 25/07/2016]; 114 enquiry, but the ubiquity of this medium and its popularity among teenagers prompted this study into the AIDS narratives therein. Based on an extensive survey of the magazines Just Seventeen and MIZZ covering over 750 issues, this chapter illuminates how teenage magazines came to loom so large in the sexual health education of children and adolescents, especially with regard to HIV/AIDS. This chapter explores the narratives in these magazines’ ‘explicit content’. It examines the identities – both feminine and HIV positive – they represented and how the movement from the morally conservative pages of Jackie magazine (first published in 1964) to the clinical frankness of Just Seventeen (first published 1983) and MIZZ (first published 1985) changed the way these texts constructed their imagined teenage readers.291 This will demonstrate the vital role popular media played in the construction and dissemination of HIV positive identities produced for the consumption of children and adolescents in the 1980s and 1990s. This will be accomplished through a close textual/visual analysis of images and written sources of AIDS-related content in Just Seventeen and MIZZ. Representative sources were identified for use in this chapter by surveying over 750 issues of the two magazines, encompassing Just Seventeen issues 0-532 covering the period 1983-1995; and MIZZ issues 1-228 covering the period 1985-1994, with each copy of the magazine viewed in its entirety, including cover matter, contents pages, ephemera and freebies. While care was taken to gain a sense of each magazine as both an object and text by examining each issue in its entirety, the abundance of material was managed systematically by focusing closer attention on problem pages, readers’ letter pages and health related articles and adverts. Where interesting and representative items were identified, I then returned to look more broadly at the magazine they appeared within, gaining a sense of the context of individual items within any given copy of Just Seventeen or MIZZ, but also within these magazines as part of a series and genre.292
Anon, Campaign, (August 09 1996), http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/news-new-teenage-titles- pick-readers-older-ones-decline/21215, [Accessed 25/07/2016]. 291 Jackie, first published in 1964 by conservative publishing company D. C. Thompson, will be discussed in more detail later. 292 This qualitative approach was made possible because a collection of Just Seventeen and MIZZ exists, as published and including freebies, at Cambridge University Library. While the British Library also has these magazines, there they have been collected into bound volumes and their ephemera and freebies removed. This more holistic approach represents a significant departure from the methodology favoured elsewhere in the academic literature concerning magazines which favours close textual analysis of content chosen to match the interests of the author and obtained from a very small sample size. Such samples are often removed from their textual context within the magazine with no reference to what else appeared within a given issue. This approach has substantial short comings; from a tendency to ahistoricism to the drawing of false conclusions and is implicated in the polarisation of magazine scholarship into those who 115
The effects of AIDS representations and the accompanying narratives of ‘safer-sex’ in particular are tracked and analysed by examining the place of AIDS in the wider sex- related content of teenage magazines. This analysis will be supplemented with testimony from adult producers of teen magazines, re-readings of audience surveys, industry guidelines, and contemporary adult journalism concerning teenage magazines. This therefore charts a history that goes beyond the textual; elucidating both the cultural context that produced the representations of HIV positive identities specific to teenage magazines, and an indication of the reception of these identities among young readers and, to a lesser extent, the adults who cared for them.
Producing a Magazine, Constructing an Audience The magazines that panicked Peter Luff in the 1990s including Just Seventeen and MIZZ were only just beginning to hit the shelves at the beginning of the 1980s. These new magazines bore little resemblance to the likes of 1960s and 1970s publications like Jackie, Bunty or the Beano, reflecting a change which had taken place in youth and consumer culture more generally.293 The early 1980s witnessed several changes in the magazine market. Pop culture publications such as The Face (1980-2004) and Blitz (1980-1991) reflected the multiplication in masculine identities made available through consumer culture294 and the new more sexually frank teen magazines like Just Seventeen and later MIZZ replicated the increase in teenage feminine identities, and took over a teenage girls’ magazine market previously dominated by the morally conservative D. C. Thomson Publishing Company.295 The incremental inclusion of sexual health education into the remit of teenage magazines was a major marker of change in the youth magazine market. The problem pages of newspapers had long played a part in the sexual health and relationship
celebrate or deride these texts as promoting sexualised femininity; to those who read a conservative heterosexism in their pages. See for example Tineke M. Willemsen ‘Widening the Gender Gap: Teenage Magazines for Girls and Boys’, Sex Roles, 38:9/10 (1998), pp. 851-86. 293 Luff, (6 February 1996), column 146; Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century Britain, (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 1-12. 294 Mort, Cultures of Consumption, pp. 15-28. 295 Bridget Knight, ‘Teenage Magazines: Education or Titillation?’, Teenage Girls and their Magazines, ed. by Pat Pinsent, (London: National Centre for Research in Children's Literature Roehampton Institute, 1998), pp. 26-33, p. 29. 116 education of Britain’s public,296 but as the traditionally shambolic sex education provision for Britain’s youth was wracked by ever more indecision and devolution, teenage magazines discovered the profits to be made by filling the sex-education vacuum.297 Editors, agony aunts, and freelance feature writers began producing problem pages, advice columns, special feature articles, and true-life-confession stories which made up for the uncomfortable silences in school and at home around the subject of sex, sexual health and sexuality.298 Unbound by the legislation, professional oversight, and the scrutiny which governed educators and doctors, magazines could offer information about sexual health and sexuality without the politicised interference experienced by teachers and doctors. They provided information on contraception and homosexuality before, during, and after both the Gillick Affair and the passing of Section 28,299 and used the legislation as an opportunity to critique the Conservative government and sex education more generally.300 This open forum formed an important site for sympathetic AIDS-related content. By 1996, when Luff’s Bill brought teenage magazines under increased inspection, the place of this new medium in the sexual health education of children was
296 Adrian Bingham, ‘Newspaper problem pages and British sexual culture since 1918’, Media History, 18:1 (2012), pp. 51-63, p. 53. 297 Blair, Monk, ‘Sex Education and the Law’, pp. 38-39. 298 Wellings, The Role of Teenage Magazines, p. 4. Wellings drew on sociological research which had long been interested in these questions, for example: E Davies ‘An examination of health education in teenage magazines’, Health Education Journal, 45 (2), (1986), pp. 86-91; S Davis S, M Harris, ‘Sexual knowledge, sexual interests and source of sexual information of rural and urban adolescents from three different cultures’, Adolescence 17 (1982), pp. 471-492. 299 For a discussion of Section 28 and Victoria Gillick’s objections to contraception see the Introduction. 300 An article published in Just Seventeen after Gillick’s appeal was successful expressed concern about its effects on the teenage pregnancy rate but offered a plurality of opinions. Bridget Le Good, ‘The Pill: Whose Right to Choose?’, Just Seventeen, Issue 34, (January 24th 1985), p. 20. Another article published after the Law Lords overturned the Gillick ruling explained how changes in the law would affect the under-sixteens. Melanie McFadyean, 'Contraception for Under 16s ', Just Seventeen, Issue 90, (March 5 1986), p. 19. Before Section 28, homosexuality was a subject frequently discussed in problem pages but also occasionally dealt with as fiction or the subject of special reports. For example Sue Teddern’s short story Mates, Just Seventeen, Issue 30, (November 29 1984) pp. 34-35 and the factual Anon, ‘Homosexuality: Facts of Life’, Just Seventeen, Issue 17, (May 31 1984), p. 27, both damned homophobia and its affects, arguing it was a sexuality like any other. After Section 28 was passed, the legislation itself was discussed and decried. See for example: Janette Baker, Anita Naik, ‘Clause 28: How will it affect you?’, Just Seventeen, Issue 207, (June 1 1988), p. 19. MIZZ was less direct in its critique, instead of features discussing Section 28 or Gillick directly, its problem pages, specials and factual features were littered with information and dissenting voices which challenged this legislation. For example: Anon, ‘My brother has a boyfriend: How to cope when you discover your brother is gay’, MIZZ, Issue 11 (August 30 – September 12 1985), p. 32; Simon Geller ‘Hetero- Trans- Homo- Bi- A- Sexual’, MIZZ, Issue 56 (May 20 - June 2 1987), pp. 30-31; Anon, letter to Tricia Krietman, ‘Can gays get married? Body & Soul’, MIZZ, Issue 61 (July 29 - August 11 1987), p. 37; April Joyce, ‘Abortion’, MIZZ, Issue 73 (January 13- 26 1988), pp. 18-19. 117 firmly established.301 Kaye Wellings’ research, commissioned in response to the Luff Bill, indicated that teenage magazines held a pivotal role in sexual health education. Wellings argued that given the threat of AIDS the government should focus its efforts on making sure that ‘teenage magazines continue to contain information which enables young people to adopt safer sex behaviour [my emphasis]’ rather than pontificating over ineffectual age restrictions.302 Echoing research produced before, during and after the short-lived Luff Bill, Wellings argued that, as young people preferred ‘to get their information on sex from printed sources rather than from adults’, the task was to ensure the accuracy of magazine material, use these texts to disseminate sexual-health education and discover why teens preferred these texts over direct interactions with knowledgeable adults.303 It might be assumed that embarrassment motivated this preference for text over personal interaction, but as Luff was keen to point out, there was more than sex education in the advice pages of teenage girls’ magazines. Advice pages provided a heady mix of interactive and rebellious entertainment in the form of voyeurism, schadenfreude and dramatic narrative. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, as contraception laws were debated and changed, AIDS appeared and Section 28 was instated, the sex education space provided by magazines began to emerge as an oppositional space for teenage rights and sexuality. Beyond the purview of a conservative education system, a confused discursive space – but a largely sex-positive, pro-choice and homosexual-friendly space – took shape in the busy pages of teenage magazines. Alongside overtly pedagogical provisions for emotional, sexual and health education, which displayed a more pluralist attitude to sexuality and morality than was favoured by the Conservative government, advice pages and the magazines that carried them had a more subtle effect. They furnished readers with a multiplicity of possible teenage femininities, indicating how to perform them both successfully and unsuccessfully, proceeding from the assumption that their teenage audiences were knowing agents. Within this context, Luff’s objection to the content of teenage
301 Knight, ‘Teenage Magazines’, pp. 26-33. 302 Wellings, The Role of Teenage Magazines, p. 4. 303 Wellings, The Role of Teenage Magazines, p. 4. Wellings drew on sociological research which had long been interested in these questions, for example: E Davies ‘An examination of health education in teenage magazines’, Health Education Journal, 45 (2), (1986), pp. 86-91; S Davis S, M Harris, ‘Sexual knowledge, sexual interests and source of sexual information of rural and urban adolescents from three different cultures’, Adolescence 17 (1982), pp. 471-492. 118 magazines was hardly surprising given the potential oppositional and increasingly individualistic space these magazines were providing for young people. But, of course, the story is more complicated than this. These magazines were in the business of selling themselves by hosting adverts and promoting a consumerist lifestyle. The multiple new teenage femininities offered up in the pages of 1980s and 1990s teenage girls magazines were key to propagating an audience that would pursue selfhood through consumption. However, this commercialism did not negate the provocative elements that developed in these truly intertextual texts. Neither did it reduce their importance for many British teenagers.304 So what made these magazines so important? Part of the answer, although it seems contradictory, was their lack of significance to the general population and, indeed, to many of their readers. Magazines make up an ephemeral aspect of daily life for many people, past and present.305 Teenage girls in the 1980s and 1990s were no exception, and it was their banal nature that allowed their cultural influence to be so comprehensive. Reading a magazine was, for many, a mere aspect of the routine performance of teenage femininity, accepted or rejected in a piecemeal fashion like all other aspects of popular culture encountered by historical actors. For others, as sociological research into this area has indicated, teenage magazines played a more dominant and corrective role in their performance of adolescent womanhood, and were used more interactively as a rule book.306 It is vital to emphasise that this performance of femininity and cultural engagement with the magazine text, whether it stopped at purchasing the magazine or extended into a deeper investment in the ideologies presented therein, did not preclude the active agency of teenage readers. After all, just because a text is didactic does not mean that its audience blindly follows or even receives the lessons it contains. Nor does
304 As previously discussed, intertextual approaches acknowledge that texts ‘lack fixed authorships and meanings’, rather they are bound in a ‘dynamic relationship to ongoing social and political transformations.’ This places an emphasis on the context into which a text is produced and also how it is experienced by its audience; acknowledging texts are produced not just for the author, but their audience. Mariela Vargova, ‘Dialogue, Pluralism, and Change: The Intertextual Constitution of Bakhtin, Kristeva, and Derrida’, Res Publica, 13 (2007) pp. 415-440, p. 415; Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259–422; Pam Morris, ‘Re‐ routing Kristeva: From pessimism to Parody’, Textual Practice, 6:1 (1992), pp. 31-46. 305 Rachel Ritchie, Sue Hawkins, Nicola Phillips, S. Jay Klienberg, ‘Introduction’, in Women in Magazines: Research, Representation, Production and Consumption, ed. by Rachel Ritchie, Sue Hawkins, Nicola Phillips, S. Jay Klienberg, (London: Routledge: 2016), pp. 1-22, pp. 2-6. 306 Dawn Currie, ‘Dear Abby: Advice pages as a site for the operation of power’, Feminist Theory, 2:3 (2001), pp. 259-281, pp. 259-261. 119 is it to suggest that these texts in any way presented a single ideology of femininity or womanhood. Contrary to what has been argued and intimated elsewhere in the literature,307 teenage girls’ magazines, even the likes of early girls’ magazines like Jackie, did not present a single homogenous femininity to their readers.308 Varied reading practices were encouraged by the inherently dialogic nature of magazines as texts which are structurally and visually diverse. The dialogic and intertextual nature of magazines should be emphatically highlighted here not only because of the multiplying and obfuscating effects it has on ideology – which so often go unacknowledged in the academic literature – but also because such an analysis aims to rescue the rest of the magazine from the telescoping effects of close textual analysis.309 Often the concentration on the content and construction of singular magazine columns focuses the analysis to such a degree that not only are author, audience and agency forgotten, but the rest of the text disappears from view as well. To put it more bluntly, even if a producer wished to present a single discourse of ‘ideal womanhood’ for teenagers to aspire to, the inclusion of multiple authors and media within a magazine prevent the very possibility. This is not to suggest that a dominant ideology was absent from the pages of Jackie, Just Seventeen and MIZZ; merely that intertextuality and the lived experience of the readership prevented any sort of direct didactic construction of teenage experience through these texts. These texts were not static edicts of moral philosophy, rather they relied on what Myers dubbed an ‘empathetic compact’ between producers and consumers, the product of their cultural context and this ‘two-way traffic’.310 The differences between Jackie and its younger-sister magazines bore the imprint of changes in this ‘empathetic compact’ and more general shifts in attitude to both youth culture and sexuality between the 1960s and 1980s. Though outwardly quite
307 Ritchie, Hawkins, Phillips, Klienberg, ‘Introduction’ pp. 2-6, pp. 17-18. 308 For an extended discussion of how feminist and post-modernist readings interpret narrative and ideology within teen magazines see Helen Pleasance, ‘Open and Closed: popular magazines and dominant culture’ in Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies, Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury, Jackie Stacey (Eds.), (Harper Collins Academic: Birmingham, 1991), pp. 69-84. An excellent example of a work which assumes gendered ideologies of consumption in teenage girls’ magazines are cohesive and predictably affective can be found in Simon Frith, Sound Affects: The Sociology of Rock, (London: Constable, 1983). 309 For close textual analysis which falls foul of this pitfall see Ana Garner, H. Sterk, S. Adams, ‘Narrative Analysis of Sexual Etiquette in Teenage Magazines’, Journal of Communication 48:4 (1998), pp. 59–78 or Sue Jackson, ‘‘I’m 15 and Desperate for Sex’: ‘Doing’ and ‘Undoing’ Desire in Letters to a Teenage Magazine’, Feminism & Psychology, 15 (2005), pp. 295-313. 310 Mitzi Myers, ‘The Erotics of Pedagogy: Historical Intervention, Literary Representation, the "Gift of Education," and the Agency of Children’, Children’s Literature, 23 (1995), pp. 1-30, p. 19. 120 similar, there were marked differences between magazines like Jackie and those which replaced it in the eighties.311 This divergence was largely accounted for by a shift in ideological direction from the adulation of monogamous (heterosexual) romance to the idolisation of the individual. Where Jackie consciously obscured differences between its readers and defined adolescence as a stage endured on the path to adulthood by responding to problems in the present with an obsessive worship of an adult future,312 Just Seventeen, MIZZ and magazines like them, constructed ideas of a powerful, knowing, sexual adolescent. Theirs was an audience of individuals with rights, duties and an authority granted them by a youthful gaze, wiser than that of the adults who came before.313 The teenager represented and addressed, and thus constructed by Jackie in its early issues was a woman-in-waiting. She existed as a worker-to-be, consumer-to- be, adult-to-be, wife-to-be, mother-to-be, and in a brief moment of private leisure before real public (adult) life began. Conversely, the knowing adolescent readers of Just Seventeen and MIZZ were constructed as already being something worthwhile: teenagers. While Jackie’s producers moved to preserve the status quo by leaving no space in their ideal performance of teenage femininity for rebellion.314 Just Seventeen and MIZZ constructed a multiplicity of possible adolescents seemingly less preoccupied with the future, yet equipped with a desire to change it. Just Seventeen’s launch on 13 October 1983 was a carefully planned affair. Its first issue was given away free in East Midland Allied Press’ (EMAP) bestselling pop music magazine Smash Hits, and it was advertised as a magazine created ‘with girl readers of Smash Hits in mind.’315 Editorial Director David Hepworth later explained that the editorial team ‘just wanted’ Just Seventeen to be ‘more sophisticated than the titles that were traditionally bought by teenage girls at the time’, ‘something with a bit
311The last issue of Jackie was published on 3 July 1993, but by this time it had been far outstripped by Just Seventeen and MIZZ both in terms of circulation and importance. This was partially due to D. C. Thompson’s unwillingness to capitulate regarding the moral ideology behind its magazines, resulting in silences around sexuality where other magazines developed mantras. 312 Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture: From ‘Jackie’ to ‘Just Seventeen’, (London: Macmillan Education Limited, 1991), pp. 83-91. 313 This narrative, of the adolescent as a powerful truth seeker and revolutionary surrounded by ignorant conservative adults, emerged elsewhere in adolescent media between the 70s and 80s. It is no coincidence that young adult literature, for which this narrative is foundational, as a genre truly began during this era. Kathryn James, Death, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Adolescent Literature. (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 156. 314 Connie Alderson, The Magazines Teenagers Read: with special reference to Tren, Jackie and Valentine, (London: Pergamon Press, 1968), pp. 10-29. 315 Unknown, ‘For Your Eyes Only’, Just Seventeen, (13 October 1983), p. 3. 121 of dash about it... something more grown up.’316 A key indication of this desire for newness and maturity was announced to Just Seventeen’s readers through the absence of the photo-strip stories which more traditional magazines like Jackie, or its competitor Blue Jeans, sported.317 These changes and aims were publicised to would-be readers in a lengthy mission statement on the contents page of the first edition, explaining how this self-appointed ‘girls magazine for the 80’s’ would operate:
An up-to-date, stylish fortnightly for girls who want to know what’s going on now, because next month is simply too late. Some people think they can tell you what to wear, who to like, how to behave, what’s best for you. We reckon you can make your own mind up. What you need is information.318 The emphasis on ‘information’ coupled with an apparent relocation or sharing of authority between adult producers and their knowledgeable teenage reader – who knew her ‘own mind’ – created an enticing anti-conservative, pro-children’s rights narrative. The involvement of the readership in the production of the magazine was emphasised repeatedly; established through fashion pages featuring ‘what real people are wearing’, and requests for letters and ‘£10 tokens for the writers of the best’ letters.319 This right of reply for the teenage readership was coupled with extensive pre-launch market research; an innovative development – aped by MIZZ – which would eventually become the industry norm.320 From the beginning, Just Seventeen followed a marketing strategy both contrary and self-aggrandising. It set itself against the more morally conservative magazines previously marketed to teenage girls; purportedly creating, as Hepworth later explained, ‘a proper magazine for girls who hadn't had a proper magazine before’, one which ‘could communicate with girls of that age on a more mature level than was previously being done’.321 Issue One’s mission statement – and the editorial ambitions it expressed – set the tone for Just Seventeen throughout the years and appointed a new direction for the British girls’ magazine market until its decline in the late 1990s. With hindsight, one can see how a production model that placed heavy emphasis on audience input from the beginning endowed the magazine with an innate flexibility that allowed
316 David Hepworth, Interview with Hannah Elizabeth on 16/10/2013. 317 Hepworth, Interview, 16/10/2013. 318 Unknown [Editorial], ‘For Your Eyes Only’, p. 3. 319 Unknown, ‘For Your Eyes Only’, p. 3. 320 McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture, p. 137. 321 Ron McKay, ‘Just Seventeen: Glory without the schmaltz’, Campaign, (1 June, 1984), pp. 32-33. 122 it to respond to changes in its market without compromising its apparent social mandate. While there were inevitably fluctuations in style, tone and content, Just Seventeen remained remarkably true to the form and mission it presented to ‘girl readers’ of Smash Hits in 1983.
The demonstrative success of Just Seventeen encouraged the International Publishing Corporation (IPC) to produce the magazine MIZZ. First published on 12 April 1985, Winship described it as a ‘me-too’ publication; it was also a blatant attempt by IPC to create a ‘copy-cat’ magazine that would allow them to compete with the EMAP publication.322 Certainly, ‘me-too’ publications were a key feature of the 1980s magazine market, where the success of one publishing house’s magazine would result in a flurry of attempts to produce a similar magazine by competitors. Yet, despite this replication in genre, demands for ‘newness’ and unique qualities that would reflect the specific aspirations of consumers fostered variety.323 Just Seventeen proved irrefutably that a bi-monthly teenage girls’ magazine, financed largely through advertising revenue, was both possible and lucrative, and thus encouraged IPC to take a risk on a new publication with the same business format. But the two magazines differed significantly. MIZZ’s first couple of editions lacked the polish of Just Seventeen; the erratic tone and content gave the impression of a magazine unsure of its target demographic, despite extensive pre-launch market research and an expensive TV advertising campaign.324 The mission statement provided by MIZZ was a far cry from the lengthy, nuanced editorial of Just Seventeen’s first issue:
MIZZ. The new magazine. We won’t say it’s different, we won’t say it’s better. We won’t even claim it’s more colourful and full of things to make your life more fun. But we hope you’ll find it all those things and a whole lot more. Every fortnight. PLAY IT LOUD.325 MIZZ begins then, by making no promises and alluding to its contemporaries much less critically. Furthermore, where Just Seventeen ended emphatically, ‘we think you’ll agree that Just Seventeen is going to be everything a girl could ask for in magazine’,326
322 Janice Winship, ‘‘A Girl Needs to Get Street-Wise’: Magazines for the 1980’, Feminist Review, 21 (Winter, 1985), pp. 25-46, p. 29. 323 Joan Barrell, Brian Braithwaite, The Business of Women’s Magazines, (London: Kogan Page, 1988) p. 15, p. 47; Mort, Cultures of Consumption, pp. 23-25. 324 Winship, ‘'A Girl Needs to Get Street-Wise', p. 29. 325 Unknown, ‘Contents’, MIZZ, 1 (12-25 April 1985) p. 3. 326 Unknown, ‘For Your Eyes Only’, p. 3. 123
MIZZ ends ambiguously with ‘PLAY IT LOUD’. The vagaries of MIZZ’s first couple of issues created the impression of a publication in search of a readership, attempting to foster a brand identity that would be salient to the widest possible audience. Smash Hits provided Just Seventeen not only with the bones of a cohesive editorial team – there was a crossover of editors for both EMAP magazines327 – but a prospective readership, so unsurprisingly Just Seventeen, the more established magazine, lacks MIZZ’s floundering quality. Significantly, the introductory statements in both magazines did not articulate an explicit ideological position on sex or sexuality, despite the sexualised content of both publications. At first this might suggest an editorial team prudently mimicking policy maker’s refusals to take an active stance on these most divisive of issues, preferring to devolve decisions to parents and teachers as argued in the previous chapter. However, as this chapter demonstrates, the representation of sex, sexuality and HIV/AIDS presented by both these magazines, though somewhat incoherent, was wholeheartedly interventionist and ideologically bound. Just Seventeen and MIZZ echoed the moral pluralism of their adult-magazine brethren; they presented a variety of sexual identities and behaviours as acceptable, championing self-knowledge and individualism rather than specific moral ideals. Representations of sex in Just Seventeen and MIZZ were just as influenced by the nebulous ideology of the knowing and assertive self as any other subject their pages undertook to represent. The discursive form these interventions took, and the ephemeral and pervasive nature of individualism as an ideology, did not lend themselves to emphatic ideological statements.328 These magazines were championing a discourse of the knowing self, rebranded for teenage consumption. They offered their audience individualised and conspicuous consumption – of information and consumer items – as a means of gaining access to multiple acceptable teenage identities; the normative effects of all of this encouraged pursuit of a whole and healthy self made ever more varied by the multiplicity of acceptable selves on offer. Some of these forms of subjectivity were marked by a knowing, if not actively pursued, sexuality.
327 Winship states that the production teams for Just Seventeen and Smash Hits were the same people. In fact, while Just Seventeen was produced by a team partially made up of Smash Hits, according to Hepworth it also drew members from trade papers. Furthermore Hepworth emphasised that his team ‘didn’t really know what we were doing, we’d never worked on a girls’ magazine before. We knew what we wanted and we just sort of made it up as we went along.’ Hepworth, Interview, 16/10/2013. See also: ‘'A Girl Needs to Get Street-Wise', p. 31. 328 Rose usefully discusses the normative effects of the pervasive ideology of the self which I have drawn on above. See Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1998), pp. 2-17. 124
‘Infections in your vaginas are ... common’: Constructing and deconstructing narratives of sexual risk in Just Seventeen It is commonly suggested, both within academic and lay narratives of the history of HIV/AIDS, that HIV had a marked effect on the frankness with which sex was talked about to adolescents.329 Certainly, the threat of AIDS gave sexual health educators a renewed mandate for talking about sex, but the emphasis on this change often gives the impression of previous silences, and immediate changes after AIDS. A survey of the sex-related content in Just Seventeen before and after its first representation of AIDS tells a more complex story. Sex was addressed in the magazine before AIDS was first portrayed, the representational practices the disease encouraged were less a change in the discourse around sex and more of a multiplication in its associated narratives and identities. AIDS gave rise to new narratives about the risks involved in sex, the proliferation of sexually-diseased or ‘at risk’ identities, and more expansive discussions on the purpose of contraception. However, the addition of these new narratives to the discourses around sex was far from immediate. Sex, in the early issues of Just Seventeen and MIZZ, was a topic largely relegated to the ‘Advice’ or health pages. These pages framed sex variously as a source of emotional turmoil; a potentially dangerous activity which might lead to an unwanted pregnancy or the loss of virginity; a source of both socially constructed and biologically manifest feminine vulnerability and conflict between the sexes made physical.330 Or it was simply a downright mystery. Key to the normative functions of these problem and health pages was the question/answer, problem/solution dialogic mode, wherein all problems were presented as dichotomous and soluble. As Hall has observed, past portrayals of sex to adolescents – both in formal sex education and in the mass media – often problematised sex, were silent on the subject of recreation or pleasure and constructed a punitive narrative for those who engaged in sexual activities.331 On the surface this appeared true in the early days of the two magazines under discussion,
329 Lily Rothman, ‘How AIDS Change the History of Sex Education: The conversation about what to teach and when shifted in the 1980s’, Time, (12 November 2014), time.com/3578597/aids-sex-ed-history/ [accessed 21/10/2016]; Johnathan Zimmerman, Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education, (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. 117-120. 330 Biological sex in MIZZ and Just Seventeen was invariably understood as biologically manifest and as a male/female binary. Conceptions of gender were, as will be discussed, somewhat more fluid. 331 Lesley A. Hall, ‘In Ignorance and in Knowledge: Reflections on the History of Sex Education in Britain’, Shaping Sexual Knowledge: A Cultural History of Sex Education in Twentieth Century Europe, ed. by Lutz D. H. Sauerteig, Roger Davidson, (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 19-36, p. 20. 125 where representations of sex often took the form of a problem, seemingly maintaining the chastity-promoting narrative Jackie proselytised. The solutions found in the pages of Just Seventeen were very different in emphasis and sexual pleasure far from absent. Where Jackie, to quote McRobbie, ‘eliminated the possibility of strong supportive relationships between people of different ages ...or indeed between girls’, Just Seventeen and MIZZ entreated girls to place friends before boyfriends and sexual relationships; where Jackie elevated ‘to dizzying heights the supremacy of the heterosexual romantic partnership’, Just Seventeen and MIZZ solidly refused to be silenced by Section 28 and consciously criticised it.332 Moreover, while the problems represented to Jackie’s readers were always presented as individual rather than social – thus allowing only personal resolutions and avoiding the move towards collective change333 – the agony aunts at MIZZ and Just Seventeen often reframed personal problems as more general teenage issues, offering universalised and implicitly politicised answers. Furthermore, these magazines often picked up on social questions, making them the subject of special reports or extended factual explorations in order to draw teenage attention to the social context that fostered issues such as rape, teenage pregnancy, substance abuse, unemployment and homelessness – to name but a few.334 Rather than suggesting that such problems were an inevitable aspect of adolescence – which following Jackie would have the effect of maintaining the status quo – this recast the personal and rendered it political. Frequently readers’ attention was drawn to the social nature of the problems afflicting Britain’s youth as a collective group and solutions involving politicised youth organisations were offered up.335 Indeed, Just Seventeen and MIZZ often relocated the problematic aspects of sex away from the act itself, suggesting instead that social factors such as ‘prejudice’, ‘ignorance’, ‘jealousy’, ‘sexism’ and ‘old fashioned attitudes’
332 McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture, p. 101. 333 McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture, p. 109. 334 See for example Anon, ‘Dangerous Drugs: Facts of Life’, Just Seventeen, Issue 16, (May 17 1984), pp. 30-31; Anon, ‘Teenage Mothers,’ Just Seventeen, Issue 26, (October 4 1984), pp. 20-21; Rosalyn Chissick, 'It'll never happen to me' Just Seventeen, Issue 96, (April 30 1986) pp. 20-21, an article on rape. April Joyce, ‘Rape: A positive approach to prevention…’, MIZZ, Issue 67 (October 21 – November 3 1987), pp. 48-49; Richard Brodie, ‘Everything you ought to know about drugs but no one ever told you’, MIZZ, Issue 38 (September 12-267 1986), pp. 48-49. 335 Letters regarding nuclear war featured on several occasions in the mid to late 1980s for instance, and the option of joining the youth branch of the Campaign for Nuclear disarmament was frequently offered up as solution to this anxiety. For example: A worried Matchstick to Just Seventeen, ‘Letters page’, Just Seventeen, Issue 29, (November 15 1984) p. 37; Anon, ‘When the Air Raid Warning Sounds’, Just Seventeen, Issue 27, (October 18 1984), pp. 20-21. 126 created ‘taboos’, ‘guilt’ ‘shyness’, ‘homophobia’ and the ‘double standard’ – wherein ‘boys can sleep around but girls are expected to be virgins’ – these, it was argued, fostered the problems adolescent girls experienced.336 To combat these social ills, beyond the provision of ‘information’ and ‘myth-busting’ the two magazines advocated varied forms of self-education, self-reliance, self-knowledge, self-control and platonic relationships – in short, the cultivation of the idealised knowing self.337 Such entreaties to know and rely upon oneself by seeking new and useful forms of knowledge peppered the pages of these magazines, but were most obvious in the problem pages, which were a hallmark of this genre. McRobbie argued that the function of the problem page was to sum up ‘the ideological content of the magazine. It hammers home ...all those ideas and values prevalent in the other sections’.338 Her observations certainly ring true when investigating earlier magazines with their larger proportion of subtly ideological romantic fictional content, but within the factual and ‘true-life-story’ dominated pages of the teenage lifestyle magazines of the 1980s and 1990s, a shift in emphasis is required. So dominant were the advice columns in the pages of Just Seventeen and MIZZ that it was the rest of the magazine which functioned to reinforce the multiple overt discourses present in the problem pages. Throughout the magazines the problem pages were echoed in the textual structure, parlance and problem/solution narratives of other features; the inherently dialogic and pluralising form of the question/answer problem page structure was made coherent through the ideological and pedagogic corroboration of other pages. These functioned to coalesce the championing of multiple teenage identities into an ideology of knowing individualism. AIDS first appeared in Just Seventeen on 13 March 1985, some years after its initial emergence in Britain’s mainstream adult press as a ‘mystery’ disease.339 Sexually transmitted diseases were not a common subject among the problem or health pages of Just Seventeen until discourses began to shift to include safer-sex rhetoric in 1988. Rather mid-1980s sex-related content concerned pregnancy, contraception,
336 Suszie Hayman, ‘“What Boys Think” about love, sex and birth control’, Just Seventeen, 38 (March 6, 1985), p. 18; Tricia Kreitman, ‘The best thing anyone told me about sex...’, MIZZ, 5 (June 21 – July 5 1985), p. 16;.Melanie McFadyean, ‘Advice’, Just Seventeen, 38 (March 6, 1985), pp. 41-42; Melanie McFadyean, ‘Advice’, Just Seventeen, 52 (June 12, 1985), p. 43; Unknown, ‘New Wives Tales’, MIZZ, 4 (May 24 – June 6, 1985), pp. 52-53. 337 Rose, Inventing Our Selves, pp. 2-17. 338 McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture, p. 111. 339 See the Times article ‘Mystery new killer disease’, Sunday Times, (September 5, 1982), p. 16, for example. 127 masturbation and the emotional impact of sex. The inclusion of a 289-word column devoted to AIDS in March 1985 is testament to the gravity with which the disease was treated by the editorial team. Up until the appearance of the piece ‘AIDS: The facts’, Just Seventeen’s coverage of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) had been limited to discussions of cystitis and thrush which emphasised their non-sexual origins. The only mentions of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) or diseases in Just Seventeen, until AIDS became the subject of discussion, appeared in health columns concerned with quelling the fears of teenage girls, or in the letters of worried self-identified ‘virgin’ readers writing to the agony aunt convinced they had ‘a VD’ only to be told it was likely thrush or cystitis. For instance, embedded within an edition of the regular feature ‘The Facts of Life’ titled ‘The Female Body’ was a typical discussion,340 under the subheading ‘Infections’:
Infections in your vaginas are ...common. Many girls are terrified if they get one, since they believe the myth that they can only be venereal diseases. This is just not true. The vagina is ...delicate ...It’s perfectly normal to have a slight discharge from your vagina; this is just the natural juice... Changes in this discharge are a sure sign of problems. The most usual one is called thrush. This can affect any woman: 60 year old maiden aunts, pregnant mothers, 13 year old virgins and day old babies get it... [It] ...can happen if you forget to take out your last tampon at the end of your period. Or you can damage the delicate tissues in the vagina with vaginal deodorants. [Emphasis in original] 341 This discussion of thrush as a ‘common’ affliction of ‘any woman’ and of secretions as ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ was in stark contrast to the alienating representations of venereal disease in the column above. Arousal and sexual pleasure are presented here as compatible with the construction of the vagina as ‘delicate’ and rejected as potential causes for shame. The origins of venereal diseases remain unexplained; those who thought they had it were ‘terrified’ and it is cast as the stuff of ‘myth’ – the antithesis to the commonness of thrush. While thrush was absorbed into the realm of normal adolescent experience, preventing any associated disruptive effects it might have on the construction of normative adolescent female identity, venereal diseases are constructed
340 This feature was a regular part of Just Seventeen from its inception in 1983 to 1985, covering a variety health and emotional wellbeing-related topics from sleep to homosexuality. 341 Unknown, ‘Facts of Life: The Female Body’, Just Seventeen, 2:6 (March 22, 1984) p. 15. 128 here as something which happens to an other. Venereal diseases did not happen to ‘any woman’ who was ‘normal’ and ‘delicate’ as she should be, rather it was those who fall outside the acceptable roles of ‘mother’ or ‘maiden’ – which made up Just Seventeen’s construction of the ‘any woman’ category – who might suffer from it. This kind of representation of sexual health had the unfortunate consequence of compounding the othering effects of venereal diseases and demonstrates that older chaste ideal femininities, akin to those suggested in Jackie, persisted within the narratives of newer teenage magazines. Indeed, the discussion of any possibility of the sexual transmission of thrush or cystitis – which was later discussed in similar terms in the column – is conspicuously absent; an omission which was significant. In early editions of Just Seventeen, the development of a sexually transmitted disease as a potential consequence of sex was represented only when it appeared first in letters to rather than from an Agony Aunt. Before AIDS appeared in the magazine – and for some time after – only once was information about venereal diseases volunteered unsolicited. Even in a large booklet given away with the magazine titled ‘Just Ask: Straight Answers To Hundreds of Questions’ the only infections mentioned were cystitis and thrush.342 Rather, it was in representations like the one below that venereal diseases, and those that suffered them, were most commonly constructed in Just Seventeen:
I have noticed a rash around my vagina... I have come to the conclusion that it is VD. I’ve never had sex so I must have caught it off a lavatory seat. ...I have O levels soon and can’t work for worrying. What should I do? You can’t get serious venereal infections like gonorrhoea or syphilis from lavatory seats. You can only get them by having sex with someone who is infected. But what you can get are minor vaginal infections like thrush ...If you haven’t had sex, you obviously don’t have a sexually transmitted infection. [Emphasis in original]343
Here the reader’s letter clearly constructs a narrative wherein ‘VD’ is seen as a natural consequence of sex; this representation was then reinforced by the disavowal of a sexual connection to thrush by the Agony Aunt without any demystification regarding the
342 Unknown, ‘Just Ask: Straight Answers To Hundreds of Questions’, booklet accompanying Just Seventeen, 38 (March 6, 1985) 343 Melanie McFadyean, ‘Advice’, Just Seventeen, 2:6 (March 22, 1984) p. 40. 129
‘serious’ diseases referred to or how potentially infectious they might be. The readers narrative also constructs social embarrassment as a normal consequence of contracting a venereal disease – explaining ‘I can’t go to my doctor as he is a family friend’ – a narrative which is then reinforced by Agony Aunt Melanie McFadyean assuring the anonymous reader that ‘[the] so called “VD clinics” are full of people who have infections that are nothing to do with sex, so don’t feel ashamed or embarrassed.’344 Shame and embarrassment were reserved for those people who had ‘infections that are to do with sex’ [my emphasis] rather than those suffering a bout of ‘any woman’’s thrush. The structure of this othering narrative would later be echoed by many of those which constructed the ‘at risk’ identities which accompanied the cultural construction of AIDS. Interestingly, on the few occasions that information was provided which explicitly represented sexual intercourse as a vector for disease within a normal teenage relationship it was thrush that dominated the discussion. Readers were told to avoid intercourse if they had thrush and that ‘[t]his infection is not necessarily sexually transmitted but it’s a good idea for your sexual partner, if you have one, also to get checked out by the doctor.’345 The atypical reply quoted here continued with a display of the first hints of safer-sex advice: ‘If you make love get your partner to use a sheath and make sure he washes before’. However it lacked any physical or medical explanation as to why this barrier method might be effective, an explicit explanation which would become a core part of the safer-sex mantra in Just Seventeen a decade later.346
‘The most important thing for you to know ...is that you stand virtually no chance of catching it’: Constructing ‘at risk’ identities in Just Seventeen
Between the first appearance of AIDS in Just Seventeen and MIZZ in 1985, and the introduction of combination therapies in 1996, the frequency, extent and focus of representations of AIDS in both magazines, while differing ideologically, largely mirrored the adult media. This was because adult and teenage media purveyors were
344 McFadyean, ‘Advice’, p. 40. 345 Melanie McFadyean, ‘Advice’, Just Seventeen, Issue 28 (November 1, 1984), p. 47. 346 McFadyean, ‘Advice’, (November 1, 1984), p. 47. 130 motivated to cover similar issues by some of the same factors, with the tone of the two magazines appearing most similar to the progressive arm of the adult press. MIZZ and Just Seventeen both began reporting on AIDS in 1985, with Just Seventeen carrying its first full-length feature on the disease in 1986.347 1986 also saw the launch of the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) AIDS-education campaign, ‘Don’t aid AIDS’, often recollected as the ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’ campaign.348 From 1986 onwards both magazines, incorporated DHSS anti-drugs and AIDS awareness adverts, and from 1988 they also began carrying Health Educational Authority (HEA) safer-sex and AIDS-education campaigns. Over the years, these would cover the dangers of intravenous drug-use and unprotected sex, condom negotiation and the avoidance of casual sex. AIDS coverage in MIZZ and Just Seventeen changed considerably between 1985 and 1995 as they adjusted to include new characters, narratives, disease trajectories and areas of attention. Ideologically, though, just as the editorials in the first editions of both magazines indicated their future direction, the first representations of AIDS in MIZZ and Just Seventeen are suggestive of their future portrayals of the disease. When AIDS’ first appeared in Just Seventeen it shared the issue with the usual features on pop stars, beauty products and the two double-page specials: ‘Anorexia: The fear of Food’ and ‘Young & Homeless’, while the front cover advertised a free ‘Page- Three Boy Poster Give-Away’. It shared the page with columns on diabetes, plucking youthful eyebrows, and changes in Irish contraception law among other things [Figure 16]. That AIDS appeared among the regular ‘Personal Column’ mixture of light pieces on grooming, health, and the exercise routine of the week demonstrates that, while the disease was being presented to the readers of Just Seventeen as something worth reading about, it was as yet unworthy of even the half-a-page of print warranted by ‘normal’ infections such as thrush, or more universal adolescent problems such as anorexia and homelessness. However, the piece was far from unremarkable and closer examination reveals direct moves within the text to intervene in the cultural construction of HIV positive identities.
347 Anon, ‘AIDS: The Answers To Your Questions’, Just Seventeen, Issue 127, (November 19 1986), pp. 30-31. 348 Becky Field, Kaye Wellings, Dominic McVey, Promoting Safer Sex: a History of the Health Education Authority’s Mass Media Campaigns on HIV, AIDS and Sexual Health, 1987-1996, (London: Health Education Authority, 1997), pp. 13-31; Virginia Berridge, ‘AIDS, the Media and Health Policy’, Health Education Journal, 50:4 (1991),pp. 179-185, pp. 179-180. 131
Figure 16. 'Personal Column', Just Seventeen, (March 13, 1985), pp. 52-53.
The column – ‘AIDS: The Facts’ – begins in earnest with criticism of the perceived racist and homophobic bias afflicting and stalling scientific research into AIDS. ‘The facts’ provided are delivered in an unemotional tone, but the piece ends by parodying the anxiety it had set out to allay:
All the publicity over AIDS has alerted people to the dangers of the disease – but hasn’t done much to help them understand it. So people who run absolutely no risk of ever catching AIDS are becoming increasingly worried by the rumours instead of understanding the facts. Part of the problem is that so little is known about the disease; some people blame the lack of research on the fact that AIDS is most prevalent among homosexual men. As a health adviser asked, “Do we have to wait for a nice white straight couple to get it before it is taken seriously?” Here is what is known about the disease: AIDS stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. It’s a virus which attacks cells in the blood that protect people against disease, such as pneumonia and cancers. The risk of contracting AIDS is only high if you are a homosexual man, a regular drug taker who shares needles, or, up until recently, a haemophiliac who has blood transfusions. AIDS is spread by blood or semen, not saliva or bodily contact or being in the same room as an AIDS victim. 132
Not everyone who contracts the AIDS virus will actually suffer from the disease. Scientists now believe that only one in 10 will develop the full disease. Of the 118 AIDS victims in Britain, fewer than half have died as a result of the disease. Probably the most important thing for you to know about AIDS is that you stand virtually no chance of catching it. Certainly not from drinking tea out of a cup at your neighbour’s whose cousin-has-a-friend-who’s-gay. So ignore the recent hysteria in the newspapers and pity – don’t fear – the victims.349 It is useful here to compare this representation of AIDS with the above portrayals of thrush and ‘VD’. The dichotomous problem/solution narrative mode of the problem page and the ‘Facts of Life’ health page is clearly repeated here: fear and anxiety are suggested as the norm and universalised. The magazine then presents itself as intervening to allay fears – here created by ‘rumours’– through the provision of ‘The Facts’ and an ‘at risk’ other is then identified to prove to the readers that they themselves are not ‘at risk’. However, unlike earlier representations of venereal diseases, which constructed ephemeral, diseased and ‘at risk’ identities merely as the antitheses to the norm, this column identifies emphatically both ‘risk’ groups and ‘AIDS victims’. This othering effect was rendered more complex than the thrush/VD dichotomy seen earlier by the direct identification of a perceived source of ‘at risk’ identity construction: newspapers. While the previous texts referred to their cultural context by alluding to myths; this text actively criticised and identified other texts and cultural perceptions, asserting an unprejudiced moral authority of sorts while adopting a counter-narrative mode of address. This direct reference to adult-media ‘publicity’ and ‘hysteria in the newspapers’ demonstrates the need for further investigation into the extent of difference between representations of AIDS in teenage media from those in the adult media. Comparable representations of HIV/AIDS in 1980s and 1990s adult media are numerous; Just Seventeen was far from alone in its criticism of ‘hysteria’ around AIDS, nor was the provision of information in a factual list designed to repudiate myths and rumours innovative.350 The Guardian, The Observer, The Times and The Daily Telegraph all carried articles critical of AIDS representation, targeting the tabloid press, the medical establishment and the government, but even these broadsheets engaged in
349 Unknown, ‘AIDS: The Facts’, Just Seventeen, (March 13, 1985), p. 53. Emphasis in original. 350 See for example Unknown, ‘The real plague is panic’, The Guardian, (February 19, 1985), p. 12; Clare Dover, ‘Why we must not panic over AIDS’, Daily Express, (February 21, 1985), p. 8. 133 the ‘gay plague’ narrative and other types of sensationalism.351 The key differences, between late twentieth century representations of AIDS targeted at an adult audience, and those seen above in the teenage magazines, was an avoidance of sexually explicit information, any narrative of the disease’s trajectory towards death and the ideas of the disease as a modern plague. Interestingly, the origin and international spread of AIDS narratives, which commanded extensive column inches in the adult press and constructed it as a foreign disease, were also absent from teenage magazines. ‘AIDS: The Facts’ was not an article designed to sensationalise the disease and ignite copy-selling fear. It offers no opportunity for lascivious voyeurism and lacks the hallmarks of the pornography of death which came to typify the majority of AIDS reportage from the sympathetic to the vitriolic.352 Indeed while ‘homosexuals’ are the first member of the ‘high’ risk group identified in the column, they are placed within an unbroken list which includes those cast elsewhere as ‘innocent victims’ of the disease, creating a rare parity in representation. It might be assumed that this detail of syntax is mere happenstance, but the concluding entreaty in the piece – to ‘pity – don’t fear – the victims’ – reinforces this egalitarian portrayal which rejects the innocent victim/deserving deviant binary. The column did not go so far as to point out that diseases lacked sapience so could not bear prejudices against particular sexual orientations or differentiate between sexual acts and sexuality, but this was as typical of the teenage press as it was of the adult press.353 That said, MIZZ’s first offering of AIDS representation attempted to remove homosexual men from the ‘at risk’ group and replace them with a more inclusive and ambiguous category of people who have had ‘intercourse’ with an infected person, or come into ‘contact with infected blood.’354
351 Martin Amis, ‘Mother Nature and the Plague’, The Observer, May 1, 1983), p. 36; Martin Amis, ‘Making Sense of AIDS’, The Observer, (June 23, 1985), p.17. Peter Wilsher, Neville Hodgkinson. ‘At Risk’ The Sunday Times, (November 2, 1986), p. 25. 352 Here I borrow Gorer’s shorthand for the morbid aesthetics of death’s late 20th-Century representation in the media. This voyeurism was particularly obvious when AIDS coverage concerned celebrities with the disease, but generally coverage in the press cultivated dramatic narratives. See for example, Baz Bamigboye, Peter McKay, ‘“He died a living skeleton – and so ashamed” The Last Days of Rock Hudson’, Daily Mail (October 3, 1985), p. 1; George Gordon ‘Haunted by the epidemic of fear’,. Daily Mail, (October 3, 1985), p. 6; Dover, Pratt, ‘Women Victims of Deadly Gay Plague’, p. 2; Geoffrey Gorer, ‘The Pornography of Death’, Encounter, 5:4 (1955), pp. 49-52, pp. 51-52. 353 This elision between a sex act and sexual orientation continues to this day and still hampers AIDS- education efforts by targeting ‘at risk’ groups according to the perceived parameters of sexual identity. This problematically leaves out anyone who is at risk of contracting HIV through behaviours which are likely to expose them to the virus, but do not personally identify as a member of a targeted sexual identity. 354 Tricia Kreitman, ‘Body and Soul’, MIZZ, 1 (April 12-25 1985), p. 26. 134
AIDS appeared in the first edition of MIZZ magazine on its problem page among a variety of letters. This first issue included beauty and fashion advice, pop gossip and several features including one on violence against women and the first of a regular contemporary politics feature named ‘Talking Heads’.355 In the first edition ‘Talking Heads’ interviewed ‘Page Three girl Samantha Fox’ to foster a discussion of arguments for and against pornography.356 Tricia Kreitman, Agony Aunt to MIZZ for seventeen years, was advertised as ‘a qualified psychologist who specialises in sexual and emotional problems’, having trained with ‘the Family Planning Association’ and taught ‘managers and employees how to get on together’.357
Figure 17. Tricia Kreitman, 'Body and Soul', MIZZ, 1 (April 12-25, 1985), p. 26-27
355 Ursula Kenny, ‘Enough is Enough: girls fight back against street violence’, MIZZ, (April 12-25, 1985), pp. 48-49. 356 Ursula Kenny, ‘Talking Heads: Samantha Fox takes the hot seat’, MIZZ, (April 12-25, 1985), pp. 59- 60. A later edition would interview Gillick on contraception to foster discussion about provision for under-sixteens. 357 Tricia Kreitman, ‘Body and Soul’, MIZZ, 1 (April 12-25 1985), p. 26. 135
The display of Tricia Kreitman’s relevant qualifications was a departure from the norm. Agony Aunts often wrote under pseudonyms and were often qualified by virtue of an ascribed title, experience and the possession of ‘common sense’ rather than more formal training. Indeed when TV Hits’ Agony Aunt ‘Mandy’ (Nikki Groocock- Renshaw) drew the media eye upon teen Agony Aunts in 1995 as a group, Kreitman was able to weather the storm rather better than some of her less qualified colleagues because of her ability to access the authority of the intellectual establishment.358 The letters for the first edition of ‘Body & Soul’ – MIZZ’s regular problem page feature – were collected in advance of the first edition from Kreitman’s ‘own patients’ postbag’ and would have been picked to chime with, and entice, an imagined letter-writing readership. Evidently, the editorial board and Kreitman felt that AIDS would be a problem their readers would have erroneous worries about contracting. Kreitman’s Body & Soul pages were busier yet more polished than the early Just Seventeen’s ‘Advice’ pages, which mimicked the newspaper columns many readers would have been familiar with. Her advice, delivered in deceptively chatty language, was typically directive and frank. Kreitman’s brusque response to the letter regarding AIDS is representatively didactic, not just of her AIDS-related advice, but of any problem which hinted at underlying prejudices.359 Just Seventeen and MIZZ’s first representations of AIDS foregrounded fear and ignorance – caused by media portrayals of the disease – as the key problems afflicting adolescents’ interactions with AIDS. MIZZ’s first venture into AIDS representation took the shape of a problem-page letter. The problem-solving narrative construction, more subtle in Just Seventeen’s list of facts, is blatant. The would-be reader explains her problem:
For the last few years I have been mixing with a lot of guys who are gay... Sometimes if it is really a late night I stay with one of them at their flat. But recently because of all the talk about AIDS I have started to worry that I could catch it from them. I want to stay friends with them but I’m so scared.
358Jane Green, ‘Spotlight on the confidantes who give out advice on the sex problems: We meet the teenage mag agony aunts’, Daily Express, (November 30, 1995) pp. 48-49. 359 For examples see her responses to cheating boyfriends, bullying friends, unsatisfying sex and unsympathetic parents in any of the following: Tricia Kreitman, ‘Body and Soul’, MIZZ, 6 (June 21 – July 4, 1985), pp. 52-53; Tricia Kreitman, ‘Body and Soul’, MIZZ, 7 (June 5 – July 18, 1985), pp. 44-45; Tricia Kreitman, ‘Body and Soul’, MIZZ, 9 (August 2-15, 1985), pp. 26-27. 136
The unknown writer’s narrative is to be read as a typical teenager’s reaction to the ‘gay plague’ narrative coupled with ideas of ‘casual transmission’. Both of these storylines were sustained well after ‘blood-born’ and ‘heterosexual transmission’ were publicised as vectors.360 Kreitman replied by first addressing the implicit ‘gay plague’ narrative, while carefully avoiding giving the specious aetiology space on the page. She begins her reply with an interrogative question; demanding that her readers questioned their presumption that ‘gay automatically’ meant dying from AIDS. Despite the obvious ‘gay plague’ subtext, Kreitman avoids indulging in the use of the mitigating inverted commas so loved by the adult press which routinely revelled in the salience of this narrative while protected from criticism via the implementation of a few punctuation marks .361
Well, first of all what makes you so sure any of them have AIDS? All this panic about it is really getting out of hand. Just because a bloke is gay doesn’t automatically mean he’s going to get AIDS.362 Having addressed the sexuality-based misconception, Kreitman moved on to deconstruct the framing of AIDS as a plague, addressing both its virulence and morbidity:
...less than 1% of people who come into contact with an AIDS sufferer will actually develop any symptoms. Forget all the hysteria you have read in the papers, the only proven way you can contract AIDS is through intercourse or by contact with infected blood. So far it has never been proved that you can catch it from saliva. So if you haven’t been having sex with any of your friends then your fears are totally unfounded.363 While the explanation of viral transmission given here is vague (later offerings would specify the ‘exchange’ of bodily fluids), the deconstruction of homosexuality as a naturally HIV positive identity is deliberate and markedly different from Just Seventeen’s first offering. While Kreitman’s explanation shared Just Seventeen’s silence on the trajectory towards death explicit in most adult AIDS journalism, her silence went
360 I use inverted commas here because terms such as heterosexual or homosexual transmission are unhelpful as they suggest the existence of heterosexual or homosexual sex – whatever they might be – rather than describing specific sex acts which risk the transmission of HIV through the exchange of blood or semen. They are however contemporary to the time period I am discussing and will be used and deconstructed where appropriate as above. 361 See for example: Unknown, 'AIDS 'not a gay plague', The Daily Mirror, (6 September ,1985); Stewart Morris 'GAY PLAGUE' IS JUST A MYTH: Killer disease could be caught by almost anyone', South London Press, (6 June, 1986). 362 Kreitman, ‘Body and Soul’, p. 26. 363 Kreitman, ‘Body and Soul’, p. 26. 137 further by refusing the narrative of victimhood. Just Seventeen invoked the term ‘victim’ three times to describe HIV positive identities. Kreitman, alongside denying the inevitability of homosexual infection, rejected the inescapability of the social and physical death AIDS engendered by virtue of its debilitating stigma and symptoms. Rather Kreitman used the term ‘AIDS sufferer’, implying an active condition, rather than the passive ‘victim’ construction seen elsewhere. This refutation of dominant AIDS narratives is representative of both Kreitman’s responses to AIDS in MIZZ’s problem pages and representations of the disease in the magazine more generally. Another representative example is provided by the ridiculing treatment the casual transmission of AIDS myth received on the page ‘New Wives Tales’ (See Figure 18). The feature parodied the comic strip pages of older magazines, each square satirising a common anxiety with the cartoon announcing the myth which would be dissolved.
Figure 18. 'New Wives Tales: "Kiss a homosexual?! -Don't you realise you'll get AIDS?!!"364
The AIDS box reads: ‘Kiss a homosexual?! - Don't you realise you'll get AIDS?!!’, and ends emphatcally with ‘AIDS cannot be spread by being near anyone who has this tragic illness.’365 Again terms such as ‘victim’ and ‘gay plague’ are studiously avoided, it is the illness where the tragedy is located, not the identities associated with it.
364 MIZZ, 4 (May 24 – June 6, 1984), pp. 52-53. 365 Unknown, ‘New Wives Tales’, MIZZ, 4 (May 24 – June 6, 1985) p. 53. 138
Kreitman’s reply ends by simultaneously dismissing the fears of her reader and by advising an unnecessary HIV antibody test:
Don’t let … [fears] spoil a good friendship. If your worries do start getting the better of you then ask for a blood test at your local hospital to put your mind at rest. Any hospital will do this for you – just walk in and ask. 366 In addition to providing a misrepresentation of how hard it was to get the HTLV-3 test in April of 1985,367 there is also a discernible denial of the pervasive social stigma associated with AIDS in Kreitman’s suggestion that a healthy reader request a test. Requesting the HTLV-3 test was often tantamount to declaring likely HIV-positivity at the very least, at a time when being HIV positive culturally meant being an AIDS sufferer, regardless of one’s actual health status.368 Even those who tested negative were hailed forever as having an ‘at risk’ identity, by virtue of having had the test, and in the early days of AIDS being ‘at risk’ usually meant at least a portion of the stigma those with AIDS were forced to endure. Presumably, the motive behind Kreitman's rather suspect advice lay in the provision of a reassuring solution which gave the impression of empowering the reader – she can take the test or not, she can be prejudiced or not, she can spoil a good friendship or not. In much the same way as risk engendered blame, the empowering format Kreitman’s advice took refused inactivity on the part of the reader and was rigidly didactic; suggesting knowledge and tolerance as the only viable solutions to the fear and prejudice which was presented as the problem. The attempt to persuade the reader, through repeated application of the problem/solution narrative in the form of didactic antithetical dichotomies – ignorance/knowledge, prejudice/tolerance, fear/empathy – when AIDS was the subject under discussion in both MIZZ and Just Seventeen remains significant. Unable to offer a ‘cure’ for AIDS itself, MIZZ and Just Seventeen seem to indicate, in their first representations of AIDS, a will to mitigate at least some of the social effects of the disease. While both magazines focused first on the fear of their imagined readership, they also moved to combat the sources of this anxiety. These
366 Kreitman, ‘Body and soul’, p. 26. 367The HTLV-3 only became available in 1985 and supplies were limited and testing facilities understaffed. Kreitman’s mistake might have stemmed from her position within the sexual health profession which might have given her a false sense of its true availability. 368 Pamphlets intended to inform adults about the HIV-antibody test warned readers about the potential risks associated with merely taking the test, regardless of result, listing stigma among them. For example Wellcome Archive: EPH 503 AIDS: Health Education Authority, AIDS the Test: Yes or No? (London: Bradleys, 1988); Islington Council HIV Unit, The HIV Antibody Test: Yes or No, (London: Islington Council, 1988?). 139 efforts would continue until the focus of AIDS representation shifted away from denial of reader’s fears of casual transmission to the perception of adolescents as an ‘at risk identity’. This would see Just Seventeen’s ‘every woman’ reconfigured as a girl who knew how to, and would want to, practice safe-sex. These important changes will be discussed in the final section, which tracks the way safer-sex information was represented dialogically to teenage girls in Just Seventeen and MIZZ.
Risk, blame and narratives of ‘safe-sex’ The meaning of the term ‘safe-sex’ – and the cagier term ‘safer-sex’ – is as culturally constructed and temporally linked as any other description of sexual behaviour. The change in sexual health education rhetoric from discourses of contraception as underage pregnancy prevention, to ‘safer-sex’ as AIDS (and other STDs) transmission prevention, was catalysed by the AIDS awareness campaigns of 1986 and 1987. While whole pages and double-page spreads of teen magazines were taken up by government- issue adverts, Just Seventeen and MIZZ added nuance to the safe/unsafe dichotomy presented therein; providing resistant and discursive spaces which troubled the cultural construction of ‘at risk’ being synonymous with ‘to blame’. This was achieved by placing government adverts in close proximity to problem pages, health pages and special features which added shades of grey to the government adverts which at best misunderstood the complexities and power dynamics within teenage heterosexual relationships and at worst amounted to clumsy victim-blaming in hopes that teenagers might be shamed into using condoms. 140
Figure 19. Isobel Irvine, the MIZZ book of AIDS, (November 27 - December 10, 1991)369
By the 1990s, both magazines had developed a variety of techniques to combat the undesirable aspects of these adverts, while using safer-sex content as a selling point. For instance, in 1991, MIZZ gave away a booklet devoted to AIDS as a freebie: The MIZZ book of AIDS. The booklet bears all the hallmarks of a conventional teenage girls’ magazine, from quizzes to ‘True Life Stories’, and it represents teen magazine AIDS-
369 Isobel Irvine, the MIZZ book of AIDS, (London: IPC Magazines, 1991), cover matter. 141 education at its most sophisticated [Figure 19 and Figure 20]. In just 16 pages, MIZZ offered accounts of teenagers engaged in AIDS activism, a true-life story from a teenage boy with HIV, a graduated breakdown of sexual activities from high-to-low risk (including anal sex with and without a condom) and then offered a quiz for readers to test their knowledge against [Figure 20].370
Figure 20. 3 pages inside the MIZZ book of AIDS
The incorporation of government health education adverts into these magazines began with anti-heroin education material in 1986. These adverts were presented without much effort to explain the social causes of drug addiction, but the sexually- active teenager represented a far greater portion of their demographic and so naturally greater effort was made to encompass these adverts into the texts more seamlessly.371 It would have been in the interest of both magazines to balance the frightening and didactic elements of government-issue AIDS-adverts with more sympathetic copy, lest readers used to a chatty glossy magazine be frightened away by the presence of the top- down sex education that was so ill-received in the classroom.
370 Isobel Irvine, the MIZZ book of AIDS, (London: IPC Magazines, 1991) pp. 3-8, 10-11. 371 See for example MIZZ, 37 (August 29-Septemeber 11, 1986) p. 45. 142
Figure 21. Department of Health and Social Security ‘Don’t Aid AIDS’ Adverts372
The ‘DON’T AID AIDS’ campaign was typified by verbose and ambiguous explanations as to who might be ‘at risk’ and entreaties to ‘reduce the risk to yourself’ by limiting your number of sexual partners and insisting ‘he wears a condom’.373 In comparison to the HEA’s ‘Don’t die of ignorance’ campaign, which constructed ideas of death lurking within every unknown sexual partner and engendered a sense of impending doom, the more measured ‘DON’T AID AIDS’ suggested the presence of a controllable risk which could be avoided. This placed the onus on the individual, suggesting they had the power to avoid AIDS through abstinence at best, or condom use at worst. This risk/blame dichotomy became increasingly emphatic as safer-sex education materials developed. For instance, the HEA produced a series of adverts circulated from 1988 which ridiculed popular ‘excuses’ for not practising safer-sex and
372 Department of Health and Social Security, ‘Your next sexual partner could be that very special person: The one that gives you AIDS’, MIZZ, 45 (December 17-30, 1986), p. 29; Department of Health and Social Security, ‘You know what’s in his mind but do you know what’s in his blood?’, MIZZ, 48 (January 28-Februrary 10, 1987), p. 35. Both these adverts appeared adjacent to the ‘Body and Soul’ problem pages. 373 DHSS, ‘Your next sexual’, p. 29. 143 ended with the taglines ‘AIDS. You know the risk. The decision is yours’ or ‘AIDS – You’re as safe as you want to be’374 Both MIZZ and Just Seventeen used written copy to juxtapose these didactic dichotomies, criticise AIDS-education provisions, and to address key obstacles that might prevent the use of condoms by adolescent girls. For example, the fear of being perceived as ‘easy’ or ‘infected’ if girls insisted on safer-sex was continually discussed and readily implied a lack of understanding by adults in authority (doctors, teachers, parents, the HEA). This constituted a complex representational task for the editorial teams and agony aunts behind these magazines; they had an obligation to promote safer- sex without being perceived as promoting sex itself. These twin motives were often achieved through caveats, qualifications and discursive writing practices such as AIDS quizzes and surveys, as well as classic problem/solution format of problem page dialogues.375
Figure 22. ‘THE MIZZ AIDS SURVEY - help us to help you’
374 HEA, ‘“I thought only gays and drug users could catch it.” That’s his excuse, what will yours be?’, MIZZ, 81 (May 4-17, 1988) pp. 43-44. The aims and objectives of this campaign are outlined in Field, Wellings, Promoting Safer, pp. 14-17. 375 See Figure 22. 144
Quizzes, surveys and problem pages allowed for complex ideas to be discussed in a manner that drew readers in, creating an interactive text that gave them a sense of power as they read, rather than demanding they empower themselves. These interactive texts (in the sense that they encouraged girls to question each other and score themselves) also had the effect of extending the meaning of safer-sex from the mere practice of sex with a condom to the demonstrative performance of safer-sex awareness. By repeatedly providing safer-sex information through texts which appeared to be produced by the readers themselves, this sexual knowledge became both normal and desirable.
Figure 23. THE MIZZ AIDS SURVEY RESULTS376
If knowing about safe-sex practices could become part of the ‘any woman’- experience of adolescent femininity, any stigma it might carry could be eradicated. Here we see the same pragmatic employment of differing textual practices and discourses to normalise a stigmatised aspect of teenage health – knowing about and using condoms – as was previously discussed in relation to suffering from thrush. Admittedly, the
376‘THE MIZZ AIDS SURVEY RESULTS’, MIZZ, 58 (June 17-30 1987), pp. 10-11. 145 complex ideological motives of the adult producers involved in safer-sex education often resulted in confused dialogues that, in an attempt to achieve everything, tended at best to only create a space for discussion.377 Just Seventeen and MIZZ’s emphasis on the reader’s right to reply remains important though, and was a key reason why teenagers chose magazines as their favoured source for sexual health and specifically for AIDS education.378
The end of the teenage magazine era AIDS coverage in MIZZ and Just Seventeen would change significantly between 1985 and 1997, with new narratives, characters and foci added to their representational repertoire. Ideologically, however, the underlying motives behind these two magazines’ portrayals of the disease and ‘at risk’ and HIV positive identities did not change radically. While sex and death certainly sell, the representation of AIDS in MIZZ and Just Seventeen was motivated by more than profit and HEA edicts; early coverage in the magazines displayed a will to both prevent its predominantly white middle-class heterosexual, underage female readership from panic and prejudice. Later, when the focus of AIDS-education was largely dominated by safer-sex practices, the victim- blaming narrative, which suggested those who risked sex without a condom were to blame for their HIV-positivity, was juxtaposed with extensive sympathetic coverage of the reasons why teenagers continued to practice ‘unsafe sex’. The dialogic and intertextual response MIZZ and Just Seventeen provided in representing HIV positive identities deliberately, and by virtue of the structural peculiarities of the texts, created a discursive space which made room for more than fear, blame and prejudice; AIDS was absorbed alongside other ‘big’ issues – nuclear war, teen suicide, homelessness, anorexia, teen pregnancy etcetera – into a maelstrom of ideas around children’s rights, consent and identity politics. The youth magazine market and the sex education it provided diminished in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as audience tastes changed and safer-sex knowledge was sought elsewhere; Just Seventeen and MIZZ would not survive beyond the early 2000s. Writing in 2004 in Campaign, Jeremy Lee declared ‘[the] ‘traditional’ teen press is in trouble’ because teenage girls were now getting their ‘information from websites’ rather
377 ‘The MIZZ AIDS Survey – help us to help you’, MIZZ, 51 (March 11-24, 1987), pp. 10-11. 378 Wellings, The Role of Teenage Magazines, p. 13. 146 than the page of entertainment magazines.379 EMAP, in response to a drop in readers, conceded defeat and closed Smash Hits in February 2004, and then six months ceased publishing Just Seventeen. MIZZ, which had ‘lost 30 per cent of its circulation year on year’, changed format and ownership rather than close.380 While there is still a magazine going by the title MIZZ, it shares little more than name with its IPC predecessor. Much like Just Seventeen before its close, MIZZ (under Panini who purchased it in 2006) has been reduced to a monthly issue; moreover its target market and consequently content has changed, becoming less mature in tone. In an attempt to adapt to the changes in teenage popular culture MIZZ launched a website, but as media analysts pointed out, it was and continues to be a challenge for print titles to compete with new internet-based brands and find successful strategies for delivering and developing content across different but often complementary media platforms.381 Sex education was particularly affected by these transformations in youth culture. While schools remained official and regulated sites of sexual health education and magazines still contained some sexual health content in the late1990s and 2000s, the internet was fast becoming another voice in the sex education of Britain’s youth. Websites proved more than a new space for consumerism and pop entertainment; increasingly they took the place of the private, reader-directed text-based sex education that had been the remit of teenage magazines.382 The interactive and discursive elements of magazines as texts, their quizzes, photos and letters pages, were echoed in the websites teenagers sought sexual health information from.383 Yet again teenage popular culture filled the gap between the official school-based sexual health education teenagers received, and the information and discursive presentation of sex they wanted. Interactive and reactive in a way school curriculums could never be, the internet would become, as magazines had before it, a space where new and old HIV positive and feminine identities were constructed, deconstructed and disseminated.
379 Jeremy Lee, Campaign, (February 30, 2004) p. 37. 380 Lucy Aitken, Campaign, (August 20, 2004), p. 31, Claire Billings, Campaign, (August 22, 2008), p. 28. 381 Nat Ives, ‘Magazines’ teen sites no match for MySpace: Girls spend little time on web properties weighed down by print partners’, Advertising Age, 78:42 (October 22, 2008), p. 8. 382 Lalita K. Suzuki, Jerel P. Calzo, ‘The search for peer advice in cyberspace: An examination of online teen bulletin boards about health and sexuality’, Applied Developmental Psychology, 25 (2004), pp. 685- 698, pp. 686-688. 383 Nicola J. Gray, Jonathan D. Klein, Peter R. Noyce, Tracy S. Sesselberg, Judith A. Cantrill, ‘Health information-seeking behaviour in adolescence: the place of the internet’, Social Science & Medicine, 60 (2005), pp. 1467-1478, pp. 1468-1469. 147
Conclusions This chapter has analysed how adults, in representing STDs, HIV positive identities and safer-sex to children, exposed their own attitudes to identity, particularly with regard to gender, sexuality and personal agency. The threat of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s was often touted as the reason behind sexual health education interventions in popular children’s media, but as this chapter has shown, while teenage girl’s magazines post- AIDS slowly took on a safer-sex rhetoric, AIDS prevention was not the sole motive behind these representations of HIV positive identities. These magazines often deployed the representation of AIDS to children opportunistically; using the subject to open up discussions on sexuality, prejudice and gender politics, while simultaneously drawing their readers in with a critiques of government sexual health and education policy, which rendered the subject salient to their schoolgirl readership. Constructed as a rebellious space for teenagers and littered with direct reader contributions, these magazines presented themselves in disagreement with the political New Right’s characterisations of childhood as a precarious time without agency. Instead, they viewed their audience as having, and consuming ideas of an empowered teenage agency. Beginning with analyses of the cultural and ideological origins of the Luff Bill, this chapter used the Conservative politician’s anxiety about new sexualities, femininities and moral decay to frame some of the changes in the mass media and youth culture which Just Seventeen and MIZZ reflected. After a discussion of the peculiarities of the 1980s magazine market and the individualising function of its multiplicity of new consumer identities, the chapter then established how the discursive and varied space provided by these new magazines differed from the old market leader Jackie. It was here that the importance of the mass market’s dominant ideology of individualism, reconstructed for teenage consumption, was first articulated, outlining how Just Seventeen and MIZZ, in constructing their imagined audiences as knowing and empowered teenage agents, simultaneously proselytised the self-realised individual as a cultural ideal. The ideological and structural origins of these two magazines were then explored through a close textual analysis of their first issue’s mission statement. This allowed the discussion to draw out the contextual peculiarities which facilitated the representation of multiple feminine identities and sexualities, and eventually, the dissemination of HIV positive identities and safer-sex information. Analysing the 148 portrayal of maligned identities in Just Seventeen – which would later be cast as ‘at risk’ identities when AIDS was represented – allowed connections to be drawn between new and old narratives of risk, sexuality and femininity, demonstrating that these new magazines offered additional teenage femininities to their readers, without the total destruction of older ideological forms and narratives. Having established the cultural context in to which HIV positive identities were disseminated, the discussion moved to a direct analysis of AIDS representations. Using the first portrayal of AIDS in MIZZ and Just Seventeen as representative examples, the strategies adult producers employed in AIDS-related education to assuage fear were established. It was demonstrated that AIDS representations in the mid-1980s were constructed with the fears of the audience in mind first, and the sexual health messages they had the power to convey, second. These were a discussion of AIDS designed to encourage sympathy in their audience, to prevent stigma, rather than to discourage any particular ‘risky’ behaviour. These representations were then compared with later AIDS-content produced by the DHSS, the HEA and the magazines themselves, constructing and deconstruction ideas of an ‘at risk’ or blameworthy teenage girl. The multitude of mitigating editorial practices employed by teenage magazines to reduce the negative effects of government-issue AIDS adverts was then discussed. This evidenced the way the intertextual nature of these texts could be manipulated to facilitate counter-narratives sympathetic to teenagers newly cast as ‘at risk’. Avoiding both the morbid sensationalism of the tabloid press and the censorious tones of early government-issue AIDS adverts, as the final section of this chapter tracked, teenage magazines instead commodified safer-sex information. This commodification of safer- sex knowledge and the knowing teenage identities it engendered did not survive the transition from printed page to webpage unchanged. Elements of the stylistic turn towards interactive content such as quizzes and ever more elaborate reader confessions still proliferate in the online forums and interactive quizzes which litter the internet’s many safer-sex education websites. While the teenage girls’ magazines born of the 1980s and 1990s proved unable to compete with the flexibility and interactivity of the internet, they were arguably the first to offer teenagers safer-sex information as a thing to be consumed in the pursuit of a knowing teenage self, rather than as knowledge to be held in trust until adulthood. Though uniquely discursive, teenage girls’ magazines were not alone in their critique of government policy and school sex education. Ten years after Just Seventeen 149 and MIZZ first broached the topic of AIDS, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) aired a five episode AIDS storyline on the popular teenage soap opera Grange Hill. Though operating in the highly scrutinised field of children’s television, Grange Hill’s AIDS storyline was similarly feminist in approach, using the death of Lucy Mitchell’s mother from AIDS-related complications to make an argument for sex education in schools and to encourage sympathy, rather than prejudice, in its young audience.
150
Chapter 3 Timeline of Key Events
•BBC Children’s department replaced by Family Programmes Department 1964
•Sexual Offences Act decriminalises sex between consenting men over 21 in private •Abortion Act legalises abortion 1967 •BBC Children’s Department relaunched
•BBC launches Grange Hill, written and produced by Phil Redmond 1978
•Conservatives win UK election under Margaret Thatcher 1979
•First cases of AIDS in Britain documented in Lancet 1981
•House of Lords overturn Gillick ruling, Gillick Competence becomes an accepted measure of children's agency in law and medicine 1985 •AIDS first represented in teenage girls magazines MIZZ and Just Seventeen
•Introduction of the National Curriculum makes biological aspects of sex education compulsory 1988 •Section 28 of the Local Government Bill prohibits LEAs from ‘promoting’ homosexuality
•John Major becomes Conservative Prime minister 1990 •EastEnders runs AIDS storyline
•1993 Education Bill makes the provision of sex education in schools compulsory but removes non-biological aspects from statutory science curriculum Parents are given the 1993 right to withdraw their children from sex education classes.
•BBC airs a five episode Grange Hill storyline about AIDS and sex education 1995
•Tony Blair becomes Labour Prime Minister 1997
•Grange Hill series terminated 2008
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Chapter 3: The construction of HIV positive identities on children’s television, the BBC’s Grange Hill
On St Valentine’s Day in 1995, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) launched a new storyline on their long-running teen soap Grange Hill. This story arc, which would span five key episodes in series 18,384 followed the decline, death and posthumous diagnosis of Lucy Mitchell’s (Belinda Crane) mother from AIDS, and then the subsequent familial fallout experienced by Lucy and her father, Greg Mitchell (Tim Bentinick) in the wake of this diagnosis.385 As the plot progressed, Lucy and her father’s AIDS narrative began to encompass the school as a whole, the plot becoming intricate as more characters and voices were added to the representational melee. Interwoven within this narrative was another more neatly drawn story which followed the character of Felicity (Anna Aidoo), the daughter of devout Christian parents. Felicity’s parents have withdrawn her from the sex education classes that peppered these episodes, and so she misses out on the ‘AIDS workshop’ that featured prominently within the story arc. At the core of these intertwining stories was a multifaceted political intervention by Grange Hill’s producers. In a similar manner to the teenage magazines discussed in the previous chapter, Grange Hill constructed an audience of agentic adolescents. For its young audience, the storyline provided a sympathetic and salient portrayal of a family affected by AIDS, encouraging fans to act without fear or prejudice, to arm themselves with the knowledge of AIDS that the show provided through didactic moral and factual narrative elements. The didactic destigmatising and protective ends of the AIDS storyline were achieved partially through the embedding of pertinent facts within the narrative. The main method the series used to empower its audience was through the successive presentation of moral dilemmas wherein characters, acting as role models, had to navigate difficult situations and provide a rubric of best practice. Unlike the teenage magazines discussed in the previous chapter, the dialogic nature of television also allowed the series to explore the effects of bad moral behaviour, starkly presenting
384 Throughout this chapter I refer to the episodes by the number they occupied in the 18th series of Grange Hill. 385 Kevin Hood, , ‘Episode 13, Grange Hill, Series 18, (BBC: 14 February 1995); Kevin Hood, ‘Episode 14’, Grange Hill, Series 18, (BBC: 17 February 1995); Kevin Hood, ‘Episode 15’, Grange Hill, Series 18, (BBC: 21 February 1995); Kevin Hood, ‘Episode 16’, Grange Hill, Series 18, (BBC: 24 February 1995); Kevin Hood, ‘Episode 18’, Grange Hill, Series 18, (BBC: 3 March 1995).
152 the audience with a contrasting representation of how not to behave, exploring the stigma which surrounds AIDS with a dramatic and ideologically persuasive manner. This chapter explores the processes by which a provocative multi-episode AIDS-narrative came to feature in Grange Hill and considers the depiction of AIDS both socially and medically. The critique of education policy the episodes provided addressed the policies discussed in chapter one, while the teenagers the programme featured, and the audience who watched them, are the same teenagers who populated the previous chapter that analysed teenage girls’ magazines. The approach to AIDS in Grange Hill in 1995 is similar to the magazine response to the emergent AIDS crisis, although admittedly a great deal later as the first responses appeared in teen magazines from 1985. Like the magazines before it, the Grange Hill AIDS-storyline is a deliberately discursive, political and didactic intervention into the lives of children and the adults who cared for them through a popular media source. In asking how an AIDS narrative came to be represented on Grange Hill in 1995 this chapter will explore how the BBC’s understandings of childhood affected the HIV positive identities they produced for the consumption of adolescents. The research for this chapter was completed using both videos of the key episodes and the post-production scripts for the episodes retrieved from the BBC archives. Unfortunately, the archive behind these episodes and Grange Hill in general is very thin, but where possible archival materials are used to provide some of the production context.386 The chapter begins by exploring what the production of children’s programming meant for the BBC in the 1980s and 1990s, placing the five key 1995 episodes in the context of the development of the BBC children’s television provision and its conceptualisation of childhood. Having placed these key episodes in context, the chapter will then reveal the didactic intent behind them, outlining their effects through a close textual analysis focused on the representation of HIV/AIDS and sex education, AIDS within a familial context, and HIV/AIDS stigma. The multiple dialogic techniques employed by Grange Hill’s creators will receive particular scrutiny, allowing the chapter to expose how this text represented a culmination, response and an intervention into the politics of AIDS and sex education which proceeded and surrounded it.
386 Given more time I would seek to redress these gaps through oral histories. 153
Examining children’s texts Surprisingly little has been written on the history of children’s broadcasting in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s. What has been written often takes the form of a measured reply from media scholars to the moral panics which marked these decades, observations on the changes wrought by the globalisation of the broadcasting market, or investigations into the state of adult anxiety in this time period, rather than more specific contextualised studies on the programmes that made up children’s televisual media at this time.387 There has been some useful scholarship on the history of the BBC and its rival broadcasters, but a preference for using the institutional archives or courting the institutions themselves rather than examining the end products created by these organisations has resulted in a tendency to survey policies and executive decisions, rather than programmes as measure of the institutional identity and ideology.388 Policies, internal structures, and officially sanctioned ideologies are influential, but these internal machinations provide only a partial measure of identity for the public- facing and varied institutions which make up British broadcasters. The use of the institutional archive is in part a product of necessity, the fertility of any given programme’s archive unpredictable and in some cases completely barren,389 but forgoing case studies of individual broadcasts, programmes or series has resulted in an elliptic history that has often ignored variation, dissonance, and the audience.390 Exemplary scholarship that closely examines individual series does exist in areas such as cultural and media studies, but this is not the case where the history of children’s broadcasting is concerned.391 Where scripts or recordings of broadcasts still exist, close
387 This writing tends to broadly define adult anxiety around children’s media, including video games, magazines and the internet in studies of moral panics. An example of this broad though useful scholarship is Patricia Holland, ‘‘I’ve just seen a hole in the reality barrier!’: Children, Childishness and the Media in the Ruins of the Twentieth Century’ in Thatcher’s Children? Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s, ed. by Jane Pilcher, Stephen Wagg, (London: Falmer Press, 1996) pp. 155-171 and Messenger Davies’ Dear BBC, but particularly pp. 21-48, pp. 127-170. 388 See for instance: Dorothy Hobson, Channel 4: The Early Years and the Jeremy Isaacs Legacy, (London: I. B. Taurus & Co., 2008); Ralph Negrine, Television and the press since 1945, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). 389 Helen Wheatley, ‘Introduction: Re-viewing television histories’, in Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography, ed. by Helen Wheatley, (London: I. B. Taurus & Co, 2007), pp. 1-12, pp. 6-7. 390 Admittedly Messenger Davies’ Dear BBC is based on extensive audience interview and survey, including a survey of children as an audience, but little time is taken to analyse particular programmes identified by the interviewees and instead Davies offers a broad and useful overview of children’s interactions with television as a medium. 391 Indeed the promisingly titled collection of case studies British Television Drama in the 1980s, does not mention children’s drama in any of its 12 chapters, despite including a chapter on Brookside, a soap 154 textual analysis of programmes provides a useful solution to empty archives and benefits from being based upon an artefact which has been seen by an audience, unlike the internal memos of the archive. Another benefit of close textual analysis is the excavation of multiple modes of discourse it allows, revealing the conscious and unconscious, the intertextual and the ideological as they might have been received. Authorial intent, alive in the archive and the process of production, is disrupted by the realities of dissemination and reception, their imagined audience dissolved into the realities of the finished product’s real audience. Close textual analysis, in acknowledging this, allows an attention to the chorus of competing voices within a text, keeping the author alive, exploring their intent and imagined audience, while simultaneously admitting the limits of their agency, rooting the text in its context and the lived experience of its living audience.392 Academic scholarship does not reflect the extensive columns inches that have been expended by media pundits on individual children’s programs.393 The subject of what is produced for, and watched by, children on the small screen is never long out of the popular press.394 The 1980s and 1990s were no exception to this rule, and the interest of the press was one shared by politicians across the political spectrum with concern over the standard of children’s broadcasting a perennial subject of discussion. As David Buckingham et. al. observed in Children’s Television in Britain: History, Discourse, and Policy, the idea that rising competition from satellite and foreign
which was the brainchild of Grange Hill creator Phil Redmond. Vera Gotleib, ‘Brookside: ‘Damon’s YTS Comes to an End’ (Barry Woodard): Paradoxes and contradictions, in British Television Drama in the 1980s, ed. by George W. Brandt, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 40-61. Jones and Davies’ chapter on Grange Hill is a useful offering, but the analysis takes in the series as a whole rather than individual episodes. Ken Jones, Hannah Davies, ‘Keeping it real’: Grange Hill and the representation of ‘the child’s world’ in children’s television drama’, in Small screens: Television for children, in David Buckingham, (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 2002), pp. 141-158. 392 Ellis provides a useful discussion on this subject in John Ellis, ‘Is it possible to construct a canon of television programmes: Immanent Reading versus textual-historicism’, in Re-viewing Television History: Critical Issues in Television Historiography, ed. by Helen Wheatley, (London: I. B. Taurus & Co, 2007), pp.15-26, pp. 18-21. 393 A quick search of any newspaper archive turns up numerous hand-wringing articles on children’s viewing practices and the state of children’s television A few representative articles include: Anon, ‘Children’s TV ‘too focused on UK and America’, The Daily Telegraph, 11 June, 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/2111432/Childrens-TV-too-focused-on-UK-and- America.html [Date accessed 08/10/2015]. 394 The press focus on children’s television tends to concentrate on the origin, quality, quantity, age appropriateness and educational value of the television children are watching. The idea that children’s television could be worth watching for its entertainment value is rarely championed. For a more extensive discussion of the media’s treatment of these themes see David Buckingham, Hannah Davies, Ken Jones, Peter Kelley, Children’s television in Britain: history, discourse and Policy, (London: BFI publishing, 1999). 155 broadcasters was creating an erosion of ‘standards’ appealed to both the left and right in Whitehall; ‘from nostalgic conservatives’ with protectionist attitudes to foreign imports, to ‘leftists critics of the capitalist cultural industries’.395 There was concern over the content and style of children’s television with frequent references to it becoming ‘dumbed down’, ‘too American’ and ‘too violent’.396 It was also suggested that such programmes were fostering an adversarial relationship between children and adults,397 and that children were gaining access to ‘adult’ media, which was provoking a dangerous sexual precociousness in a vulnerable young accidental audience.398 Beyond the concerns expressed in the adult news media, the effects of these anxieties upon the production of children’s media can also be located in both government and industry policy and practice. The state of children’s television and its content underwent constant monitoring and adjustment, induced through both formal investigations instigated by industry and government, moral panics within the media, and as an effect of the necessity of innovation to maintain audience interest and public support.399 Television as a medium is significantly constrained by industry guidelines, common practice (tradition) and in the case of the BBC, the BBC Charter and Reith’s charge that broadcasting must inform, educate and entertain.400 The BBC’s commitment to education is often presented in conflict with its role as entertainer, and this tension is at its most obvious where children’s programming is concerned. This is in part because of the dichotomous way in which children’s television is presented as either good for children and educative, or bad for children and entertaining and therefore more alluring and dangerous to them. This is in spite of extensive scheduling of children’s
395 Buckingham et al., Children’s television in Britain, p. 7. 396 Ibid. 397 In fact this very charge was made against Grange Hill in 1995 when students at Battersea Technical College staged a noisy walk-out after a Sunday repeat of Grange Hill with a student protest storyline aired: Anon, ‘Shame of Grange Hill ‘copycats’: Parents blame BBC series for walkout’, Daily Mail, March 17, 1995 p. 37. 398 For example, Nicola Tyer, ‘Not in front of the kids’, Daily Mail, March 30 1995, p. 48. Buckingham discusses this at length in David Buckingham, Sara Bragg, Young people, sex and the media: the facts of life?, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 3-5, pp. 208-217. 399 Mary Irwin, ‘Doreen Stephens: Producing and Managing British Television in the 1950s and 1960s’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 10:3 (2013), pp. 618-634, pp. 622-627; Lawrence Black, ‘There Was Something About Mary: The National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association and Social Movement History’, in NGOs in Contemporary Britain: Non-state Actors in Society and Politics since 1945, ed. by Nick Crowson, Mather Hilton, James Mckay, (Online: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) pp. 182- 200, pp. 182-189. 400 Mark Aldridge, The Birth of Television: A History, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 69-70; Bob Franklin, British Television Policy: A Reader, (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 19-21. 156 programming which is constructed to deliver on both the educative and the entertaining aims Reith outlined. Fears about inappropriate content and its potentially negative influence over British youth reveal constructions of the child audience as both vulnerable and passive, failed by parents and broadcasters, and damaged by television, or as an underestimated child agent whose needs as citizen and consumer were not being adequately met by ‘good’ empowering television. Paternalism, either morally conservative or progressive, is present in both constructions of the child viewer and a common enemy emerges in the marketisation of broadcasting which entertains without educating children – for the sake of their future moral citizenship in the former conception and their empowerment in the latter.401 The anxiety which surrounds questions of ‘appropriateness’ and the effects of the media upon children would seem to acknowledge what Bakhtin saw as the ideological power of the author and their text.402 Indeed we can identify questions around who had the authority to place ideas into any given text as a key source of anxiety in the 1980s and 1990s, especially when the intended audience for the text was children. The press’ assessment of a decline in the standard of children’s broadcasting often left out the idea that entertainment might be good for children or that the child might have a right, or at the very least a genuine desire, to be entertained. Conversely, commercial broadcasters in the pocket of advertisers, viewing the increasingly agentic child as a new consumer, placed high value on children’s desires, seeing their entertainment as a means to an end – luring in a new audience and selling goods while creating new and future consumers. Children’s interests in entertainment are taken into account by public service broadcasters like the BBC that need to compete with commercial broadcasters and to maintain an audience. They are bound by charter to produce programming for the improvement of their young audience, which requires constant adjustment to meet audience interests. This again treats entertainment as a means to an end – luring the child in for the purpose of education and improvement, rather than to deliver entertainment as an end in and of itself, despite Reith’s oft-quoted principles. This was achieved by producing programmes which straddled multiple
401 This paternalism has been identified and critiqued by media scholars and scholars of childhood for silencing the child’s voice in constructions of childhood and the media designed for their consumption. Buckingham et al., Children’s television in Britain, pp. 188-189; Messenger Davies, Dear BBC, pp. 42- 43. 402 This is outlined at length in the introduction to this thesis. 157 genres, delivering education and entertainment in one programme, or by ensuring diversity within the schedule, maintaining ‘commercially attractive genres such as gunge-dunking games’ while providing a ‘framework which …guarantee[d] – a diversity both of genre, and of audience-appeal.’403
Creating Children’s television at the BBC: Policy and intent The BBC attitude to children and their needs as viewers is one which developed over time in conjunction with, and as a reflection of, the cultural developments exterior to the institution. Children’s programming is always the creation of multiple voices. The numerous individuals involved in the construction and dissemination of children’s programming inevitably creates a deeply intertextual finished product. Competing voices, past and present contribute to its construction and find space within its final referential incarnation. The imagined audience of Grange Hill was varied; informed by the BBC’s developing understanding of childhood and constructed by numerous producers with a variety of motives, it was made up of agentic but fragile middle-class children, deprived but plucky working-class kids and variously mystified or angry adults (parents and teachers).404 The imagined audience of Grange Hill’s AIDS storyline was a creation born out of the institution’s long history, the series’ ethos, and the specific cultural context of 1995 and the problems AIDS brought with it. The following section traces the emergence of the ideas behind the most important elements which make up Grange Hill’s imagined audience, placing the aims of the storyline in the wider context of the BBC’s aims for children’s programming more generally.
In 1960, the complicated task of catering to a real, rather than imagined, child audience was proving difficult for the BBC’s Children’s Department. Mounting competition and a nostalgic view of the child which failed to deliver on audience desires was affecting a withdrawal of the BBC’s youth audience.405 The loss of a previously loyal young audience resulted in a change in the terms of the production context at the BBC, with the success of programmes being measured in viewing ratings rather than through more nebulous ideas about educational or entertainment content.406 Increasingly a more discerning and migratory child – who also watched adult entertainment – was
403 Messenger Davies, Dear BBC, p. 45. 404 Jones, Davies, ‘Keeping it real’, pp. 146-150. 405 Buckingham et al., Children’s television in Britain, p. 26. 406 Ibid. 158 being recognised as a powerful member of the audience.407 With this recognition came an increasing acknowledgement that the boundary between child and adult television was indistinct and frequently crossed by members of all age groups, undermining the need for a separate Children’s Department.408 This change in ‘atmosphere’ led to the dissolution of the department in 1964.409 The BBC Children’s Department was replaced by the Family Programmes Department, an entity that acknowledged the fallacy of the segregated child audience; it aimed to produce programmes that reflected the breakdown in the barriers between childhood and adulthood. Head of the Department Doreen Stephens explained her vision for the new department, declaring it would intervene in the lives of women and children by meeting their needs in terms of:
interests and entertainment, with problems of adolescents, the needs of women with children at home and with children who have grown up [Also] …aspects of health and welfare of special family concern… household management and consumer research…410 Stephens’ memorandum signalled an acknowledgement that childhood, at least as the BBC conceptualised it, had changed and that the BBC needed to change with it. In 1966 Stephens returned to these loose aims when she delivered a defensive, if content thin, lunchtime lecture on the subject of Children’s Television at Broadcasting House, articulating a more solidly conceived vision of the child and childhood.411 In her lecture she rejected the ‘cushioned ignorance’ or older vision of childhood, describing previous eras’ programming as ‘soft and sentimental, sometimes self-consciously middle-class and inclined to condescension’. Instead she championed a new age of programmes
407 Changes in children’s viewing practices and interests were recognised and discussed publically by broadcasters, the print media and politicians. Children’s television and viewing formed an area of concern during the discussions which were framed by the Pilkington Report, with admonitions about the ‘violence and triviality’ of broadcasts broadly expressed. The National Archives (TNA): CAB/129/110, C. (162) 102, ‘Broadcasting Policy: The Pilkington Report’, (26 June 1962), p. 7; Lord St. Oswald, ‘The Pilkington Report on Broadcasting’, HL Deb 242 (18 July 1962), cc. 605-765, c. 758. 408 Programmes like Doctor Who captured large audiences of adults and children and were produced by the BBC’s Drama Department rather than the Children’s department, threatening its mandate. Jonathan Bignell, ‘Space for ‘quality’: Negotiating with the Daleks’, in Popular Television Drama: Critical Perspectives, ed. by Jonathan Bignell, Stephen Lacey, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 77-92, pp. 78-79. 409 Mary Irwin, ‘Doreen Stephens: Producing and Managing British Television in the 1950s and 1960s’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 10:3 (2013), pp. 618-634, p. 623. 410 Doreen Stephens, Memorandum, 1964 (WAC T31/324) in Buckingham et al., Children’s television in Britain, p. 30. 411 Doreen Stephens, ‘Television for Children: A lecture’, Lunch-Time Lectures in Broadcasting House, 1:5 (London: British Broadcasting Corporation 1966). 159 which would recognise ‘the best way to protect children from life and its vicissitudes of knowledge.’412 Specifically she argued that the BBC ‘must offer programmes [children would] choose to watch …no matter how minded we might be in offering children programmes of first class pedagogic value which they ought to watch, it is useless doing so in a competitive situation unless they choose to watch them’.413 What can be seen emerging here was an acknowledgement of a more agentic child, one free to choose which programmes it watched, yet one still in need of programmes which ‘enrich[ed] and enlarge[d] the child’s experience’.414 This fragile but increasingly agentic child, in need of useful and protective knowledge, lay at the heart of the child which emerged as Grange Hill’s imagined audience. By the time the BBC Children’s department re-emerged in 1967 it had a firmer grasp on what it felt was good for the child, and a better picture of its real and imagined audience. Lessons learnt before the dissolution of the department and during its hiatus allowed it to emerge in a more responsive form. The consensus still remained that children were a problem audience; happy to migrate to another channel and difficult to define, but the late 1960s marked a time for the BBC of relative market dominance where, though budgets were small, risks could be taken with this difficult audience.415 The new head of the department, Monica Simms, added to the BBC’s accumulating ideas about the child and childhood, arguing that children were naturally inclined to question their surroundings, thirsty for knowledge and viewed adult culture with a scepticism which should be nurtured rather than quashed.416 For younger children, ideas about learning through play revalued entertainment and helped dissolve boundaries between educational and entertaining programming for children more generally, recasting children as a responsive, active and imaginative audience, able to learn from less overtly pedagogical sources. This model of a more animate and responsive child appears closer to the imagined audience members of Grange Hill; able to learn through critical engagement with entertaining, as well as pedagogic, texts. This imagined audience of more engaged children did not go unquestioned. Increasing awareness of the social problems caused by class difference, which dominated the political agenda of the 1960s and 1970s bled through to the BBC, placing
412 Stephens, ‘Television for Children pp. 3-8. 413 Stephens, ‘Television for Children’, p. 4. 414 Stephens, ‘Television for Children’, p. 8. 415 Buckingham et al., Children’s television in Britain, pp. 32-33. 416 Buckingham et al., Children’s television in Britain, p. 34. 160 the issue of ‘cultural deprivation’ high on the agenda. Working-class audiences and their ability to learn, engage and articulate their needs, became increasingly important with the BBC positioning itself as bridging the experience gap between middle and working-class children, playing the role of both teacher and parent.417 In a 1982 interview, Edward Barnes, then head of the Children’s Department, described the BBC’s position as trying to ‘integrate children into our kind of family’ to give ‘children from deprived homes …a sense of belonging’.418 Some years later Anna Home, former head of children's programming at the BBC (1986-1997), expressed a similar sentiment in an interview looking back at the mid-90s. Explaining why she often overrode potential parental objections in editorial judgements, she described the BBC as more able to know what children wanted and needed than their parents: ‘Often I think parents are unaware of the world in which their kids live – and they are concerned when we talk about things in programmes which they don't think are of concern to their kids, but I think they often are.’419 Beyond this paternalistic sentiment, the BBC also reached out to working-class and teenage audiences by broadening its range in an attempt to represent something akin to a working-class or teenage experience. One of the flagship programmes which emerged from this move was Grange Hill in 1978.
Grange Hill: trend setter to safe product, 1978-1995 Grange Hill began airing in 1978 and was met with critical acclaim and the positive audience ratings the BBC commissioned it hoping for. Its producer, Phil Redmond, speaking to The Observer about the upcoming 30th anniversary of the show in 2008, described Grange Hill’s early incarnation as a ‘hard-hitting, socially relevant, rites-of- passage teenage show.’420 Conceived while Redmond was finishing his Social Studies degree as a mature student at Liverpool University, the drama is a product of the BBC’s desire to reach new audiences, and Redmond’s academic interests and quite consciously his personal political agenda. Redmond got the idea for Grange Hill while waiting in
417 Buckingham et al., Children’s television in Britain, p. 36. 418 Edward Barnes, interviewed by Stuart Hall for the Open University Television Programme D102 A Foundation Course in the Social Sciences – Social Integration 1: Children’s Television, 1982, cited in Buckingham et al., Children’s television in Britain, p. 37. 419 Anna Home interview with M. M. Davies, K. O'Malley (1996) quoted in Messenger Davies, Dear BBC, pp. 28-29. 420 David Smith, ‘Shut down Grange Hill, says its creator’, The Observer, (13, January 2008) http://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/jan/13/television.bbc [Accessed 01/02/2016]. 161 the dole queue, part way through a module on the sociology of education.421 While Redmond kept one eye firmly on entertainment, believing boredom to be implicated in turning off ‘children’s innate desire to learn’, at its source the programme had a clear ideological and didactic agenda; less about hiding maths or science among the school day dramas and more about instilling a rights-based ideology of education and citizenship in its young audience. The series, while ‘not directly autobiographical’ was, Redmond admits, influenced by his school experiences and a wish to reach students experiencing similar educations.422 The ideological underpinnings of Grange Hill did not go unremarked. A battery of concerned adults lined up to condemn the ‘Marxist subversion’ they felt Grange Hill represented, questions were even put to the Home Secretary regarding the ‘appropriateness’ of the programme as a BBC production.423 As the series progressed, some of the ideological clarity the series began with was lost, and Redmond’s departure from the show to start work on Brookside certainly initiated a slow softening of its radical agenda. But the new ground Grange Hill forged at its inception can be credited with creating the space needed for a children’s drama to air five episodes in 1995 which dealt with AIDS. In its early days, Grange Hill’s direct approach to social issues and marked departure from previous children’s programming garnered it a great deal of press attention resulting in significant internal scrutiny. Despite this, Grange Hill’s success is indisputable, and in many ways can be credited with forging the politically engaged television career of its creator Redmond who later went on to produce Brookside (1982- 2003) and Hollyoaks (1995-present), two popular weekly soap operas aimed at a late- teen to late-twenties audience, airing on Channel 4.424 Like Grange Hill, these programmes consciously engaged in dramatising ‘social issues’, colloquially dubbed ‘the helpline narrative’, with programmes ending with a public service message and helpline numbers to contact if viewers were affected by the content of the episode.425 Indeed, as Independent journalist Thomas Sutcliffe observed in 1995, ‘the adult
421 Redmond particularly credits Holt’s work How Children Fail, for having a deep impact on his view of education, motivating him to create a programme which would intervene in the education of British teenagers through the medium of television. Phil Redmond, Mid-term Report: From Grange Hill to Hollyoaks, via Brookside, (London: Arrow Books, 2013), pp. 90-91. 422 Redmond, Mid-term Report, p. 118. 423 Redmond, Mid-term Report, pp. 118-119. 424 Gotleib, ‘Brookside’, pp. 40-42. 425 Thomas Sutcliffe, ‘From soft sell to gritty issues’, The Independent, (May 19, 1995), p. 17. 162 approach to popular drama’ was learnt ‘at school’, arguing Grange Hill ‘should really take the credit for the social responsibility of […] British soaps.426 Grange Hill did more than dramatise social issues and offer numbers to call. Redmond was also keen to offer a solution to the problems he represented, feeling ‘an obligation to offer a possible solution to whichever issue was featured.’427 This problem-solution method of constructing storylines formed a recognisable and successful pattern for Grange Hill’s narratives and is apparent in the AIDS narrative discussed below. Television viewing figures for the 1980s are sketchy, especially where children’s programmes are concerned as audience research was concentrated on adult programming, but an estimated 8 million viewers tuned in to watch Grange Hill’s first series.428 It seemed that the new drama captured the BBC’s missing audience of working-class children and miscellaneous teenagers. Identifying who exactly watched Grange Hill in these early days is hard. Redmond gave his imagined audience – sketched from memories of his own disaffected youth and sociological studies of education – flesh through school visits where he researched storylines for each series and by directly asking children ‘what they would like to see in’ Grange Hill.429 He then wrote what they wanted, as far as he could, into the programme, blurring the line between the imagined audiences, the characters on the screen, the producers and the real audiences in a way that seemed to satisfy everyone except conservative parents and the tabloid press. This close adherence to the wants and realities of the audience, carefully guessed at or directly researched, seems apparent even in the later series of Grange Hill when filming had moved out of real schools to the closed sets at Elstree, with high ratings demonstrating audience satisfaction and a symmetry between the teenagers of Grange Hill and the readers of Just Seventeen and MIZZ seeming to indicate a residual realism.430 By 1995 Grange Hill had largely lost its controversial status and instead represented a fairly safe product as an inexpensive series with a large reliable audience, and was particularly liked by working-class children over the age of ten – a key target
426 Thomas Sutcliffe, ‘From soft sell to gritty issues’, The Independent, (May 19, 1995), p. 17. 427 Redmond, Mid-term Report, p. 120. 428 Redmond, Mid-term Report, p. 118. 429 Redmond, Mid-term Report, p. 120. 430It is not clear form the archive whether Grange Hill’s producers continued to visit schools to research plotlines for the programme after Redmond became less involved. The closed set at Elstree was Grange Hill’s filming location from 1984-2003, the same location where EastEnders was filmed. Redmond, Mid- term Report, p. 303. 163 audience.431 Grange Hill’s domestication was a product of its commercial success, the series had become a ubiquitous part of childhood and at its height in the 1980s its influence on children’s media – and so children’s lives – stretched well beyond the confines of the living room television to magazines, novels, comics, a successful album and even a video game.432 With Redmond no longer Grange Hill’s writer and producer, a production team and group of writers now played these roles; Redmond, though influential, was simply credited with devising the show.433 The multiple voices behind Grange Hill’s production, Redmond’s weighty ideological influence and the agenda of the BBC are all reflected in the slightly messy, AIDS narrative studied here. The early, and arguably more radical, days of Grange Hill also largely inured the media to the controversial topics the series was expected to cover by the 1990s; allowing the series to attract and sustain audience interest by covering salient social issues, without ruffling too many feathers. AIDS was not a new subject for the BBC’s soaps in 1995. In 1990, Grange Hill’s Elstree set neighbour EastEnders famously featured an HIV positive character, Mark Fowler (Todd Carty), whose HIV diagnosis and eventual death formed a long- running narrative for the soap.434 The EastEnders AIDS storyline, centred around a heterosexual character, resulted in a spike in requests for HIV antibody testing, demonstrating the powerful influence public health messages have when embedded within an entertaining long-running soap.435 During the period when the AIDS storyline aired on Grange Hill it garnered a comfortable above-average audience share of around 32% with around 85% of viewers tending to find the programme ‘enjoyable’, especially those audience members over the
431 BBC Written Archive: R9/2,171/1, Clive Graham, Young View Summary Report: Grange Hill, (BBC: BARB, February 1995), p. 3. 432 There is not space here to detail the long list of publications which took on Grange Hill’s name to sell copy or to advertise the programme. However it’s worth detailing that during the 1980s IPC published several successful annuals, the BBC released Grange Hill: The Album in 1986 and shortly after Grange Hill: The Computer Game was released in 1987. See Redmond, Mid-term Report, pp. 127-129, pp. 306- 307. 433 While the show was directed by Nigel Douglas and produced by Christine Secombe in 1995, a long list of producers and writers are also credited. Kevin Hood, ‘Episode 13’, Grange Hill, Series 18, (BBC, 14 February 1995). 434 Redmond’s Channel 4 offering Brookside also dealt with AIDS in the late 1980s, framing AIDS- related stigma within a homophobia plotline. Christine Geraghty, ‘Social issues and realist soaps: A study of British soaps in the 1980/1990s’, in To Be Continued… Soap Operas Around the World, ed. by Robert C. Allen, (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 66-80, pp. 73-77 Geraghty, Christine, ‘British soaps in the 1980s’, in Come On Down? Popular media culture in post-war Britain, ed. by Dominic Strinati, Stephen Wagg, (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 133-149, pp. 142-144. 435 J D Ross and G R Scott, ‘The Association between HIV media campaigns and number of patients coming forward for HIV antibody testing’, Genitourin Med, 63 1993, pp. 193-195, p. 195. 164 age of ten.436 Airing at 5:10pm on Tuesdays and Fridays, it faced significant ‘opposition aimed primarily at adult viewers on terrestrial channels’, but despite this it garnered the ‘largest audience share out of ITV, BBC2 and Channel 4.’437 Grange Hill’s audience was made up of loyal viewers who had seen the programme before and tried to watch it habitually.438 This allowed the programme to develop its characters and plots, as well as to present more complicated ideas, safe in the knowledge that its audience would be well equipped with prior knowledge of the characters and their histories and so able to absorb new knowledge within the framework of familiar characters and the routines of Grange Hill. Girls tended to give the ‘programme higher ratings than boys’, as will be discussed later. This difference is unsurprising when show often depicted representations of boys behaving badly and girls being frustrated by their disruptions, events which resonated favourably with girls.439
Bullying boys & anxious adults: Grange Hill’s depiction of obstacles to sex education Episode 13 of Series 18 of Grange Hill formed the first episode in the AIDS storyline. The episode was steeped in the embarrassing, but potentially comic, elements of early teenage sexuality. 14-year-old Lucy, the main protagonist of the AIDS story- arc, first appeared in the AIDS episodes discussing the feasibility of adding a lonely hearts section to the student newsletter. This lonely hearts section soon spirals out of control when adverts are mixed up and respondents are paired inadvertently with other pupils who are entertainingly disgruntled but, crucially, of inappropriately differing ages. Framed first by this moralistic – if entertaining – sub-plot, which raises the subject of inappropriate sexual relationships and the vulnerability of young adolescents, the AIDS workshop featured in the same episode and the subsequent sexual-health education lessons which pepper the following episodes are given a broader context beyond the personal narrative Lucy’s experiences encompass. The case for sex education and AIDS education is made repeatedly using multiple arguments, each intended to resonate with a section of Grange Hill’s varied audience.
436 This average was produced by combining figures from BARB audience reaction reports for the time period. For original data see BBC Written Archive: R9/2,171/1, Graham, Young View Summary Report: Grange Hill, (BBC: BARB, February 1995), pp. 1-2 and Clive Graham, Young Viewer Summary Report: Grange Hill, (BBC: BARB, April, 1995), p.1. 437 Graham, Young Viewer Summary Report: Grange Hill, (BBC: BARB, February 1995), p. 1. 438 Graham, Young Viewer Summary Report: Grange Hill, (BBC: BARB, February 1995), p. 3. 439 Graham, Young Viewer Summary Report: Grange Hill, (BBC: BARB, April, 1995), p.1. 165
The AIDS workshop in episode 13 showed pupils in Year 10 (aged 14-15) learning about AIDS and later in a second workshop, asking more general sexual health questions of their teacher. Unlike the classroom interactions that populated some British sex education films though, the children are not portrayed idealistically as well- behaved, politely curious and attentive.440 Nor are the teachers portrayed idealised oracles of knowledge possessed of limitless empathy; rather they are presented variously as struggling to control the class, as bigots, or where they are presented as empathetic or sympathetic, their power to act is shown to be distinctly limited as victims of the policies which muted their voices. The difficulties which limit students seeking sex education or safer-sex knowledge are presented through a distinctly gendered lens with girls’ agency doubly limited by the whims of parents and parliament and the complacent attitudes of their male compatriots, allowing Grange Hill to subtly evince sex education and safer-sex to be a feminist issue. This is achieved by presenting parents, backed by policy, as the first insurmountable obstacle to children’s access to sex education when the character Felicity is withdrawn from the AIDS workshop. As the plot progresses, Felicity’s ignorance gains increased importance as fear grips the school. Felicity’s desire to attain sex education is sharply contrasted with Lucy’s boyfriend’s declaration that the workshop will be ‘a laugh’, she bemoans her parents’ decision as he trivialises the lesson.441 ‘What’s so bad about sex education?’ Felicity’s friend asks, to which she replies ‘mum and dad think it might give me ideas.’442 While this brief scene places the blame for the children and teenagers’ ignorance around matters of sex at the feet of parents and policy makers first, the complacency of the male students allows a feminist narrative to emerge. The children are divided along gendered lines, misbehaving boys and exasperated girls become a repeated theme in all five AIDS episodes, with the task of teaching/learning about sexual health portrayed realistically as difficult, frustrating and limited [Figure 24].443
440 Sex education films created to be viewed in the classroom were often ill-received by students who described them as ‘childish’ and ‘useless’. Alison Woodcock, Karen Stenner, and Roger Ingham., ‘“All these contraceptives, videos and that…”: young people talking about school sex education’, Health Education Research ,7:4 (December 1992), pp. 517-531, pp. 526-527. See for example DES, Your Choice for Life, (London: CLF Vision, 1987). 441 Hood, ‘Episode 13’. 442 Hood, ‘Episode 13’. 443 Research indicated that this disruptive and unsatisfying experience of sex education was unfortunately the norm. Woodcock, et. al., ‘All these contraceptives, videos and that’, pp. 528-530. 166
Figure 24. Disruptive, the boys laugh; attentive, the girls shush them and try to listen in episode 15444
This feminist critique of sex education and gender politics manifests on several occasions. The most striking incident is the brief scene where the class are given condoms and vegetables in order to learn how to put a condom on successfully. While one of the workshop leaders is occupied ‘passing round carrots’ to the pupils, the camera pans past girls working quietly together to ‘Josh and Dennis roaring with laughter’.445 Rather than taking the opportunity to learn proper condom use, (by putting ‘a condom on the vegetable’ as instructed) the boys instead decide to hit one another with the vegetables and the condoms [Figure 25].446 This chaotic scene is witnessed by school governor Mr Maxwell – standing in here for more authoritarian and traditional understandings of education and childhood agency – confirming everything he believes about teenage irresponsibility and the dangers of sex education on the basis of a few misbehaving boys. Turning to the head teacher he exclaims sarcastically, ‘I hope you feel this is worthy of your respect’.447 The didactic message here is clear – if Grange Hill’s young audience wish their desires for sex education to be taken seriously, they must behave like they are ‘worthy’ of ‘respect’ – like the girls and unlike the boys.
444 Kevin Hood, ‘Episode 15’, Grange Hill, Series 18, (BBC, 21 February 1995). 445 Hood, ‘Episode 13 Post-Production Script’, p. 104. 446 Ibid. 447 Hood, ‘Episode 13 Post-Production Script’, p. 106. 167
Figure 25. Jodie places a condom on a cucumber; Dennis, Dudley and Josh hit each other with cucumbers and condoms
This gendered narrative is reinforced in the next episode during the follow-up AIDS workshop when the boys’ self-inflicted ignorance regarding HIV and contraception is revealed and addressed. Male ignorance is presented as limiting the agency of teenage girls. The boys are rendered unable to contribute usefully to the lesson by their ignorance; they instead disrupt the girls’ ability to acquire new protective and empowering sexual and safer-sex knowledge. The girls’ frustrated declarations that they are ‘being serious’ and admonishments to the boys to ‘shut up and grow up’ are met with derision, their attempts to learn and share their knowledge thwarted by misbehaving boys [pictured in Figure 24].448 For example, in answer to their teacher’s question ‘what do you think are the dangers of unprotected sex?’ Dean (Geoff Martin), the first to reply, responds ‘Why miss don’t you know?’, which she ignores.449 Goaded by failing to get a rise from his teacher, Dean then responds to Jodie’s answer of ‘Getting AIDS’ with ‘If you go with a slag’, which earns him sniggers from the other boys.450 Emboldened, Dean continues ‘Ask me they deserve everything they get’ and Lucy, recently bereaved and unsure of her father’s and her own serostatus, bolts from the room, chased out by Dean’s bullying and the other boys’ ignorant giggles. This scenario could be read at first as a call for single-sex sexual health education, but as the AIDS narrative continues a larger critique of sex and gender politics emerges; complacency and lack of empathy (even bigotry) are framed as largely
448 Kevin Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, Grange Hill, Series 18, (BBC TV Children’s Department, 23.11.1994), p. 52. 449 Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, p. 54. 450 Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, p. 54. 168 heterosexual male traits. The multiple incidents of bullying, lack of empathy and unfortunate ignorance perpetrated by heterosexual male characters within the AIDS narrative are almost formulaic in their similarity, with female characters attempting to present the voice of reason or knowledge falling silent in the face of noisy male opposition or uninterested ignorance. As the plot demonstrates, this leaves students like Felicity exposed; left unarmed with the protective and empowering knowledge the advocates of sex education would offer her. The idea that Felicity will be left vulnerable, and that her parent’s behaviour is naïve, is reinforced when her friend declares ‘well I’m going to tell her about it’, in response to being told Felicity’s parents ‘don’t think sex education is good for her’.451 The teacher, following behind cautions Felicity’s friend and exclaims, ‘well then, I hope for her sake you’re listening carefully.’452 Thus Felicity is presented as doubly vulnerable, both to the sexist attitudes of her male compatriots who would presume to foist all responsibility onto their female counterparts and secondly, to the vagaries of second-hand information. This narrative is important as it charges its audience, which consisted mainly of girls aged 11-15, not to squander their sex education, but also to be aware of the vulnerability and value of their agency.453
The representation of risk in Grange Hill’s AIDS Workshop Echoing the AIDS and You Video Game discussed in the first chapter and the teenage magazines discussed in the second, a scale from ‘high risk’ to ‘low risk’ is created by students in the AIDS workshop. The exercise, depicted at length, was aimed at discussing risk factors for contracting HIV, with a student standing in as the ‘at risk’ individual, walking up and down a ‘risk’ scale [Figure 26]. In a scene which seemingly lifts the format of teen magazine’s ‘myth-busting’ quizzes or problem page confessionals off the page, we see a common teenage activity anxiously assessed for its risk, the imposition of rumour and hearsay on the worried teens’ assessment, and then the rational reaction of a knowing teenager when given all the facts. For example, Rob Fletcher, one of the AIDS workshop leaders calls out ‘Kissing?’ – Jodie (Natalie
451 Hood, ‘Episode 13’. 452 Hood, ‘Episode 13’. 453 Viewing figures and interviews showed girls were more likely to watch and enjoy Grange Hill during the period when the AIDS storyline aired. Grange Hill Audience Reaction Report, (January – February 1995), pp. 1-2. BBC Written Archive, R9/2,171 TV AUDIENCE REACTION REPORTS 1995: 95/001- 95/010. 169
Tapper, a friend of Lucy’s) pipes up with ‘Low risk’ and the activity begins. After some deliberation, another pupil, Lauren (Melanie Jospeh), asks ‘Can the virus be carried in saliva?’ In response, the stage directions explain, ‘Jodie reacts, and shuffles towards [the] high risk’ end of the scale.454 The AIDS workshop leader’s reply is simple and comprehensive, but adds humour to avoid the kind of top-down didactic response which children and adolescents would recognise from their own sex education classes:
Well it’s been estimated that you’d have to drink the equivalent of a bucket of saliva to be at any risk whatsoever. Who here kisses like that?455
During the laughter that follows, Jodie shuffles back towards the lower risk end of the scale, her movement visible to the audience. Thus we see Jodie assess her risk from kissing first using her own assumptions, then those of the worried crowd of teenagers, then finally using the facts as laid down by a trustworthy adult authority. This fanciful and humorous aside is the only incident within the AIDS workshop when the activities are directly discussed in reference to the sexual lives and experiences of the teenagers themselves. This process is repeated with less discussion with ‘riskier’ and less acceptable activities which teenagers might engage in. First ‘unprotected sex’, ‘which means?’, we are asked and told, ‘sex without a condom’, though no further detail is given.456 Those who engage in unprotected sex are given no distinguishing characteristics, the focus remaining firmly on the act rather than the actors. Though this subject is met with a degree of uncomfortable laughter, it is also met with shouts of ‘high risk’ and the pupil standing in as the ‘at risk’ individual is told ‘higher, higher’.457 The consensus amongst this teenage crowd is that this activity is ‘high risk’, and the subsequent agreement from the AIDS workshop leaders informs the young audience that this should be knowledge they already have. No mention is made here of particular sexual acts which vary in terms of their transmission risk, nor is ‘sex without a condom’ clarified, while the knowledge of what ‘sex’ might constitute is assumed here.458 This
454 Hood, ‘Episode 13 Post-Production Script’, p. 98. 455 Hood, ‘Episode 13 Post-Production Script’, p. 98. 456 Hood, ‘Episode 13 Post-Production Script’, p. 99. 457 Hood, ‘Episode 13 Post-Production Script’, p. 100. 458 This might seem like a big ask of young adult media, but just a year later Melvin Burgess’ controversial award winning young adult novel Junk addressed this very issue with regards to needles. His young protagonist, having become a sex worker, stops sharing her needles to prevent the spread of 170 allowed the producers of Grange Hill to discuss sex without being accused of giving teenagers the kind of ‘ideas’ and dangerous knowledge Felicity’s parents are so worried about in the show.
Figure 26. Rachel walks to the 'high risk' end of the scale to demonstrate ‘unprotected sex’ is not ‘safe’459
The use of safer-sex rhetoric, and AIDS education more generally, as a vehicle to discourage activities which teenagers and the wider public might engage in becomes clear when ‘drinking’ is raised as a possible ‘high risk’ activity. Lucy responds to the suggestion with ‘stupid’, but workshop leader Thea interjects:
No no. That’s a very good point because it could lead to sharing needles, or it could lead to unprotected sex. Well done. 460 Simply read, Thea’s admonition against alcohol demonstrates the use of the AIDS workshop as a vehicle to prevent other undesirable activities beyond the transmission of HIV, but something more subtle is offered by the inclusion of ‘drinking’ as a high risk activity. The idea that alcohol might be blamed for impaired judgment
HIV, knowing both her job and her drug-habit might put her, and those she might share needles with, at risk. Melvin Burgess, Junk, (London: Anderson, 1996). 459 Hood, ‘Episode 13’. 460 Hood, ‘Episode 13 Post-Production Script’, p. 102. 171 with regards to drug use or unprotected sex disrupts the risk/blame dichotomy, moving the cause of HIV positivity away from the direct act of transference – the virus crossing the barriers of the body – to the more nebulous act of ‘drinking’. The inclusion of drinking in the ‘high risk’ group of activities, and so those who drink in the ‘at risk’ group has the potential to either declare an expansive group ‘at risk’, to remove blame or to reapportion it. Research had by this time indicated tangible links between excessive alcohol consumption or recreational drug use and unprotected sex, but the simplicity of government health education messages meant that messages of personal responsibility tended to lack caveats about the effects of substance-induced impairment.461 While alcohol consumption is mentioned in the more detailed AIDS education literature and some of the testimonial-style adverts, it did not feature widely in the health education response targeted at adolescents. The mid-1990s saw increasing emphasis on teenage girls’ needs with regards to the ability to negotiate condom usage, but the idea that alcohol might compromise this negotiation did not feature. Through the depiction of this exercise, Grange Hill indirectly represented ‘at risk’ identities to its young audience through recognisable characters who never truly occupy the ‘at risk’ identities they briefly depict. This allowed Grange Hill to successfully detach activities from their often consequent associated identities; the parameters of each activity are so loosely defined that the emergence of HIV positive identities – prostitute, haemophiliac, IV-drug user, homosexual – fails to materialise. The pupils who pay attention to the workshop – the girls – are given the opportunity through this lesson to check their knowledge and reassure themselves of their own safety. This reassurance becomes an important aspect of the stigma narrative which later emerges when Lucy begins to be read as ‘at risk’ and/or HIV positive by her classmates. The character Felicity has thus missed out on an innocuous but prescient AIDS education while Lucy’s boyfriend and the other male members of the class largely squander it. Here the critique is twofold: firstly Felicity’s parents’ decision to remove her from class demonstrates the perversity of ‘compulsory sex education’ under the 1993 Education Act, whereby parents could remove their children from sex education against the wishes of the child (as discussed in chapter one). Secondly, a
461 Health education materials produced for the consumption of men who have sex with men by LGBTQ charities did take up this issue in more detail. 172 feminist critique emerges, wherein the male students disregard their responsibility and opportunity to learn, leaving contraception, empathy and safer-sex the responsibility of the female students, while simultaneously disrupting the lesson [Figure 24].462
The effect of AIDS on identity and the nuclear family in Grange Hill Grange Hill’s representation of HIV positivity is one where ‘[p]assivity is imputed at all stages’, even going so far as to avoid rendering the ‘certain “culpable” activity’ which Stephen F. Kruger identifies as the moment where agency is exercised, causing the blame aspect of AIDS narratives.463 When Lucy Mitchell’s mother dies of AIDS, the very structure of the Mitchells’ nuclear family is disrupted and Lucy’s childhood and identity are reconstructed. The incursion into normative familial roles and identities that HIV represents is explored by the series through Mrs Mitchell’s transition from mother to HIV positive identity – in this case an HIV positive mother. The trajectory of Mrs Mitchell’s illness does not feature prominently within Grange Hill’s AIDS narrative; rather it is the cause and consequences of her death from AIDS upon which the plot largely concentrates, dramatically rendered to elicit sympathy in its audience and as a catalyst which reconfigures Lucy’s teenage identity. While the producers of Grange Hill attempted to present an AIDS narrative which avoided a condemnation of HIV positive identities, locating the risk in the activity – drug taking, unprotected sex, drinking – rather than the person – the heroin addict, the homosexual, the prostitute, the unfaithful spouse – it also largely failed to give much voice, agency or even a first name to Lucy’s HIV positive mother.464 Instead, Lucy’s mother is sketched through absence and passivity. As a result, the show avoided constructing her as the much maligned ‘bad mother’ who commonly populated fictional renderings of HIV positive motherhood, but the tragic failure they instead choose to present her as had its own implications.465 Alive, she is incapacitated and – however briefly – potentially infectious. Once dead, her identity and history are simplified, constructed and reconstructed by doctors, her husband and her child, reconfirming her
462 A similar critique was taken up by the teenage magazines discussed in the previous chapter where sympathetic discussion of consent and safer sex focused on the effects of sexism upon condom usage negotiations. 463 Stephen F. Kruger, AIDS Narrative: Gender and Sexuality, Fiction and Science, (Garland: New York, 1996), p. 73. 464 Mrs Mitchell is only ever referred to as ‘Mrs Mitchell’ or ‘Lucy’s mum’ or ‘Lucy’s mother’, her identity entirely the product of her relationship to her husband or daughter. 465 Katie Hogan, Women Take Care: Gender, Race, and the Culture of AIDS, (New York: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 69-70. 173 identity as entirely relational and without agency. Bereft of agency – before and after her death – she cannot be blamed for her serostatus or infectivity, and so the narrative sidesteps the thorny issue of culpability so often a hallmark of pop-culture renderings of the HIV/AIDS.466 Nonetheless, it is worth exploring the limited ways the show represents her HIV-positivity while she remains alive, before the plot is diverted into an infection whodunnit with Lucy, her father and more nebulous ideas of the nuclear family becoming the main protagonists. It is to the excavation of what little there is of her silent voice that this chapter now turns. Mrs Mitchell’s illness disrupts her identity as a mother – even before her death, we see Lucy struggling to cope with the household chores her mother would normally do. Lucy’s identity as a child-to-be-cared-for reconfigured as her mother’s identity is disrupted and subsumed into incapacitated HIV-positivity.467 This acts as both a critique of Mr Mitchell’s inability to step into the breach as a single parent and a demonstration of Lucy’s maturity, but, more importantly, it presents HIV positive motherhood as a kind of failed motherhood. Lucy’s success in taking on her mother’s role as caretaker sets a positive example to the adolescent audience of the series – who might themselves experience family breakdown of one form or another – while simultaneously demonstrating her parents’ failures by placing their action or inaction in stark contrast. Lucy’s developing maturity and her father’s failure to fulfil his paternal role become reoccurring themes within the AIDS plot – a critique of her parents and a subtly didactic device encouraging a caring form of independence in keeping with both adolescent fiction and the general representation of the responsible agentic teenager that Grange Hill favoured.468
466The 1993 film Philadelphia is a prime example of 1990s HIV/AIDS storyline where past agency imputes blame on the ‘passive’ AIDS-sufferer Andrew Beckett. Kylo-Patrick R. Hart, The AIDS movie: Representing a pandemic in film and television. (Online: Routledge, 2014) pp. 19-21; Ron Nyswaner, Philadelphia, dir. Jonathan Demme, (United States: TrisStar Pictures, 1993). I discuss agency, passivity and the risk/blame nexus at length in the introduction to this thesis. 467 For a comprehensive discussion of these tropes see Hogan ‘s chapter ‘Absent Mothers and Missing Children’ in Katie Hogan, Women Take Care: Gender, Race, and the Culture of AIDS, (New York: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 57-79 and Robin Grona, Vamps, Virgins and Victims: How can Women Fight AIDS, (London: Cassell, 1996). 468 For instance, as discussed earlier, when Felicity’s friend offers to step into the educational breach created by her parent’s withdrawing her from the sex education classes and AIDS workshop. Young adult fiction often features teenagers who take on the roles of their adult compatriots when faced with a crisis, classically knowing more, behaving more rationally and resolving the situation more successfully than their ousted or abdicating carers. This effectively provides positive role models to its young adult audience while allowing a text to be subtly didactic through a dialogical presentation of ideas and actions. I explore this at length in Hannah. E. Kershaw, Educating for the Apocalypse: Childhood, Gender and the Nuclear Threat, 1979-1986, (Unpublished MA dissertation, University of Manchester, 2012). 174
During the AIDS narrative, Lucy’s mother appears mainly as a conspicuously absent yet disruptive off-screen presence, her inconvenient incapacity foreshadowing her death. For instance, in the first episode of the AIDS storyline, Lucy appears on screen struggling to cook, pots boiling over. When asked where her absent mother is she dejectedly says ‘oh, flu.’469 Then again, in the next episode she arrives late to school giving the excuse that her mother is ill: ‘Oh, it’s still flu. She catches everything going. It’s a real pain.’470 Banal though these examples might seem, the multiplication of Lucy’s roles and responsibilities seen here – and so the disruptive effects of her mother’s illness and death – form an important aspect of this AIDS narrative and the consequent construction of the HIV positive identities it represents. Lucy’s life and character increase in complexity as the narrative progresses while her mother’s is stripped down to a single HIV positive identity. Lucy and her father must imagine and remember Mrs Mitchell to give her voice. This is achieved partially through reading her diaries, partially through conversations between Lucy and her father and partially through more of the empathy exercises which take place in the AIDS workshop and later, during Lucy’s grief counselling session.
Figure 27. The Year Tens imagine how a loved one diagnosed with HIV might feel471
For instance, during the AIDS workshop in episode 13 before Lucy’s mother has been diagnosed with AIDS, the pupils are shown responding to the prompt: ‘Imagine
469 Hood, ‘Episode 13’. 470 Kevin Hood, ‘Episode 14 Post-Production Script’, Grange Hill, Series 18, (BBC, 14 February 1995), p. 1. 471 Hood, ‘Episode 13’ 175 how a loved one diagnosed with HIV might feel?’472 The stage directions detail Lucy’s response: We see the cloth and the images representing people who are HIV positive. Lucy, imagining her mother’s response to being diagnosed with HIV writes ‘Helpless. Shock. Support. Sympathy.’ 473
This exercise echoes the immersive exercises built into the AIDS and You games discussed in the first chapter, with the pupils on screen responding to a question which demands empathetic engagement with HIV positive identities from the watching audience. This thought provoking exercise foreshadows Lucy’s own trajectory from HIV-affected to ‘at risk’ as the plot progresses. As a dramatic device such transparent foreshadowing serves multiple purposes: to allow viewers to connect disparate elements of the plot between five episodes scheduled to be broadcast over three weeks; to demonstrate the potential utility of an interactive and immersive HIV/AIDS lesson which focuses on more than biology; to make the morally/emotionally didactic elements of the sequence easy to absorb; and to demonstrate the seriousness and reality of the subject and thus critique the behaviour of the boys who reject the opportunity to learn the lesson and so lack the empathy or knowledge to help Lucy in the later episodes. The few times Lucy’s mother appears on screen she is largely obscured by medical apparatus and remains voiceless – reinforcing the sense that this plot is less about the experiences and identities of those who are HIV positive and more about those who have been affected by someone with HIV or might exist in the uneasy liminal space of the ‘at risk’. For instance, when Lucy’s mother succumbs to her illness and is rushed to hospital in an ambulance it is Lucy’s point of view which the camera follows.474 It is Lucy we hear begging for information, demanding of her mother ‘Talk to me… Talk to me… Say something!’[Figure 28]475 Lucy’s growing maturity and her father’s inadequacy are later reinforced when she appeals to another authority figure,476 in this case, the sympathetic doctor Dr West (Dorcas Morgan), for information about her mother’s illness. This provided a positive
472 Hood, ‘Episode 13’. 473 Kevin Hood, ‘Episode 13 Post-Production Script’, Grange Hill, Series 18, (BBC TV Children’s Department, 23.11.1994), p. 95; Hood, ‘Episode 13’. 474 Hood, ‘Episode 14 Post-Production Script’, pp. 35-36. 475 Hood, ‘Episode 14 Post-Production Script’, pp. 35-36. 476 This is not the only time Lucy has to replace her father with another adult authority figure. As will be discussed later, when Lucy is experiencing AIDS-related bullying and her father is going to pieces at home it is her art teacher Mr Brisley who offers a sympathetic ear. 176 role model for Grange Hill’s young audience in Lucy, and an example for adults in Dr West. In a scene which once again highlights teenagers’ need for information about AIDS, Lucy confronts her mother’s doctor with a perceptiveness that demonstrates her sense of purpose. The ‘gowned doctor’, according to her stage directions, ‘strips off a pair of sterile gloves. Bins them. Forces a smile’ and enters the ‘rest area’ where Lucy is sleeping alone curled on a chair.477 Dazed, Lucy asks Dr West after her father’s whereabouts and then her mother’s condition, before beginning a more meaningful interrogation with ‘Why does everyone wear gloves?’ 478 Dr West replies ‘It’s normal procedure for a patient in isolation’, so Lucy asks for a diagnosis in response. Dr West uncomfortably answers, ‘Your father will talk to you’, but not to be fobbed off Lucy responds, ‘I think he’s got enough on his plate. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?’ Persuaded, Dr West responds ambiguously ‘we think it’s a form of meningitis.’479 To any audience members with knowledge or experience of AIDS, it is likely such a diagnosis would indicate HIV-positivity – the ‘form of meningitis’ likely to be cryptococcal meningitis,480 ‘a common opportunistic infection and AIDS-defining illness in patients with late-stage HIV infection’.481 Lucy, still ignorant of what such a diagnosis might mean asks ‘Is it dangerous?’ and Dr West answers with a sombre nod, ‘Yes.’482 This exchange between Lucy and Dr West is notable for two key reasons; firstly it provides a laudable example of behaviour in the case of both Lucy and Dr West; the former demonstrating a mature attitude and the latter recognising and rewarding it. As a role model, Lucy speaks both to and for Grange Hill’s young audience, the creation of a believable adolescent character worthy of adult consideration acts as an embodiment of the BBC’s argument for a more open education system which takes the needs of teenagers seriously. Lucy’s need – for information, education, consideration – is clear and her ability to accept what she is given demonstrates the success to be had when her agency (and so the agency of other teenagers) is taken seriously. Through this and
477 Interestingly, though she is pictured in gown, gloves and mask earlier in this episode, the moment where Dr West strips off her gloves does not feature in the version of the episode, which aired, nor does she appear dressed in a gown in this scene, rather she wears a standard white doctor’s coat..; Hood, ‘Episode 14’, p. 59. 478 Hood, ‘Episode 14 Post-Production Script’, p. 59. 479 Hood, ‘Episode 14 Post-Production Script’, p. 59. 480 In episode 15 this is revealed to be the diagnosis. 481 Certainly this later turns out to be the type of meningitis which afflicts Mrs Mitchell. See Tihana Bicanic, Thomas S. Harrison, British Medical Bulletin, 72 (2004), pp. 99-118, p. 99. 482 Hood, ‘Episode 14 Post-Production Script’, pp. 60-61. 177 similar exchanges, Grange Hill demonstrated that adults and teenagers are capable of treating each other as equals and that peaceable, rather than adversarial, interactions result in positive outcomes. Another reason the exchange between Dr West and Lucy is of interests is the overt presence of images associated with the medical control of dangerous pathogens in the shape of the ‘gowned’ doctor, binned ‘sterile gloves’ and a patient in ‘isolation’[Figure 28].
Figure 28. Mrs Mitchell on screen, Episode 14
(From top left) Lucy demands her mother 'say something!' as paramedics take her away; Lucy watches her comatose mother through the glass as gowned, gloved and masked Dr West attends her; Mrs Mitchell is attended to by a gloved, gowned and masked nurse; Lucy and Mr Mitchell watch through the glass.
Appearing on screen repeatedly but left unexplained, these technologies of sterility which presumably provide protection to Lucy’s immunocompromised mother, seem to suggest that Mrs Mitchell herself is contagious or a contagion, harking back to older isolating imagery associated with AIDS.483 This suggestive iconography is later reinforced when Lucy and her father are pictured ‘looking through glass at her mother’,
483 Mrs Mitchell repeatedly appears behind glass, surrounded by medical equipment and attended by masked, gloved and gowned medical practitioners. 178 the physical barrier reinforced when Lucy ‘leans her head against the glass’.484 Here Grange Hill draws on older models of HIV and AIDS, representing the illness as an acute health crisis rather than chronic illness.485 The potentially infectious nature of Mrs Mitchell’s new identity is only confirmed after her death when suspicions are transfigured into facts, her meningitis assimilated into a cache of symptoms associated with AIDS. In a scene with two prominent and conflicting dialogues – the factual and the aetiological – Mrs Mitchell’s diagnosis is revealed to her husband in a manner which delivers numerous medically relevant facts and attempts to apportion blame for her illness, setting up the aetiological drama which then drives the plot. Dr West begins:
The test results show that Mrs Mitchell died of cryptococcal meningitis. It is an extremely rare form of the disease. […] Mr Mitchell – there is no easy way to say this. Your wife was HIV positive.486
Dr Firth (Barbara Phelps) – a ‘specialist’ – then takes over the explanation as Mr Mitchell becomes increasingly agitated. The verisimilitude created by naming the particular ‘form’ of meningitis which caused Mrs Mitchell’s death serves several purposes: it reminds the audience of the previous episode where the diagnosis is disclosed to Lucy, but the ‘form’ of the meningitis remains unnamed, inviting the audience to compare her reaction to her father’s while also hinting at the way information is managed (or restricted) around adolescents. This process renders the expertise of the doctors credible; it acknowledges the way meningitis has been used euphemistically and ambiguously by adding a clarification while reinforcing the idea that this ‘form’ of meningitis is unusual; and it provides an educative function: cryptococcal meningitis is a ‘defining’ opportunistic infection associated with AIDS, a fact which was well-established by 1995 when the series aired these episodes.487
484 Hood, ‘Episode 14’; Hood, ‘Episode 14 Post-Production Script’, p. 80. 485 Interestingly, Brookside and EastEnders represented AIDS using a more chronic model of the illness, with characters aware of their serostatus well before they became ill. 486 Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, p. 20. 487 See William E. Damukes, ‘Cryptococcal Meningitis in Patients with AIDS’, Journal of Infectious Diseases, 157:4 (April 1988), pp . 624-628, p. 624; William G. Powderly, ‘Cryptococcal Meningitis and AIDS’, Clinical Infectious Diseases, 17 (November, 1993), pp. 837-42, p. 837. 179
Dr Firth continues ‘In some, but not all cases, the HIV virus weakens the immune system and unusual infections can take hold.’488 In shock Mr Mitchell replies, his voice breaking and building to a shout, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute here. You’re telling me that my wife – died – my wife had AIDS and I didn’t know?’489 Calmly Dr Firth explains – delivering any relevant medical facts to Mr Mitchell and the audience – ‘Occasionally the symptoms can be mild. But it’s been clear she’s been HIV positive for some years.’490 Disbelieving, Mr Mitchell replies, ‘This is insane’, conveying his shock to the audience and ensuring their sympathy is captured before it is potentially lost as the question of how Mrs Mitchell became infected is broached.491 After this exclamation, the focus of the conversation moves swiftly from diagnosis to aetiological concerns with Dr West asking ‘Can you think how your wife became infected? Let’s say the last ten years.’ This question engages the audience, reminding them of what they learnt in episode 13 and the relevance of the AIDS workshop. In answer to this question, Mr Mitchell ‘looks Dr Firth in the eyes… (realising)’ the implication before answering and as though accused replies ‘You mean have I had unprotected sex with anyone.’492 Dr Firth meets his gaze and waits, the pause allowing the audience to grapple with the accusation of infidelity that is left unuttered. After the pause, Mr Mitchell answers ‘Just my wife. She trusted me. And I trusted her.’493 Here the scene ends and the excavation and reconstruction of Mrs Mitchell’s character begins; the factual elements of the plot subsumed beneath speculative aetiological questions with the implication of either Mr Mitchell or his wife’s undisclosed infidelity hanging in the air. The destructive consequences of the unuttered question – how did Mrs Mitchell become infected with HIV? – are dramatically rendered during the remainder of episode 15. Coupled with this question are the as yet unarticulated consequences of Mrs Mitchell’s serostatus: namely the possibility that Mr Mitchell is himself HIV positive due to the ‘unprotected sex’ he has engaged in with his wife, and, though less likely, the possibility that Lucy might be HIV positive too. The connection between unprotected sex and HIV-transmission had of course been firmly established during previous
488 Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, p. 21. 489 Ibid. 490 Ibid. 491 Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, p. 21. 492 Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, p. 21. 493 Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, p. 22. 180 episodes and it becomes clear that Mr Mitchell fears for himself because of this. It quickly transpires that he has also concluded that his wife had contracted the virus through unprotected extra-marital sex, conjuring an image of HIV-positivity associated with unfaithful behaviour. Mr Mitchell’s responds first with a desperate, drunken and angry search through his deceased wife’s possessions, reading her letters and diaries in search of proof of her infidelity, erasing his previous conceptions of her as faithful wife and mother. The destructive nature of Mr Mitchell’s anxiety reaches a crescendo when he notices Lucy is wearing a pair of Mrs Mitchell’s earrings, responding with violent fear. Frightened by her angry father Lucy rips them from her ears, causing them to tear a little [Figure 29].494 Cleaning the wound, Lucy calmly questions her father’s reaction asking ‘Is all this because she died of meningitis? […] And you’re worried about me getting it? From her earring?’ 495 At this point, Mr Mitchell’s fears have not infected Lucy’s stoic emotional state and she remains only affected by him on the surface. As the plot progresses though, his anxieties take hold in Lucy herself. In a later scene, Mr Mitchell sits at the dining table, drunkenly going through Mrs Mitchell’s old diaries. Lucy confronts him, defending her mother’s privacy.
Lucy: Why are you reading her old diaries? Mitchell: Something was going on. Lucy: Diaries are private. Mitchell: Private things affect other people. Lucy: Look, I don’t know what’s going on here. But I really don’t like it. Mitchell: She was having an affair. Lucy: (Amazed, then hurt) No. you’re lying.496
Mr Mitchell’s reactions seem rooted in both the betrayal he assumes he has suffered – his wife’s presumed infidelity – and, where the earrings are concerned, ideas of casual transmission – ideas which episode 13’s AIDS workshop should have disabused the audience of, but which are given credence throughout episode 15 because of the
494 See Figure 29; Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, pp. 26-27. 495 Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, pp. 29-30. 496 Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, pp. 29-30. 181 palpable fear of Mr Mitchell; the consequent anxiety which Lucy later exhibits; and the vivid presence of blood.497 Lucy’s trust in her mother is later proved well-founded when Mr Mitchell realises that Mrs Mitchell contracted the virus during a blood transfusion in America in the 1980s after he crashed the family’s car speeding. Upon realising his mistake, Mr Mitchell’s own possible HIV-positivity seems to become a reality, his feeling of culpability for causing the car crash that rendered Mrs Mitchell in need of a blood transfusion seemingly forcing him to face his own mortality.498
Figure 29. Mr Mitchell panics
(From top left) Lucy gasps in pain as the earring rips her ear; the camera zooms in on her bloodied hand; Mr Mitchell forcibly washes Lucy’s ear with antiseptic; Lucy asks if Mr Mitchell if he fears she will get her mother’s meningitis.499
By 1995 the impossibility of the casual transmission of HIV and the improbability of HIV transmission through piercings was of course firmly
497 See Figure 29. 498 Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, p. 36. 499 Hood, ‘Episode 15’, 182 established.500 Mr Mitchell’s repeated panicked reactions add more than drama and demonstrate more than ignorance; they establish the cause and effects of AIDS-related stigma. Mr Mitchell’s ignorance leads to fear, which leads to emotional and physical violence, leading to self-doubt in the person (Lucy) targeted by the violence and eventual isolation and self-loathing. This is the trajectory of Lucy’s ‘at risk’ experience within the narrative, the consequence of AIDS-related stigma which is often described as a kind of ‘social death’. It is to the representation of stigma and the surviving Mitchells’ ‘at risk’ identities that the analysis now turns in the final portion of this chapter.
The representation of AIDS stigma and ‘at risk’ identities in Grange Hill Mr Mitchell’s ‘at risk’ identity is firmly established in the same scene when the cause of Mrs Mitchell’s HIV-positivity (an infected blood transfusion in the US) is confirmed, moving the plot towards the last and most important focus of the Grange Hill AIDS storyline – AIDS-related stigma. With Mrs Mitchell’s death, and the blame for it firmly located elsewhere and with a different health service, Grange Hill is able to safely explore the consequence of HIV-positivity on the lives of the HIV positive and their family as far from controversy as possible. As had already been hinted by Mr Mitchell’s anxious behaviour, ‘at risk’ identities may be read as a part of a continuum of HIV positive identities, the unconfirmed nature of the risk having little impact upon those who would stigmatise the HIV positive because of a mistaken beliefs in the virulence of the virus or the character of the person who has placed themselves ‘at risk’.501 The exploration of AIDS-related stigma using ‘at risk’ rather than HIV positive identities performs several functions within the plot, foremost of which is the confirmation of the irrational nature of AIDS-related stigma. Best and worst behaviour towards the HIV positive and those who have lost someone to AIDS are explored, each bigoted or sympathetic character providing positive examples or dire warnings to
500 The Department of Health and Social Security was confident enough in the science of HIV transmission to release a series of related leaflets offering practice guidelines for professionals who worked intimately with customers in 1987. The professions included in this offshoot of the ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’ campaign were ‘tattoo artists’, ‘hairdressers’, ‘acupuncturists’, ‘chiropodists’, ‘electrolocists’ and ‘ear piercers’. The ‘Government Information 1987 AIDS Guidelines for Ear Piercers’ leaflet states: ‘No one has ever been known to catch the AIDS virus from having their ears pierced. [...] The risk from any one customer is remote.’ Wellcome Archive, EPH 504: AIDS: Awareness & Education 2: DHSS, ‘Government Information 1987 AIDS Guidelines for Ear Piercers’, Don’t Die of Ignorance, (Department of Health and Social Security: Central Office of Information, November 1987). 501 This is of course not the only cause of HIV-stigma, much of which is related to aetiological assumptions and presumptions about the character/behaviour of the HIV positive. 183
Grange Hill’s young audience with an affirmation of the need for AIDS-related education and so personal, social and sex education constantly repeated. His ‘at risk’ identity confirmed, Mr Mitchell asks, ‘Is my daughter in danger?’ Dr Firth, replies ‘Well. HIV is not easy to transmit through casual contact. But if she is worried she can take a test herself.’502 Given no cases of casual transmission had been established by 1995, one can only assume that Lucy’s HIV-positivity is left as a possibility for the sake of the plot. Moreover, the idea that a ‘worried’ Lucy might wish to take the test for her own peace of mind seems credible, if woefully uncomplicated given the myriad consequences the taking of an HIV-test could still engender in the mid-1990s.503 Mr Mitchell’s focus does not fall on these issues, instead he asks ‘I’m supposed to tell her that her mother died of AIDS?’, his anxiety firmly located in the realm of disclosing uncomfortable truths to his teenage daughter. Thus Mr Mitchell embodies the anxious adults who populate much of this thesis; uncomfortable imparting information to children and adolescents which concerns sex and death, despite the clear and apparent need for such disclosures. Dr Firth advocates and echoes the position established earlier in the AIDS narrative, that adolescents need this information if they are to make informed decisions about their own health and sexual citizenship, exclaiming ‘How else can she make her own decision?’504 Lucy’s first real reaction to being told about the cause of her mother’s death is to go through the bathroom throwing away items her mother might have come in to contact with, acting out the fears of casual transmission her father has established in her. The stage directions are uncompromising:
She picks up a toothbrush by the end and drops it in the wastebin. Picks up the soap with a flannel and drops both of them in the bin. She tips all the toothbrushes in the bin.505
502 Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, p. 78. 503 Fictional dramas rarely explored these consequences, but the need to ‘declare’ having been tested for HIV on employment, housing and immigration documents – despite in some cases the illegality of such requests – was an established factor which discouraged people from taking the test. The Wellcome Archive has several leaflets dating from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990swhich inform those considering the HIV-antibody test of the discrimination which this action might engender regardless of the test’s result. For instance, one leaflet states: ‘Having the test, regardless of the result, may mean you are discriminated against when applying for mortgages, financial loans and employment.’ TWA: EPH 503 AIDS: Islington Council AIDS Unit, The HIV Antibody Test: Yes or No, (Islington Council HIV Unit: London, April, 1993). 504 Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, p. 41. 505 Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, p. 47. 184
Lucy’s lapse in belief in the facts she was provided with during the AIDS workshop about the unlikelihood of casual transmission achieves two ends. Firstly it demonstrates the powerful anxiety experienced by the ‘at risk’ and those who lose a family member to HIV, and secondly, it provides an opportunity for Grange Hill to provide a sympathetic corrective intervention in the following scene. Lucy, having calmed herself down, calls Childline – the name of the charity ‘prominently’ marked according to stage directions – asking
What about sharing soap? That’s okay. (NODS) Good. What about toothbrushes? They’re ok as well, right good. What about earrings? We both had pierced ears. [...] So ...it’s only if there’s blood.506 The format of Lucy’s conversation with Childline – her voice providing both question and answer – allows Lucy to take on the voice of both concerned agentic teenager and authority; the tools she uses, the teenage magazine and the prominent advocate of children’s rights Childline. Consequently, this educative scene does more than merely disavow the possibility of casual transmission which looms so large in this episode; it once again allows Grange Hill to establish the necessity of AIDS education and the suitability of teenagers for it by demonstrating Lucy’s need and ability to cope with information regarding AIDS. Moreover, the comfort Lucy takes from this experience has a normative affect; the use of tools accessible to most teenagers – the teenage magazine and uncontroversial charity Childline – indicating to teenagers whose school- based sex education is lacking, where else they might gain sex education and AIDS information, subtly simultaneously pointing out the counterproductive aspects of the government’s sex education policy. The purposeful nature of this particular didactic intervention by the programme is belied by the stage direction indicating that Childline’s number be displayed ‘prominently’. Armed with this knowledge, Lucy returns to school and attempts to face bullies, anxious friends and concerned parents. The reactions Lucy encounters can be divided into examples of good and bad behaviour in relation to a person assumed to be HIV positive, the didactic effect they provide a rubric of ‘what to do’, ‘what not to do’ and also, how to defend and be a good friend to someone experiencing this kind of stigma, with the option of doing nothing
506 Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, p. 49. 185 firmly discouraged.507 Once again these reactions can be divided loosely along gendered lines with Lucy’s main antagonists taking the form of malevolent, or at the very least, feckless boys. Her defenders are less distinctly gendered, however, with female friends, male friends and Mr Brisley the gay art teacher providing a wider spectrum of good examples from which the audience can draw. This has the effect of nuancing the highly gendered representation of school-based sex education discussed earlier. Lucy’s experience of the anxiety and stigma, which surrounds AIDS begins with her father’s downward spiral, is confirmed by the taunts and giggles of the boys who force her from the AIDS-workshop follow up lesson and reaches a head when Dean graffiti’s her locker, causing rumours of her possible HIV-positivity to spread.508 The incidents of bullying that pepper the plot are too numerous to document, however it is worth meditating on Dean’s defacing of Lucy’s locker and its consequences; the refusal of Lucy’s classmates to swim in a pool with her and the reactions this produces along with Mr Brisley’s sympathetic intervention.
Figure 30. Plague Girl Death Touch. Dean defaces Lucy’s locker509
Lucy’s first reaction to her defaced locker is an attempt to smear away the red paint, ashamed by the implication and frightened that her classmates will see.510 The
507 A similar rubric was provided by the pamphlet What Can I do About AIDS?, produced by Barnardo’s and the Terrance Higgins Trust in 1991 as will be discussed in the final chapter of this thesis. 508 See Figure 30. Plague Girl Death Touch. Dean defaces Lucy’s locker 509 Hood, ‘Episode 15’. 186 skull and crossbones, reminiscent of both the symbol for chemical toxicity and a badge The Sun placed above any AIDS-related article in the early 1980s, perpetuating the idea that Lucy is herself toxic and that Dean’s ignorant and nasty reaction is outdated. The consequences of this very public outing of Lucy’s possible HIV-positivity are manifold, but most importantly we see Lucy’s identity being framed here by her antagonists rather than herself. Even the more measured – but equally destructive – reaction of the less sympathetic parents and teachers within the school amounts to treating Lucy as a problem to be solved rather than a person in need of sympathy and information. Lucy’s initial fearful response to the news of her ‘at risk’ identity getting out is quickly followed by a more empowered reaction. She rejects her friends’ requests for information, acknowledges the terrible position she has been placed in and goes home to confront her father, his attempts to make small talk finally making her snap under the pressure:
Lucy: Stop it! Stop treating me like a kid! This is not a kid situation. I understand the implications! Look, obviously you and mum – you slept on the other side of that wall. I heard you. (forces herself to ask) Did you use a condom? Mitchell: That’s private, Lucy. Lucy: Well, private things affect other people. Mitchell: No we didn’t use a condom. Lucy: Then you could die any minute just like mum. Mitchell: Look, it’s much harder for a man to get the virus than the other way round. I might not be infected. Lucy: And you might be. Look are you going to have the test or not? 511
This scene, which takes place as Lucy searches for a swimsuit determined to return to school despite the bullies and her father’s suggestion that she not bother, marks yet another incident where Lucy rejects her ‘kid’ role to take on a more adult position in the face of her father’s unreliable behaviour. Admonishing him with ‘this is not a kid situation’, implies that thus far he had been treating it as such, making her request more than a plea to be treated as an adult, but also a criticism of his infantile behaviour. This
510 Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, p. 69. 511 Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, pp. 74-75. 187 effect is bolstered when, in a reversal of expected roles, Lucy gives her father ‘the sex talk’, acknowledging his sexuality and asking if he used a condom with her mother. Lucy’s empowered role reversal – child interrogating parent and making the importance of condom use plain – is significant for a number of reasons. Here her place as a role model is extended beyond her teenage audience to include parents as educators as, taking on a parental role, she bears the embarrassment and anxiety which are expected to accompany such a talk and forces her father to face the possible consequences of his actions. Mr Mitchell’s line from earlier in the storyline is even thrown back at him by Lucy when he protests her intrusion, Lucy having experienced first-hand that ‘private things affect other people’. Upon returning to school the next day Lucy’s troubles have escalated, though they remain firmly couched within the realms of school-based bullying. Lucy’s friend Jodie is so visibly ‘frightened’ by Lucy’s proximity that Lucy enforces as self-exile sitting alone rather than with friends in an echo of Mr Mitchell’s previous isolating behaviour.512 Dudley then gleefully whispers to Dennis ‘Lucy Mitchell’s mum died of AIDS’, which quickly results in a fist fight between Dennis and Dudley, the latter attempting to defend Lucy in a mistaken show of chivalry. Here episode fifteen ends with an appalled Lucy on the brink of disclosing the cause of her mother’s death and, through association, her own possible HIV positivity.513 The moment of disclosure forms the first scene of the next episode, beginning with Dudley and Dennis still mid-fist fight, Mr Brisley the art teacher stepping in to end the altercation and handing the decision to tell or not tell the class back to Lucy.
Lucy: Look I’ve got enough to handle without lies and secrets. It’s true. [..] Mr Brisley: ‘There’s no need. You don’t have to do this. Lucy: (To the class) She was HIV positive. From a blood transfusion she had years ago in America. She had AIDS.514
This disclosure, forced upon Lucy by her schoolmates, represents yet another moment when Lucy takes control of the information which surrounds her mother’s death,
512 Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, p. 78. 513 Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, pp. 78-80. 514 Kevin Hood, ‘Episode 16 Post-production Script’, Grange Hill, Series 18, (BBC: 24 February 1995), p. 2. 188 treating her classmates with more maturity than some of them seem to deserve. Lucy’s attempt to retain control over the terms of her mother’s history and her own narrative is met with suspicion. Once again the boys take on the part of the stigmatising elements within the plot in an echo of Mr Mitchell’s own suspicions:
Harry: You believe all that about blood transfusion? Dean: Yeah, that’s what they all say. It’s obvious what happened. Her mother got it from her father. Who probably got it from someone like Mr Brisley. [The homosexual art teacher] Harry: Yeah, or maybe her mother got it from someone else. [...] Dean: Maybe she got around a bit, you know what I mean? Harry: You mean she was a prostitute? [...] Harry: What about Lucy Mitchell? Dean: Ten-to-one she’s got it too.515
Without Mrs Mitchell’s own voice and with Lucy’s ‘at risk’ voice absent, these stereotypes seem to go unchallenged, but delivered as they are by bullying boys their conclusion are made to seem malicious and their behaviour unattractive – these are not role models for the audience to copy but bullies to challenge. The bullies are challenged by popular characters, including Lucy, her friends and Mr Brisley, reinforcing their unsuitability as role models. Foregrounding Mr Brisley, a much-loved character whose ‘outing’ formed a controversial anti-homophobia plot several series beforehand, also allowed Grange Hill to firmly link AIDS-stigma with homophobia, something which Mr Brisley’s character had been designed to prove unacceptable. Moreover, the gendered turn the boys’ conversation takes, placing the blame for HIV-positivity on the female characters and demonstrating the double standard which permeates sexual politics highlighted in episode thirteen cast these boys in an ever more distasteful light. Their homophobia, ignorance, sexism and insensitivity are made to seem an ever more unattractive and retrogressive way to behave by their status as bullies, while their attitudes are made to
515 Hood, ‘Episode 16 Post-Production Script’, pp. 5-6. 189 seem the product of unnecessary ignorance from the standpoint of an audience which had benefitted from an AIDS workshop which made such behaviour seem demonstrably unnecessary and irrational. The idea that ignorance makes teenagers potentially vulnerable to this kind of stigmatising ideology and that these ideas should be challenged is reinforced when Dean leads a rebellion in the swimming lesson which makes up the next scene, refusing to enter the swimming pool with Lucy because, he says, ‘I don’t want to get AIDS’. 516 Lucy’s friend Rachel, having listened carefully during the AIDS workshop in episode thirteen jumps into the water, asking Lucy in after her, but none of the other students make the same move, spooked by Dean’s behaviour. Even Josh, Lucy’s boyfriend, remarks ‘I can’t remember if it’s safe or not’, his ignorance leaving him open to fear and uncertainty.517 Here sex education is demonstrated to be about more than preventing bodily harm on a personal level; it is also about challenging assumptions which could create the ‘unnecessary anxiety amongst heterosexuals’ which the government and BMA were preoccupied with challenging while challenging the harmful stereotypes which teenage magazines and Grange Hill wanted to combat.518 Lauren admonishes Josh, ‘You should have paid attention at the AIDS workshop instead of mucking about’, before jumping in herself.519 This scene serves to reinforce the points made earlier in the AIDS storyline about the need for sex education and open and frank conversations with teenagers about AIDS, but Grange Hill is at pains to demonstrate that fear and ignorance were not only the provision of the young, the teachers are also used to stage a similarly morally didactic scene. Lunchtime is used in episode sixteen to once again air fears of casual transmission amongst student and teachers. As Lucy deals with the rumours which fly about the canteen, the teachers panic over their coffee. Once again Mr Brisley defends Lucy’s right to make her own decisions around the decision to both disclose her possible HIV-status and to take the test.
Parrott: Is she infected or not? Robson: Don’t know.
516 Hood, ‘Episode 16 Post-Production Script’, p. 11. 517 Hood, ‘Episode 16 Post-Production Script’, p. 12. 518 See chapter one for a discussion of the concern felt by sexual health-educators around heterosexuals becoming ‘unduly’ about AIDS and chapter two for a discussion of the ways teenage magazines attempted to ridicule bigoted attitudes amongst their teenage readers. 519 Hood, ‘Episode 16 Post-Production Script’, p. 12. 190
Parrott: So what we have is a very serious health risk on our hands? [...] Brisley: The last thing we need is panic. [...] Robson: Perhaps it would be in everyone’s interest if we asked her to take the test. Brisley: Peter that has to be Lucy’s decision, not ours. Carver: Excuse me. I just want to be clear about what happens if she has an accident and cuts herself. Do we help her? Parrott: Good point. Brisley: Of course you help her! Robson: We know the only possible danger is from blood. And we have a supply of disposable gloves. [...] Parrott: If she has a cut, well, I’m sorry I’m not touching her without one of these. Brisley: Look, there is no need to be afraid of her. Malcolm – have you ever known anyone with HIV related disease? Parrott: (Offended) What are you suggesting? Brisley: That you are over-reacting. Massively.520
This exchange offers more than a chance for Mr Brisley to be placed firmly in Lucy’s corner, champion her agency; it also reiterates blood as the only possible transmission risk presented by a non-sexual scenario and proffers gloves as an effective barrier method. Beyond this rather practical message, Mr Parrott’s phobic reaction and Mr Brisley’s defence of Lucy and more widely ‘anyone with HIV related disease’ takes on new meaning here; Mr Parrot’s bigoted attitudes a previously established character trait, demonstrated by clashes with Mr Brisley over his homosexuality in a previous series in 1992. The offence Mr Parrott takes at the intimation he might know someone HIV positive can be read as part of his characterisation as bigoted, his apparent conclusion that those who contract HIV must be undesirable clear and connected to his previous
520 Hood, ‘Episode 16 Post-Production Script’, pp. 16-22. 191 displays of homophobia. This assumption, and the presumption that the sex he finds distasteful are made to seem juvenile by the scene which follows on the heels of this one. Dean, fulfilling his role as a bully, declares of Mrs Mitchell, ‘I reckon it’s definitely her dad who give it to her mum [sic.]. He must swing both ways.’ adding the stereotype of the infectious bisexual or hidden homosexual to the slew of stereotypes Dean proffers, and furnishing the previous scene with the unarticulated HIV positive identities Mr Parrott fears associating with.521 Jodie, Lucy’s friend, sums up her assessment of responses like Dean’s and Mr Parrot’s, indicating what the audience is encouraged to feel in regard to these less than sympathetic reactions with a derisive, ‘Ignorant creeps.’522 The idea that Lucy might present a danger to other students is raised again when Mrs Jenkins, a concerned parent, decides to withdraw her son from school, declaring ‘it’s obvious a child in the school with AIDS is a danger to all the others.’523 Here Grange Hill plays out events which the press repeatedly covered during the 1980s and 1990s, when panics about HIV positive children emptied whole schools as confused and worried parents withdrew children to avoid them coming into contact with the infected pupil. The staff appear more sympathetic to parental fears than Lucy’s situation, and Mr Brisley, Lucy’s sympathetic adult defender, storms from the staffroom in disgust. On the heels of this incident, Lucy seeks Mr Brisley out, articulating to him and Grange Hill’s audience, the ways in which the AIDS-related stigma she is experiencing have affected her.
Lucy: I think... I think I have it. I mean AIDS. Like mum. Brisley: Why? Lucy: Well, I lived with her. I must have it. It’s obvious. Brisley: Not to me it’s not. Lucy: It is to everyone else. They make me feel so... Brisley: Dirty? [stage directions] Brisley takes her hands. Lucy: You’re touching me and you’re not frightened?
521 Hood, ‘Episode 16 Post-Production Script’, p. 23. 522 Hood, ‘Episode 16 Post-Production Script’, p. 23. 523 Hood, ‘Episode 16 Post-Production Script’, p. 39. 192
Brisley: Yeah, well there’s no need to be. You know this virus is very weak it’s very fragile. HIV can’t be transmitted by touching or by sharing cups or toilets. Lucy: What about swimming pools? Brisley: That either. [Stage direction] Brisley kisses her forehead chastely.524
Following the same path as her father, Lucy has come to see herself as contagious, convinced of her own HIV-positivity and unable to believe the medical facts the AIDS workshop had furnished her with. Mr Brisley’s timely and sympathetic intervention, demonstrating his and her humanity by extending physical comfort, represents more than an example of best-practice to Grange Hill’s young audience; it also offered unassailable proof to the audience that Lucy presents no threat. This low point marks a turning point in the trajectory of Lucy’s experience of AIDS stigma, after this moment she begins to articulate and tackle the way the stigma is affecting her view of herself, her mother and her behaviour. Later during counselling at the Terrence Higgins Trust, Lucy explains the way AIDS-related stigma has affected her relationship with her dead mother:
Lucy: It’s like she’s stopped being my mum and become this woman who might have given me AIDS. Counsellor: AIDS is a disease not a judgement. Your mum had nothing to be ashamed of. Lucy: Well I have.
Here Grange Hill delivers its final ideological message, articulating the annihilation of Mrs Mitchell’s character through Lucy’s despairing words and attempting to redeem her through a separation of the disease from the person by trying to disabuse Lucy of the blame narrative she has accepted and internalised. The episode ends with Lucy and her father in a haematology clinic, holding hands about to take their HIV-tests. In episode eighteen it is revealed that neither Lucy nor her father is HIV positive and Grange Hill’s AIDS storyline ends.
524 Hood, ‘Episode 16 Post-Production Script’, pp. 61-63. 193
Conclusions: ‘Private things affect other people’ ‘Private things affect other people’. This line, which reoccurs throughout the AIDS narrative, champions both disclosure and personal sexual responsibility and seems to be the motive that lies behind Lucy’s later disclosure to her classmates about the cause of her mother’s death, but it is much more than that. Here Grange Hill seems to present an idealised series of events wherein such disclosures are made both possible and advisable by sex education, allowing the series to reiterate the need for sex education, and specifically AIDS education, through the acceptance Lucy receives from her enlightened allies. Though Lucy faces stigma as an ‘at risk’ or HIV positive identity, her educated female classmates are largely able to sway the minds of her ignorant male antagonists, demonstrating the empowerment to be found in sex education on several fronts, while her male friends who remain ignorant resort to violence.525 There is another reading of this reoccurring line which needs addressing. HIV/AIDS was, and is, not a notifiable disease. ‘Private things affect other people’ might seem to be problematising this particular element of the legislation which surrounds HIV. Placed in the context of a storyline which is as much about championing the agentic teenager as it is about promoting more tolerant attitudes to the HIV positive, it should be understood as a disavowal of the need to keep certain aspects of life ‘private’ from teenagers, rather than a call for AIDS to become a notifiable disease. Ultimately, this text must be read first and foremost as a call for more rational and comprehensive sex education. Where teenage magazines took aim at adult media. Grange Hill took aim at education policies which left teachers confused, children uneducated and parents with the uncomfortable choice between sex education (and therefore AIDS education) or withdrawal. Beyond the broader education narrative lies the AIDS narrative at the heart of this case study, wherein Mrs Mitchell’s death from AIDS comes to represent an ultimate failure in her role as mother, with the illness irrevocably robbing her of the ability to care for her family within which her previous role was rooted. Indeed, though the series largely avoided stereotypical representations of the HIV positive that were so popular with the adult printed press in the early 1980s, it still failed to allow HIV-
525 Dennis ends up in a fist fight with Dudley when he gleefully announces ‘Lucy Mitchell’s mum died of AIDS’, Hood, ‘Episode 15 Post-Production Script’, pp. 78-80. 194 positivity to exist alongside other more banal identities within its characters. Just as Mrs Mitchell’s identities are annihilated and subsumed into one single identity – HIV positive mother – later both Mr Mitchell’s and Lucy’s identities come to be dominated by the mere possibility that they might be HIV positive, rendering them ‘at risk’. After her mother’s death this aspect of narrative is plainly articulated by Lucy herself when she expresses her sense that her mother ‘stopped being my mum and […became] this woman who might have given me AIDS.’ Ultimately Grange Hill’s AIDS storyline offers both an intervention into, and a reflection of, the complex politics of anxiety which surrounded AIDS and sex education more broadly during the 1990s. The narrative clarity of the AIDS workshop, with its clear feminist articulation of the sexual politics around condom use and the need for sex education becomes a little lost amongst the turmoil of Lucy’s unravelling life. As the next chapter which focuses on children directly affected by HIV will demonstrate, the messiness depicted here has a verisimilitude, the complex questions of consent and disclosure touched on by Grange Hill forming core areas of anxiety when the need to tell children about AIDS moves from an ideal to a necessity.
195
Chapter 4 Timeline of Key Events
•Sexual Offences Act decriminalises sex between consenting men over 21 in private 1967 •Abortion Act legalises abortion
•International Year of the Child 1979 •Conservatives win UK election under Margaret Thatcher
1981 •First cases of AIDS in Britain documented in Lancet
•House of Lords overturn Gillick ruling, Gillick Competence becomes an accepted 1985 measure of children's agency in law and medicine
•Section 28 of the Local Government Bill prohibits LEAs from ‘promoting’ 1988 homosexuality
•Living and Working with HIV: Training Guidance for Staff in the Personal Social 1989 Services, published
•John Major becomes Conservative Prime minister. 1990
•National Curriculum revised and HIV/AIDS is added to statutory science curriculum for pupils aged 11 to 16 1991 •HIV, AIDS and Children: A Cause for Concern published •What Can I do About AIDS? Published by Terrence Higgins Trust and Barnardo's
•Picture book It’s Clinic Day published 1992
•1993 Education Bill makes the provision of sex education in schools compulsory but removes non-biological aspects from statutory science curriculum Parents are given the 1993 right to withdraw their children from sex education classes.
•Children and Families Affected by HIV in Europe: The Way Forward published 1994
•What Do We Tell The Children? Books to use with children affected by illness and 1996 bereavement published
•Tony Blair becomes Labour Prime Minister 1997
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Chapter 4: ‘It is like living with a tiny time bomb’:526 Representing HIV positive identities to HIV-affected children
The title of this chapter is drawn from the testimony of a mother living with the realities of bringing up her HIV positive son – her ‘tiny time bomb’ – in 1988. The short quote below to which it belongs explains some of what it is to be an HIV-affected parent: the moment of diagnosis; the empowering effects of AIDS education; the need for familial and emotional support; the discomfort of telling HIV-affected children about their diagnosis; the assertion of agency through disclosure; and the day-to-day of living with a child with AIDS. It reads:
We were told that Thomas was AIDS virus positive…the tears started and I could not stop. Poor little Thomas could not understand… The next hard bit was to tell our three teenage sons who loved Thomas very much and did not want to part with him….We had a doctor from the Fife Health Board out to counsel us on the virus and realised what the papers were printing on how you catch the virus was very wrong. I have to say that not one of our family was worried about catching the virus, and we treat Thomas [as] a normal boy as he is, lots of kisses and cuddles, and the only thing we are careful with is his blood... We also decided that we were going to be honest right from the start about what Thomas has… The outlook for Thomas is not good as he not only has the virus but it is active and he does have problems, like night sweats, enlarged lymph glands, and skin rashes. He has to go into hospital every three weeks for infusions of gamma globulin …It is like living with a tiny time bomb, but we take each day at a time and just enjoy him.527
In opening my chapter with the words of a parent affected by HIV, I acknowledge a silence elsewhere in my thesis; that is, the absent voices of those who lived the reality of the HIV positive identities that my research investigates. This silence reflects, for the most part, the material which has been analysed so far. The texts covered in previous chapters were created by producers who, though aiming to be kind and prevent stigma, were arguably unconcerned with emotional needs or agency of the HIV positive,
526 Extract from AIDS Bulletin, June 1988, published by Social Work Service Group, Scottish Education Department, quoted in Naomi Honigsbaum, Living and Working with HIV: Training Guidance for Staff in the Personal Social Services, (London: Central Council For Education and Training in Social Work, 1989), p. 63. 527 Extract from AIDS Bulletin, June 1988, Honigsbaum, Living and Working with HIV, p. 63. 197 prioritising instead what they viewed to be the needs of the HIV negative. This final chapter departs from this material, investigating instead the HIV positive identities produced for the consumption of children and adolescents affected by HIV, investigating how ideas of childhood were negotiated alongside the day-to-day reality of living within an HIV-affected family. In the early 1980s, the specific needs of families affected by HIV in Britain, while recognised, were not prioritised. HIV’s emotional and social impact was quickly identified as formative aspects of its effect on individuals and communities, but any public health and social care responses to these experiential facets of HIV infection were superseded by a public health response aimed at transmission prevention, often to the detriment of the agency of those with HIV. It quickly became clear however that the social aspects of HIV infection, such as the stigma and myths which became associated with the disease, were affecting the success of the public health response. Assumptions about who got the disease, how it was transmitted and the trajectory of HIV-affected the allocation of resources and the impact of education, leaving the needs of key groups – such as women and children – at worst neglected, and at best misunderstood. Recognising an as yet unfulfilled need, the HIV positive, those who knew and loved them, and the social service sector, began to address the problems associated with the social costs of HIV, producing materials for the consumption of the HIV positive, their families and communities. This material addressed both the education and emotional needs of its audience, giving voice, returning agency and respecting the dignity of those affected by HIV. My final chapter examines the portion of this material which was aimed specifically at children, constructing HIV-affected childhoods which reflected the realities and the anxieties of living and working with HIV. Previous chapters focused on producers’ attempts to create and disseminate HIV positive identities for the consumption of children and adolescents who were assumed to be largely ignorant of the virus. The knowledge disseminated through these materials, to a young audience, was largely framed as protective: protecting children from contracting the virus in their future through safer-sex education and protecting HIV positive people from prejudice by dispelling stigmatising myths. In this chapter I investigate the way HIV was represented to a very different audience of children and adolescents; those who were HIV positive themselves and/or those who were closely related to someone who was. These representations of HIV-positivity, while once again designed to meet educative aims which targeted myths, stigma and transmission, were 198 fundamentally different to those aimed at populations as yet unaffected by HIV. Crucially, the producers of material for the HIV positive had a further core aim: bolstering the agency of the HIV positive by giving them a voice or empathetically representing them, especially in the case of HIV positive children.
The chapter begins by investigating how social service practitioners involved in the care and management of families affected by HIV identified and provided for the specific education and emotional needs of children affected by HIV. The solutions offered by the British social service community to tackle the manifold issues associated with the newly recognised and evolving needs of HIV-affected families were threefold: emphasising the need for specific training, networking and funding. It is not the purpose of this chapter to provide a comprehensive history of this process, rather I trace how social services created, disseminated and deployed HIV positive identities to provide for the needs of HIV-affected families. In particular, the way the social service sector worked to tackle misinformation, HIV stigma and transmission and to empower HIV- affected families will be assessed. This will be achieved by analysing key social work texts, discussion papers, reports and a key oral history collected from Naomi Honigsbaum, a social worker who was integral to the creation of the National Children’s Bureau’s National Forum on AIDS and Children in the UK, the European Forum on HIV/AIDS Children and Families, and held several key AIDS-related positions within the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work (CCETSW) during the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. By analysing social work manuals the chapter traces how social work practices related to HIV positive children were codified, how narratives were produced and how HIV positive identities intended for the consumption of HIV-affected children developed as part of a response to their needs. These identities were disseminated and consumed through the didactic fictional texts discussed later in this chapter, but also existed outside these texts in moments of interaction between the social worker, the HIV-affected parent and the HIV-affected child, and it is through these manuals that such interactions can be glimpsed. Having contextualised the social services response to HIV-affected children, the chapter then discusses the creation and dissemination of material responses to the needs of HIV-affected families, specifically focusing on how HIV positive identities were represented to children affected by HIV. This is achieved through the analysis of two representative texts aimed at HIV-affected children and adolescents: the picture book 199
It’s Clinic Day, a text authored by an HIV positive mother in 1992, and a pamphlet titled What Can I do About AIDS?, co-produced by Barnardo’s and the Terrence Higgins Trust in 1991. Prioritising the needs, voices and agency of children within AIDS-related public health was no simple feat. Children’s voices remained largely absent from the public health discourse around AIDS during the 1980s and 1990s. Instead, narratives of adult infection and spread proliferated. Early epidemiological narratives of HIV erased individuals, adults and children, in favour of population narratives which tracked the ‘apocalyptic spread of disease’ and the inevitable ‘abandonment of particular “risk groups”... for the “general population”’ if health interventions failed to be effective.528 Those narratives which identified individuals with HIV as examples of HIV-positivity implied ‘passivity at all stages’, except crucially the initial moment of infection, where ‘a certain “culpable” activity’ was categorised and implicated as the source of HIV exposure.529 When these personal and epidemiological AIDS narratives were combined, as Steven Kruger has argued, ‘the agent of the epidemic’s spread’ were identified as ‘the body of the “infectious” patient’, [...] the person with AIDS’, and so they were reframed as ‘irremediably given over to death’ and ‘the source of others’ deaths; […] simultaneously and paradoxically, the active bearer of disease and its passive sufferer.’530 Ideas of HIV as a problem for isolated HIV positive adults (the sufferers and agents of destruction), proved hard to sustain when narratives of childhood innocence and victimhood joined the AIDS discourse. As children were recognised as an affected population they catalysed the move away from conceptualisations of HIV as an infection affecting isolated – yet infectious – individuals because children were inextricably situated in families. At first children’s experience of HIV-positivity was treated as a mere caveat to AIDS narratives concerning the lives of adults; the presence of an HIV positive child implicated their parents, creating new blame and victimhood narratives where the
528 Kruger, AIDS Narratives, pp. 75-76, see for example Clare Dover, Colin Pratt, ‘Women Victims of Deadly Gay Plague’, Daily Express, (February 19 1985) p. 2; Anon ‘AIDS toll by 1991’, Daily Mirror, (January 10 1985), p. 2. 529 Kruger, AIDS Narratives, p.73. See for example Geoff Sutton, ‘Web of Fear: after ‘reckless’ HIV Romeo is revealed’, Daily Mirror, (June 25 1992) p. 3. The ‘HIV Romeo’ in this story was a haemophiliac who had engaged in premarital sex; See also James Murray, ‘Abortion agony for wife who caught AIDS from husband’, Daily Express, (December 6 1986) p. 1. This story reveals her husband was a ‘secret bisexual’. 530 Kruger, AIDS Narratives, p. 77. See for example Peter Kent, ‘Why even doctors dread killer AIDS’ Daily Express, (February 1 1985), p. 5. 200 child’s identity dissolved into little more than an accusation or a symptom of their parent’s HIV-positivity and past/present deviancy. The HIV positive infant came to be seen as symptomatic of larger problems associated with HIV as a health crisis. Touted by the media and politicians as proof of failed parenthood amongst bisexuals, prostitutes and IV drug users, the individual personhood of the HIV positive infant dissolved, to be replaced by victimhood and membership of a failed HIV positive or HIV-affected family – an addendum in a tragic morality tale.531 Where children were members of families affected by infected blood products – such as haemophiliac families – they were held up as symbols of government or health service failures.532 Media sensations around infant cases of AIDS began emerging as early as 1984 and continued to be part of the AIDS repertoire for much of the UK’s tabloid press till the mid-1990s, with the accusatory tone sustained and the child’s voice erased. The version of childhood constructed by these representations offered little space for agency and was one marred by tragedy, a powerless experience cut short. In part, the passive construction and limited agency of the HIV-affected child was a product of the cultural and legislative construction of children more broadly. Children, especially young children, were viewed as indivisible from their family or parentage, with little or no recognised agency over the construction of many aspects of their identity and lives. This was confirmed in legislation in 1989 when the Children Act demarcated the roles of parents and the State in relation to children, constructing the limits of children’s agency situationally and according to age and capacity.533 The Act upheld the family as the best place for children, and while provisions were made for social workers – cast in a supportive role – to undertake to adhere to the wishes of a child judged capable of making decisions when that child was in state care or the court, no provision was made for children within their families to offer criticism or dissent to parental rule.534 As with any identity dependant on self-knowledge, children’s ability to
531 Jill Palmer, ‘Wife Get AIDS from Husband’s Affair: Death risk forces mum-to-be to have an abortion’, Daily Mirror, (October 23 1986), p. 7. 532 See Clare Dover, ’10 Million Fall Victim to AIDS’, Daily Express, (25 January 1988), p. 14;William Daniels, ‘Secret AIDS Watch on a Mother and Baby’, Daily Mirror, (December 21 1984), p. 2.; Jill Palmer, ‘AIDS Baby Nightmare: Mum Must Wait to See if Her Baby Will Live’, Daily Mirror, (20 February 1985) pp. 1-2; Gordon Hughes, ‘Please Don’t Ever Wake Up, Darling: Tormented mum’s prayer for AIDS boy’, Daily Mirror, (February 2 1987) p. 5. 533 This was discussed at length in the introduction to this thesis. Karen Winter, Paul Connolly, ‘‘Keeping It in the Family’: Thatcherism and the Children Act 1989’, in Thatcher’s Children? Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s, ed. by Jane Pilcher, Stephen Wagg, (London: Falmer Press, 1996), pp. 29-42, p. 35. 534 Winter, Connolly, ‘Keeping It in the Family’, pp. 39-40. 201 self-identify as HIV positive or as HIV-affected was compromised by their dependence upon adults for information, their agency at the mercy of adults’ control over information about HIV, its presence within their family or community and the discourse which surrounded the disease. In an attempt to protect both children and themselves from the stigma and emotional anguish associated with HIV, carers and medical practitioners often attempted to limit the provision of information about HIV to HIV- affected children, even going so far as to leave children ignorant of their own serostatus. There were those however, as this chapter will investigate, who did not keep but rather broke this silence.
As thinking in HIV-related social work developed, the all-encompassing term ‘HIV-affected’ (which I have adopted in this chapter) began to be used to refer to those ‘infected or those who live in a family or community where… carers, relatives or peers have the virus, which will have emotional, social or economic consequences’.535 I have chosen to use this term, borrowed from the instructional social work texts which form part of my analysis, in part for its breadth. I have also chosen it for its ambiguity. HIV- affected refers simultaneously to service users and service providers, and in the case of texts, producers and their audiences, reflecting the complex production context of the texts under analysis. The ambiguous relationship between the producers of these texts and their audience is in part the product of the liminal space social workers who worked with the HIV-affected came to occupy in this period. The social worker, by working with the HIV positive, quickly became a member of the ‘HIV-affected’; experiencing ‘courtesy stigma’ as fears of casual transmission persisted, and becoming emotionally compromised by the difficulties associated with their work.536 Social workers were both producers of, and audiences for, some of the texts under discussion. Similarly, social work manuals on HIV/AIDS were produced in close consultation with those who were HIV positive had AIDS or were the parents of HIV positive children, dissolving the boundary between producer and audience.
535 Though alluded to and understood in Living and Working with HIV, this clear explanation is from the 1994 text: Naomi Honigsbaum, ‘Children and Families Affected by HIV in Europe: The Way Forward, (London: The National Children’s Bureau, 1994), p. 6. 536 Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity,(New York: Simon & Schuster,1963), pp. pp. 30-31; Ann Sutton, ‘Key Issues in Working with Children and HIV’ in, Children and HIV: Supporting Children and their Families, ed. by Sarah Morton, David Johnson, (Edinburgh: The Stationary Office, 1996), pp. 8-15, p. 13. 202
The distinction between audience and producers dissolves still further when creative texts responding to the emotional needs of HIV-affected children are considered. Written as tools to be used with and by the HIV-affected, they follow the rules laid out in instructional social work texts, but were often produced by the HIV positive themselves to fulfil needs which were recognised but not yet met by social workers or wider HIV-affected communities. HIV positive parents wrote for themselves and their children, but also other parents and children like them, creating identities for the consumption of HIV-affected children with an audience as real as it was imagined. These texts, fictive and instructional, are not merely intertextual, littered with first person testimony and created through the closest of compact between HIV-affected producer and HIV-affected audience, they sit uneasily between genres, at once manual, biography, autobiography and picture book.
‘[T]his is not a gay disease’: Recognising HIV as a ‘family disease’537 Dating the moment when HIV was recognised as an inter-generational health crisis which affected families, rather than a problem almost exclusively affecting men who have sex with men, is difficult. In interview, Naomi Honigsbaum explained that in 1987 when she began to work in earnest on the familial dimensions of HIV for the CCETSW, the impact the disease was having on women and children in Britain was largely unrecognised. Honigsbaum’s own interest in the disease arose at first because of her local environment, she happened to be working as chair for the District Health Council between St Mary’s Hospital and what was then Earl’s Court (now Chelsea and Westminster) Hospital, where some of the first HIV cases in the UK were observed, treated and reported to the press.538 She explained how her own (and others’) realisation of the likely impact HIV would have on families was gradual as understandings of HIV as an illness developed:
[T]he impact on children, …in ‘87 it was not seen as a huge problem, it was just beginning to surface because of course women were getting HIV and children, infected babies, were being born to infected women because that
537 Author’s interview with Naomi Honigsbaum, 04/09/2013, track 2. 538 The four Thames Regional Authorities dealt with the majority of cases with St Mary’s Hospital receiving the first patient. British Medical Association, Statement on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, (Chameleon Press Limited: London, 1986) p. 3; Berridge, AIDS in the UK, p.17. 203
was before they had the appropriate treatment and medication to intervene during pregnancy…539 The recognition of vertical transmission (from mother to foetus during pregnancy or birth) and transmission via infected blood products affected the perception of the HIV and the HIV positive, drawing focus away from a wholly sexualised view of the virus and those affected, identifying new affected populations and areas for social work intervention.
…The early perception was adult men, adult gay men, and then wow, surprise, surprise, heterosexual men and women can acquire HIV infection[s]... …But that was the setting up, the shifting the whole emphasis, ‘this is not a gay disease’ …this is a general infection which can be picked up through mainly sexual contact, but not totally, because that’s where the first group of children were really identified as being a separate issue because through drug use women were getting HIV-infection through dirty needles, men and women, and then giving birth to children. 540 Throughout my interview with her, Honigsbaum emphasised that there was no immediate change in perceptions of HIV, ‘it was a long time before one could say this is a family disease because it was intergenerational.’541 The reconceptualization of the disease as affecting a multitude of populations and specifically whole families, rather than individuals, was gradual and far from total – even with the media making a sensation of every new case, especially those affecting women or children. The gap between the media discourse around HIV and a change to the expectations of those involved in the health services might in part be due to the way official epidemiological statistics were reported. Statistics published in the British Medical Association’s widely circulated 1986 Statement on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome cited ‘high risk category and sex’ as the pertinent demographic divisions and the number of ‘female’ cases cited (11) was small compared to the number of ‘male’ cases (324).542 The further statistical breakdown favoured sexuality over other demographic divisions; of the total 324 cases identified, 296 of the patients were categorised as male ‘homosexual/bisexual’.543 While the statement did acknowledge 35% of the (approximately 700) haemophiliac children in the UK tested
539 Honigsbaum, 04/09/2013, track 2. 540 Honigsbaum, 04/09/2013, track 2. 541 Honigsbaum, 04/09/2013, track 2. 542 BMA, Statement on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, p. 3. 543 BMA, Statement on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, p. 3. 204
‘antibody positive’ and did list ‘infants born to mothers who are HTLV III positive or at risk of catching the virus’ amongst the five ‘high risk groups’ identified in the booklet. The ages of the patients went unmentioned in the statistical breakdown, obscuring this important demographic category.544 The lack of statistical clarity was complained about repeatedly in the manuals and research cited throughout this chapter. Honigsbaum writing in 1991 went so far as to implicate the unclear reporting of statistics in creating a ‘falsely optimistic view that infectivity in children is statistically insignificant’.545 Despite these difficulties, the unique needs of women and children were eventually recognised.
In the late 1980s, the global perspective on AIDS began to shift. The ‘Paris Declaration on Women, Children and the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) 1989’ acknowledged the specific challenges HIV presented and made fifteen recommendations calling for the development of comprehensive strategies towards children and women in relation to HIV prevention.546 These included aspects of HIV research, prevention, care and treatment. The Declaration noted especially that the needs of women and children had been previously overlooked, and therefore required greater specific attention.547 While medical communities around the world began to step up investigation into transmission rates and the specific morbidities experienced by women and children infected by HIV, in Britain, a broader community of social workers, carers, teachers and other concerned adults attempted to grapple more holistically with ‘the social and emotional, as well as the medical implications of HIV’ and to assess the power they had to meet these needs.548 Honigsbaum and her colleagues began to ask questions about the health and social care which would be necessary to meet the needs of women and children specifically. Medical queries such as ‘…what is the treatment? What is the prognosis?’ were quickly joined by questions about how to
544 BMA, Statement on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, p. 3-4. 545 Naomi Honigsbaum, HIV, AIDS and Children: A Cause for Concern, (London: National Children’s Bureau, 1991), p. 8. 546 WHO/GPA/DIR/89.12, ‘Paris Declaration on Women, Children and the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS)’ in Report on the International Conference on the Implication of AIDS for Mothers and Children: Technical Statements and Selected Presentations, (27-30 November 1989), pp. 3-5. 547 Honigsbaum, Children and Families Affected by HIV in Europe, p. 4. 548 Honigsbaum, Children and Families Affected by HIV in Europe, p. 19. 205 get HIV recognised and tackled as a family disease, both medically and socially and more specifically ‘How can we progress the needs of children and focus on children?’549 In 1988 Honigsbaum began a six-month research project, funded by the Department of Health, on the impact of HIV on children and families, eventually publishing her research in 1989 as a manual titled Living and Working with HIV: Training Guidance for Staff in the Personal Social Services ‘…to alert the social work profession to what it would mean to them when they encountered people with HIV’.550 The research also resulted in the publication of four discussion papers addressing the impact of AIDS and social work on the voluntary sector, black and minority ethnic communities, the needs of staff working with drug users and more general social work perspectives.551 The manual and four reports reflect the interdisciplinary, qualitative and quantitative research undertaken by Honigsbaum and her team during the six-month research period, but also the inclusive aims of the social work community which included greater participation from the HIV positive in the creation of AIDS-related policy and practice, but also a greater attention to diversity within the HIV positive community specifically with regard to age, gender, race, sexuality and class. The information, data and resultant guidelines disseminated in the manual and discussion papers were obtained by consulting a wide variety of groups who were likely to interact with the HIV-affected through:
...a questionnaire mailed to all UK social services departments, education authorities, voluntary organisations, regional and district health authorities, health education units, the probations services and CCETSW courses and schemes; …structured interviews with key individuals and staff; observation visits to specialist agencies and organisations involved in HIV services; focussed workshop discussions with staff groups from different agency settings.552
549 Honigsbaum, 04/09/2013, track 2. 550 Honigsbaum, 04/09/2013, track 2. The text referred to here is Naomi Honigsbaum, Living and Working with HIV: Training Guidance for Staff in the Personal Social Services, (London: Central Council For Education and Training in Social Work, 1989). 551 Nick Manning, ‘Issues and choices: Employment-based Training within the Personal social Services for Hospital and Community-based Social Workers, Planners and Managers’, Living and Working with HIV, Discussion paper 1, (London: CCETSW, 1989); Kate Tomlinson, ‘The experience of Voluntary Organisations’, Living and Working with HIV, Discussion paper 2, (London: CCETSW, 1989); Mehboob Dada and Kate Tomlinson, ‘Issues for Clients and Workers from Black and Ethnic Minority Communities’, Living and Working with HIV, Discussion paper 3, (London: CCETSW, 1989); Kate Tomlinson, Training Needs of Staff Working with Drug Users’, Living and Working with HIV, Discussion paper 4, (London: CCETSW, 1989). 552 Honigsbaum, Living and Working with HIV, p. 11. 206
These qualitative and quantitative techniques were supplemented by thirteen workshops held over three months with around 340 participants ‘invited from different geographical regions, settings, organisational levels and black and ethnic minority communities’.553 Participants were ‘trainers, senior managers, team leaders, home help organisers, home helps, residential and day care staff, doctors, social work tutors, drug workers, probation officers, HIV coordinators and individuals who were HIV positive.’554 This diversity was reflected in the manual’s guidelines and the intertextuality of the text itself, which was littered with testimonies collected during the research process, placed in dialogue with the policies and practices outlined within the text. This allowed the manual to reflect both consensus within the social work community about the challenge HIV/AIDS presented, but also the agency of the individuals – workers and service users –affected by it. In allowing the HIV-affected to explain their experiences and needs in their own words, the manual in effect practised what it preached; creating a space for the HIV-affected to represent themselves and to assert their agency within their relationship with social services. The training manual Living and Working with HIV began with a forward by the director of the CCETSW, Tony Hall, who cautioned readers that any changes to the service engendered by HIV were ‘not about creating “special services”,’ rather changes were intended to ensure ‘good practices in the services that already exist’, allocating resources in line with policies of positive discrimination where necessary.555 Debates around practices of positive discrimination within social care, which underlay Hall’s statement, dated back to the 1970s, when limited powers were granted by employment legislation to allow institutions to enact policies of positive discrimination.556 Despite these powers, the practice of positive discrimination remained a contentious issue within social care and employment practice, perhaps leading Hall to disavow that ‘special services’ were being created to avoid the often proffered criticism that positive
553 Honigsbaum, Living and Working with HIV, p. 11. 554 Honigsbaum, Living and Working with HIV, p. 11. 555 Tony Hall in Naomi Honigsbaum, Living and Working with HIV: Training Guidance for Staff in the Personal Social Services, (London: Central Council For Education and Training in Social Work, 1989), p. 9. 556 John Edwards, ‘Social Indicators, Urban Deprivation and Positive Discrimination’, Journal of Social Policy, 4:3 (July, 1975), pp. 275-287 provides an early example of discussion on theory and practice of positive discrimination. Chantal Davies, Muriel Robison, ‘Bridging the gap: An exploration of the use and impact of positive action in the United Kingdom’, International Journal of Discrimination and the Law, 16:2-3 (June/September 2016, pp. 83-101, p . 84. 207 discrimination caused ‘reverse discrimination’.557 Hall continued ‘although HIV infection is a relatively new problem the skills and knowledge needed to provide high quality services are an inherent part of good social work.’558 This statement acted to both reassure the social workers embarking on HIV-related training that they were capable of coping with the challenges HIV presented, and to caution them to treat HIV- affected service users in the same manner as any other service user. That is, ‘with kindness, dignity and respect’ – the danger of prejudice within the social service sector understood as a significant element of the health and social care challenge which was HIV.559 This less obvious message emerged throughout the manual as repeated calls for staff to assess their own negative ‘attitudes and feelings’ towards the HIV positive and HIV-affected families, with an emphasis placed particularly on an awareness of ‘compound stigma’ and active moves to negate its effects.560
Honigsbaum sought to raise awareness of the problem of ‘compound’ AIDS stigma – understood in the manual as the experience of the intersecting effects of HIV/AIDS stigma with ableism, racism, sexism, ageism, classism, homophobia, biphobia, heterosexism and the stigmatising of IV-drug users and prostitutes. Honigsbaum drew attention to how the lived experience of particular maligned identities which might combine with HIV identities to engender greater hardship, preventing HIV-affected people from seeking and accessing services or conversely, social workers recognising and meeting their complex needs.
The solutions the manual offered to mitigate the effects of ‘compound’ HIV/AIDS stigma ranged from the training of staff to recognise their own prejudices, to ensuring that specialised staff (in disability or elderly care for example) were ready to train other staff in their area of expertise regarding the likely difficulties encountered by particular HIV-affected populations. This training in intersectional awareness was fundamental to the practicalities of the caring role the social worker occupied, but also formed an integral aspect of social workers’ role as conflict mediators, intermediaries and/or representatives for the HIV-affected. On occasions where whole HIV-affected
557 Mike Noon, ‘The Shackled runner: time to rethink positive discrimination?’, Work, Employment and Society, 24:4 (December, 2010), pp. 728-739, p. 736. 558 Hall in Honigsbaum, Living and Working with HIV, p. 9. 559 Quote from an HIV positive parent. The full quote reads: ‘All of us have one thing in common; we want to be treated as human beings with kindness, dignity and respect.’ Quoted in: Honigsbaum, ‘Children and Families Affected by HIV in Europe, p. 4. 560 Honigsbaum, Living and Working with HIV, pp. 19-20, 28-29, 45-47. 208 populations needed to be represented or where self-representation proved too distressing or impossible – for instance where anonymity must be preserved, where a person with AIDS was too ill to fight against discrimination, or where a child’s rights were being neglected – the social worker was required to relay, represent, create and disseminate HIV positive identities, in some cases from one HIV-affected person or group to another. This intermediary role was not unique to HIV/AIDS-related social work, rather this was a recasting of a representative role long occupied by social workers in interactions between their clients, their families and relevant institutions and policy makers.561
Recognising representation as an integral aspect of social work with the HIV positive, the manual offered practitioners some general advice regarding language to ensure stigma was fought rather than reinforced by the social services. It stressed ‘[t]he importance of using clear and accurate language to avoid misrepresentation, confusion or assumptions based on anxiety or prejudice’. 562 Several general examples of language to be used and avoided were given. For instance, the manual explained:
the use of words like AIDS – as in ‘the AIDS project’ – has been avoided because it is important to emphasise the broader implications of HIV infection. Purely focusing on AIDS can lead to the needs of people with asymptomatic HIV infection or HIV diseases being marginalised…563 Another important point made in the 1989 manual Living and Working with HIV, carried through in later CCETSW works, was to avoid focusing on death:
we have tried to refer to ‘people living with HIV/HIV infection/AIDS’. We have done this to make the point that people living with the virus are not dying from it. The terms ‘AIDS victim’ or ‘AIDS sufferer’ imply passivity and powerlessness…564
Making the distinction between ‘living with HIV’ and ‘dying from it’ did not result in an absence of discussion about death and its implications, rather it focused on the process of living with the effects of HIV, whether it was physical, such as opportunistic
561 Ruth J. Parsons, ‘The Mediator Role in Social Work Practice, Social Work 36:6 (November, 1991), pp. 483-487, pp. 483-484; Janet R. Faust, ‘Clinical Social Worker as Patient Advocate in a Community Mental Health Center’, Clinical Social Work Journal, 36 (2008), pp. 293-300, pp. 294-296. 562 Honigsbaum, Living and Working with HIV, p. 17. 563 Honigsbaum, Living and Working with HIV, p. 17. 564 Honigsbaum, Living and Working with HIV, p. 17. 209 infections or restrictions on movements created by stigma, or emotional, such as the shock of diagnosis or the grief of losing a loved one to AIDS. One final area which was flagged for particular consideration was the idea of ‘risk groups’ and the HIV narratives and HIV positive identities it generated:
References have been made to ‘high risk behaviour’ rather than ‘high risk groups’. This recognises the fact that exposure to the virus depends on what you do rather than who you are. For example, sharing needles is a risk rather than being an injecting drug user per se. Reference to high risk groups can also imply blame and suggest individuals who do not see themselves as members of these groups are not at risk.565
It is worth noting here that the emphasis was first on the detrimental effects of blame for the HIV positive, rather than false immunity assumed by certain groups. Comparable statements were made by the British Medical Association, as explored in the first chapter, but these skated over issues such as blame, concentrating on instilling caution in all groups, memorably without ‘excessively’ worrying ‘heterosexuals’.566 In general terms, in the manual Honigsbaum argued that handling the effects of the virus on families required a holistic approach and presented a unique challenge for social care professionals, requiring extra training in a multitude of areas. The disenfranchising effect of stigma upon HIV-affected children was manifold, pitting children’s rights against those of their parents as Honigsbaum explained:
Haemophiliac families had [HIV-affected and HIV positive] children, drug using families started to have [HIV-affected and HIV positive] children, and so the big question is, what do the children know, how are they going to cope with living in a family where secrecy and shame and stigma were a given? So it’s all those issues came together and right at the end of that was, at what stage do children have to be informed? Because the other great big bogey was, nobody can know in school, because if a child is sent to school, and either they live in a family where there’s HIV infection, or they may be carrying the virus. The schools… say the child can’t come to school, because there was this overwhelming fear of contagion.567
565 Honigsbaum, Living and Working with HIV, p. 17. 566 BMA Archive, B.43.1.1, British Medical Association, Draft Memorandum of Evidence to the Social Services Committee Inquiry on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), AIDS 4 1986-87 (December, 1986), p. 2. See chapter 1 where this is discussed in greater detail. 567 Honigsbaum, 04/09/2013, track 2. 210
Here the child’s right to an education and to knowledge about themselves was dissolved by the fears of adults about HIV, or the stigma it created. Once again, knowledge was framed as dangerous, not because it might cause the child to act in an undesirable manner as some assumed was the case with sexual knowledge (see Chapter 1), but because the child might incautiously disclose their identity without comprehending the potential social costs which might follow such a revelation for themselves and their family. As a consequence of the persistence of myths and stigma, the HIV-affected child’s agency was doubly threatened: by the prejudice which marked the social consequences of HIV and by the agency of their guardians who held the power to weigh the benefits of serostatus disclosure to their child against the detriments of exposure to stigma. Ultimately adults held the power to limit children’s knowledge about themselves, their family and their health, if they judged it necessary. Should the HIV- affected child be empowered with knowledge of the serostatus of themselves or their family, they gained access to knowledge imbued – because of HIV/AIDS-related stigma – with the power to limit the agency of their parents and other members of their family. Acknowledging that the cultivation of ignorance in HIV-affected children was both impractical and morally dubious, social workers moved to mitigate the causes of parental anxiety and empower all members of HIV-affected families to talk about HIV and their experiences. Part of this process was facilitated by social workers or volunteers acting as intermediaries or advocates for and within families. However, as understanding of the problems facing HIV-affected families increased, and research and experience within the service industry began to catch up with their needs, resources to be used by the HIV-affected families themselves, independent of outside help, began to proliferate. 1991 saw the publication of HIV AIDS and Children: A Cause for Concern, again authored by Honigsbaum, but this time funded by the National AIDS Trust, Action for Children, National Children’s Bureau and The Wellcome Foundation, rather than the Department of Health.568 The report identified the major issues affecting the provision of care and education to HIV-affected children and families by examining the range, quality and adequacy of existing services targeted at with HIV and/or AIDS in 1991, while making recommendations for the future. Again the reticence of both adult
568 Naomi Honigsbaum, HIV AIDS and Children: A Cause for Concern, (London: National Children’s Bureau, 1991). 211 carers and medical practitioners regarding the provision of information about HIV and AIDS to children was identified as a problem inhibiting the care of HIV-affected children, but with a slightly more sympathetic emphasis. Adults’ unwillingness to speak to children about HIV, even when it directly affected them, was understood here as not wholly the result of stigma and a desire to manage the flow of information, but also as an anxiety about saying the ‘wrong thing’. In an echo of many parents’ and teachers’ anxiety regarding teaching safer-sex and HIV/AIDS education more generally, the study identified that ‘staff and parents often feel that they lack the skills, confidence and courage to confront HIV illness in children, and frequently express the need for more expert help and guidance in this task’.569
The answers given to the difficult questions of ‘what to tell an infected child, at what age, how, and when’ were similar to those given to the questions which surrounded the provision of safer-sex and HIV/AIDS education to unaffected children.570 As with materials targeted at an audience of children unaffected by HIV, the emphasis was upon flexibility and age appropriate information. It was argued that ‘[c]hildren may need to receive information gradually over time, and in a way that leaves them with some hope and optimism.’571 Once again knowledge was framed here as potentially dangerous – causing mental anguish – and ignorance as potentially protective. The study even acknowledged that ‘[a]dults face difficult and painful decisions, knowing that telling a child can make living with HIV disease more difficult.’572 However, the study also made the pertinent point that ‘not telling them denies a child an opportunity to develop adaptive behaviour and explore unspoken fears and anxieties Some children may actually find it a relief that unreal fantasies and exaggerated feelings can be openly acknowledged.’573 This moved the discussions of agency from the practical considerations which protected the child from harm through access to knowledge, healthcare and schooling, to more nebulous ideas of self- knowledge and self-realisation, bolstering what freedoms HIV-affected children had to
569 Honigsbaum, HIV AIDS and Children, p. 58. 570 Honigsbaum, HIV AIDS and Children, p. 58. 571 Honigsbaum, HIV AIDS and Children, p. 58-59. 572 Honigsbaum, HIV AIDS and Children, p. 59. 573 Ibid. 212 shape their own future.574 Ideas of self-realisation and the need for children to air feelings about their diagnosis or membership of an HIV-affected family would later form a key aspect of the social work undertaken with HIV-affected children.
Having acknowledged children as an HIV-affected population, finding ways to ‘progress the needs of children’ became a priority for Honigsbaum and her colleagues. This was difficult to achieve as the usual problems faced by social services in placing children on the agenda were compounded by the specifics of HIV as a stigmatised condition. As Honigsbaum explained, convincing the relevant authorities that children were part of the health crisis HIV presented was difficult:
It was very hard work, hard work to persuade other people. I think children always are a low priority, quite honestly, and also slightly exotic. It was a real battle. Having set up the European Forum on HIV/AIDS Children and Families… the battle was getting funding.575 Even with increasing funding, a European Forum, a UK Forum and an expanding literature on HIV-affected families, the specific needs of children remained difficult to support. Stigma created silences which made intervention difficult, with the rights of parents’ to confidentiality superseding those of children to knowledge about themselves and their families. These silences, created by adult control of AIDS discourse, needed to be treated sensitively and with understanding. ‘[P]arents didn’t want to tell their children, for all the absolutely obvious reasons: shame, stigma, isolation, inability…’ but as Honigsbaum and her colleagues identified over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, adult anxiety presented a very real obstacle to the mental and physical health and wellbeing of HIV-affected children unable to articulate their needs without access to information or a space to speak.576 The solution that practitioners offered was one of child-centred material, away days, child-centred forums and child-centred confidential spaces where children dictated the narratives and terms of the discourse which surrounded them.577 Progress was gradual, and the production of material by HIV- affected children for HIV-affected children or even material which merely includes testimony from HIV-affected children themselves largely falls outside my time period,
574 The ‘freedom from’ harm and ‘freedom to’ choose dichotomy evident here draws on ideas of positive and negative liberty and agency outlined in Berlin as discussed in the introduction to this thesis. 575 Honigsbaum, 04/09/2013, track 2. 576 Honigsbaum, 04/09/2013, track 2. 577 Away days and child centred forums did not become standard practice until after the time period of my study ends. 213 in the 2000s.578 I acknowledge it here because the child centred-approach which eventually dictated the representation of HIV positive identities to HIV-affected children is one with its roots firmly in my period. Although material created by children for children and child-centred approaches have become the norm, and dictated the representation of HIV—positive identities to HIV-affected children, the roots of this child-centred approach were clearly set in this period. As Honigsbaum explained:
Eventually we started to be able to talk to children. …We had a parent with HIV and a child with HIV on our board so that it was always very much looking at direct experience and being informed by their everyday experience. …It took a long time before we could get to a point that we could bring children together who knew that they had HIV infection and could talk about their concerns, and it was so revealing. …at that time you couldn’t explore any of those issues in an open forum it had to be somewhere where there was confidentiality, there was support …things happened emotionally and the adults around them were experienced enough to be able to deal with some of those things that arose… it’s not a quick fix. And you have to plan it very carefully, what happens in those situations. Because you don’t want to leave young people who’ve got enough on their plate anyway emotionally exposed and unsupported.579
Once again the effect of representations of HIV-positivity upon the emotional wellbeing of the HIV-affected child was placed at the forefront of the concerns expressed here, even when the representations came from the child themselves. Knowledge of HIV was understood throughout the 1980s and 1990s to be a powerful tool for the protection and empowerment of HIV-affected children, but always with a cautious acknowledgement that it was also dangerous, with the power to engender despair in the face of chronic illness and an uncertain future or stigma when a trusting child had unwisely disclosed their serostatus or that of a family member. Balancing the needs of the HIV-affected child with those of the HIV-affected parent was a constant negotiation. There the battlefield of children’s rights and parental jurisdiction became a matter of emotional and bodily integrity, with the restriction of information or education to HIV-affected children and teenagers rendered a matter of life and death. Sex education, safer-sex
578 A key example of work in this area is: Katherine Band, Judith Dorrell, Naomi Honigsbaum, What do the children say? Children’s Participation Workshop Project Report, (13-20 August 1999), (The European Forum on HIV/AIDS Children and Families: London, 2000). Similar projects were assessed and reported in the newsletter for The European Forum on HIV/AIDS Children and Families, for instance Katherine Band (ed.), ‘Will Someone Listen? Please’, The European Forum on HIV/AIDS Children and Families Newsletter, 11 (Autumn 2000) was devoted to the issue of children’s voices. 579 Honigsbaum, 04/09/2013, track 2. 214 knowledge and HIV/AIDS education had the potential to empower the teenagers and children in my previous chapters, but for the HIV-affected child HIV/AIDS related knowledge could give them back a little of all they had lost in the face of the physically and emotionally debilitating effects of a stigmatised and ill-understood illness. This is not to say that the HIV/AIDS education received by HIV-affected children was bereft of sex education elements. Honigsbaum stressed it ‘must also address issues of health education and prevention, including the discussion of safer sex and safer drug use.’580 The study HIV AIDS and Children was based upon found ‘clear consensus for presenting information on HIV prevention within a sex education framework, rather than just focusing on HIV’ and advised this duty to HIV-affected children should be shared ‘between parents, schools and the community.’581
Picture books for HIV-affected Children As child-centred techniques progressed throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the need for ‘good written material produced in simple user friendly language’ that could be used as ‘an aid for children, parents, carers and staff’ persisted.582 Calls for material designed to empower carers and health workers specifically so they could communicate with HIV- affected children were slowly answered and by 1992, when the picture book It’s Clinic Day was published, a limited number of creative books and pamphlets, specifically intended for use with HIV-affected children were in circulation. Created with the carers of HIV-affected children in mind, but intended for general circulation as well, these books acted as prompts or intermediaries, providing some answers to the thorny question: what do we tell the children? Picture books provided both the answer to the question of what to tell children about HIV and how to do it. Inevitably plural – offering multiple viable interpretations and therefore flexibility – but highly structured and ‘inherently ideological’ in form, the picture book format provided both a factual and ideological script for the reticent adult and an expansive prompt for further discussion.583 Picture books aimed at young children are not simple texts; rather they are ‘inescapably plural’, meriting a brief
580 Honigsbaum, HIV AIDS and Children, p. 59. 581 Honigsbaum, HIV AIDS and Children, p. 59. 582 Honigsbaum, HIV AIDS and Children, p. 59. 583 Stuart Marriot, ‘Picture books and the moral imperative’, What’s in the Picture? Responding to Illustrations in Picture Books, ed. by Janet Evans, (London: Paul Chapman Publishing Ltd, 1998) , pp. 1- 24, p. 4. 215 discussion of their culturally productive elements here before proceeding to analyse It’s Clinic Day.584 As was outlined in the introduction to this thesis, children’s media reflects the anxieties and desires of its adult producers allowing us access to what the adult producers believed to be important or ‘good’ for an imagined child. It reveals what adults envision childhood and the child to be at the moment of production because, as Lesnik-Oberstein and others have explained, it requires adults to first ‘construct’ a child as imagined audience.585 As Rose argued, ‘children’s fiction draws in the child, it secures, places and frames the child’, rendering the creation of it an exercise in establishing the adult’s own reality first, then adulterating it through the manipulation of the child (and through them the future) second.586 Unfortunately, approaches which place emphasis on the constructed nature of the child can obscure the agency of the audience, while suggesting that the ideal selves constructed through texts, and desired by authors, only exist in the singular. As is the case with the picture book and leaflet discussed here, children’s media is often produced by multiple authors and frequently didactically suggests multiple possible acceptable identities for children to adopt rather than a singular ideal. Scholars have mitigated these flaws by using intertextuality, acknowledging the dialogic nature of texts and cultural narratives where multiple voices and discourse may conflict and coexist.587 Intertextual approaches acknowledge that texts ‘lack fixed authorships and meanings’, rather they are bound in a ‘dynamic relationship to ongoing social and political transformations.’588 This admits that textual meaning may just as easily mirror its varied audience as be changed, resisted, embraced or appropriated by it. Furthermore, as Myers points out, one must precede with full comprehension of pedagogic texts as deliberate public interventions reliant on an ‘empathetic compact between author and reader’, the product of a ‘two-way traffic between producer and consumer’ and the context which fosters the
584 Marriot, ‘Picture books and the moral imperative’, p. 4. 585Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, ‘Essentials: What is Children’s Literature? What is Childhood?’, Understanding Children’s Literature: Key Essays from the International Companion Encyclopaedia of children’s Literature, ed. by Peter Hunt, (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 15-29, p. 15. 586 Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan and the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 2. 587 Dominick Lacapra, ‘Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts’, History and Theory, 19:3 (October, 1980), pp. 245-276, p. 255. 588 Mariela Vargova, ‘Dialogue, Pluralism, and Change: The Intertextual Constitution of Bakhtin, Kristeva, and Derrida’, Res Publica, 13 (2007) pp. 415-440, p. 415; Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, The Dialogic Imagination, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259–422; Pam Morris, ‘Re‐routing Kristeva: From pessimism to Parody’, Textual Practice, 6:1 (1992), pp. 31-46. 216 texts themselves.589 In the case of It’s Clinic Day, the author perceived a shared need – for materials explaining HIV to HIV-affected children – with their audience, drawing directly on this compact, imagining a kinship between author and audience reinforced through the text. Even the most overtly didactic picture book which tells the simplest of linear narratives will fail to transfer knowledge or meaning in a direct linear manner because the combination of words and pictures inevitably multiplies the polysemic and polyphonic effect of visual/literary interpretation,590 blurring meanings and creating dialogic space – the tension between picture and text producing, Egoff argues, ‘the greatest social and aesthetic tensions in the whole field of children’s literature’.591 The dialogic and intertextual space which exists within the pages of a picture book draws the reader into a discursive relationship with the text where the visual vies with the written for narrative dominance. This effect is created by the combination of reading and viewing information which leads to a comparative and creative interpretation of the information imparted by word and image. The salience and interpretation of the words or images within a picture book are situationally dependent on the reader themselves and how the text is being interacted with.592 Children’s picture books are rendered more complex still by the presence, overt or covert, of an adult mediator who ultimately acts as a gatekeeper for the text and the knowledge and ideologies therein. Picture books, like all texts, are created with imagined audiences in mind. But as picture books are aimed at a child audience, largely without the means to obtain the text without the aid of an adult, they must appeal first to an imagined audience of adults. This creates a complex relationship between the author and the adult audience, wherein the text must appeal to both the adult audiences’ idea of their child and the adult purchaser’s idea of themselves as an adult carer or educator, because ultimately in obtaining a picture book to read with a child, an adult agrees to act as a mediator
589 Mitzi Myers, ‘The Erotics of Pedagogy: Historical Intervention, Literary Representation, the ‘Gift of Education,’ and the Agency of Children’, Children’s Literature, 23 (1995), pp. 1-30, p. 19. 590 Here I draw on the Bakhtinian techniques of textual interpretation outlined in the introduction of this thesis. Specifically I am applying his contention that all texts are combinations of heteroglossia, creating a polyphonic effect which multiplies meanings endlessly as readers bring their own thoughts, feelings and cultural context to bare on the dialogic and intertextual text – in this case the picture book. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. by Michael Holquist, trs. by Caryl Emerson, Michael Holquist, (London: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 278-279. 591 S. Egoff, ‘Picture Books’, in Thursday’s Child, ed. by S. Egoff , (Chicago: American Library Association, 1981), pp. 247-274, p. 248. 592 Janet Evans, ‘Responding to illustrations in picture story books’, Reading, 32:2 (July, 1998), pp. 27- 31, p. 27. 217 between text and child. For this reason, picture books are often sold overtly as cultural tools to be used by an imagined audience of adults interacting with an imagined audience of children. For this functional appeal to be successful, the author must create a text intended for an imagined audience of children who are recognisable to the adults who will ultimately purchase the book. Once purchased, the mediator role taken on by the adult audience of children’s picture books becomes editorial and authorial – their interpretation of the text in the moment of reading with the child becomes the text. Where a text is overtly didactic, the lesson within must appeal to the adult mediators and the ultimate cultural aim of the text – to move the imagined child from one state to another – must be shared.
Figure 31. It’s Clinic Day by Ruth Stevens593
Published in 1992 by the Edinburgh district council Women’s Committee, It’s Clinic Day is an example of a text created to meet the emotional and educational needs of HIV-affected children. It falls comfortably within the sub-genre of ideological and didactic picture books intended to teach children about potentially threatening experiences – for example visiting the optician, attending school for the first time, or
593 Ruth Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, Illustrator Fiona Menzies, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh District Council Women’s Committee, 1992), Front Cover. 218 going to the dentist. Ultimately the aim of such books is to render an inevitable but distasteful experience palatable to a young child by explaining its purpose and by making adherence to adult control seem desirable, an end which is seen as particularly crucial in picture books depicting paediatric medical care.594 It’s Clinic Day follows many recognisable tropes of children’s health-focused picture books. In general, picture books which feature illness or injury focus on the social-emotional aspects of illness, care and recovery and particularly emphasise the roles of health care professionals and parents (especially mothers).595 Health focused children’s picture books place little emphasis upon causation – transmission or biological agents – instead focusing on the process of care, casting illness positively, establishing it is not a form of punishment, but avoiding offering false hope.596 Here the age of the imagined audience is highly significant as books targeted at children in their teens place a different emphasis on causation and are often much bleaker in tone, acting as pessimistic warnings to deter undesirable behaviour or introduce adolescents to adult aspects of life.597 While texts which could be used as tools to facilitate communication with HIV- affected children were deliberately created and sought, this does not mean that a sizeable market existed. As a fiction book on HIV intended for use with primary age children It’s Clinic Day was an admittedly rare artefact, and even today, such books are uncommon.598 The annotated bibliography What Do We Tell The Children published in 1996 listed just six fictional books written in English aimed at the under-elevens which dealt with HIV, including texts from the USA and Canada.599 This was despite an often articulated desire of parents living with HIV ‘for books to help them open up this topic with their own children, and for books that will help them explain how the virus works.’600 While no bibliography can hope to be comprehensive, the dearth of resources
594 Renee C. B. Manworren, Barbara Woodring, ‘Evaluating Children’s Literature as a Source for Patient Education’, Paediatric Nursing, 24:6 (November/December, 1998), pp. 548-553, p. 548. 595 Joan C. Turner, ‘Representations of Illness, Injury, and Health in Children's Picture Books’, Children's Health Care, 35:2 (2006), pp. 179-189, pp. 185-187. 596 Turner, ‘Representations of Illness’, p. 185. 597 For AIDS related examples see Gloria Miklowitz, Goodbye Tomorrow, (New York: Lions Teen Tracks, 1987); M E Kerr, Night Kites, (New York: Pan Horizon, 1987). 598 As some of these text contained factual information which quickly went out of date as medical knowledge and treatment advanced many texts are no longer in print or circulation. It has proved very difficult to locate many of texts listed in the bibliographies and suggested reading lists which guided this chapter. 599 Kerstin B Phillips, What Do We Tell The Children? Books to use with children affected by illness and bereavement, (Paediatric AIDS Resource Centre: Edinburgh, 1996). 600 Phillips, What Do We Tell The Children?, p. 10. 219 for use with children affected by HIV was a problem acknowledged across medical, educational and social work literature and amongst professionals at the time. It was this lack of resources which in part motivated Ruth Stevens to write It’s Clinic Day. As Margaret Miller, Convenor of the Edinburgh District Women’s Committee in 1992 explained in the introduction to the book ‘Ruth was concerned about the lack of resources available to HIV positive parents to help them introduce the subject of HIV and AIDS in a sensitive way to their children.’601 The book began with an introduction, which acknowledged both Ruth’s role in its production and the effect Edinburgh, as an area where ‘almost half the children with HIV in Britain live[ed]’, had upon its origin. The book ended with a list of ‘useful addresses’ allowing adult carers of HIV-affected children to gain yet more agency over the process of disclosure the book is intended to start.602 The book was also multiply endorsed – through Ruth’s testimony, by McGregor and by Dr Mok, a Consultant Paediatrician, so that the discerning or worried HIV-affected parent could feel safe in the knowledge they have armed themselves with an appropriate tool to start a conversation with their child about HIV. Emphasising routine, the book normalised the clinic visit to create reassurance, but it was also as a vehicle to combat AIDS-related stigma; educating its young audience about transmission to fight misinformation. It’s Clinic Day follows Jane and her mother through a day at the HIV clinic. Cheerfully drawn and brightly coloured, the intention of the text was as much about emotional reassurance as it was about imparting information about HIV. The simple friendly language was paired with clear illustrations, some of which have no text allowing the audience to interact with the images unmediated by textual explanations and without the need for an adult reader. Jane’s character acts simultaneously as the audience surrogate to the book’s intended young audience – asking the questions they would like asked – and as an avatar for the HIV-affected children of the parents using the book as a prompt for disclosure. The interactions between Jane and her adult care-givers are idealised; with Jane presented as a model patient for child audiences to learn from – asking questions, listening to instruction and being brave – while the empathy and willingness to answer Jane’s questions displayed by the adult characters articulates a demand for similar
601 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 2. 602 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 2, p. 24. 220 behaviour from the adult audiences.603 The text effectively reassured both the imagined child and adult audiences that the HIV-affected child, visiting the clinic and learning about HIV – can cope. Indeed, the illustrator Fiona Menzies was careful to draw in the adult imagined audience directly; illustrating the text with references to Women’s groups and women’s HIV/AIDS support groups which acknowledged the needs of adult carers as individuals and parents.604 As an HIV positive mother herself, the boundary between Stevens as author and intended audience was blurred; the book itself was an act of empowering disclosure of Stevens’ own HIV-positivity in relation to motherhood, allowing her to lead by example. Through the book Stevens provided more than a rubric of helpful behaviour; when read aloud the words of the adult characters function as scripts for adults struggling to talk to their children about HIV. The book opens with Jane getting dressed for the clinic; she cheerfully asked her mother why they are going. Her mother explains that she has HIV, “And we want to make sure that you don’t have it too”.605 This question and answer format used throughout the text acted as more than a means of imparting knowledge to the audience; in asking questions and being rewarded with answers, Jane’s character demonstrated that curiosity was desirable. Jane’s character is empowered by the knowledge imparted to her through her interactions with the adults involved in her healthcare and they are empowered in turn by setting the terms of the discourse.
603 Grange Hill’s Dr West and Mr Brisley bore similar roles as discussed in the previous chapter. 604 The illustrations for the pages displayed in Figure 35 and Figure 39 both feature posters for the Edinburgh District Council’s women’s groups; The Women and HIV AIDS Network Meeting of Positive Mothers and the EDC Women’s Committee – the publishers of It’s Clinic Day. 605 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 4. 221
Figure 32. What a load of questions!606
After saying hello to a friendly receptionist she recognises, Jane is excited by the toy box in the clinic’s waiting room. While playing she meets two other children in the waiting room who have been brought to the clinic by their father. Like her, they are inquisitive and ask who Jane is and why she is at the clinic. The waiting room is represented as child-friendly interactive space [Figure 33]. Filled with the same toys a child might find at a playgroup or nursery, it normalises a key aspect of the clinic’s geography. Using representations of play to draw a link between the home, the clinic and the outside world here is not mere artistic choice on the part of the illustrator; rather it reflects a developing area of expertise in the use of hospital play. Play was advocated by play experts to aid ‘communication’ and expression of emotions such as ‘anger and frustration’, to reduce ‘stress and anxiety’, to aid ‘preparation for medical procedures’, to let ‘a child feel in control’ and because ‘Play is fun [original emphasis].’607 The emphasis placed on this final point is significant; reminding adults facilitating play to make the hospital experience easier on all involved that ‘fun’ was of great value to the HIV-affected child.
606 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 4. 607 Alison Blair, Rosemary Garrod, Jinty Ramsay, ‘Hospital Play for Children Infected and Affected by HIV and AIDS’, Children and HIV: Supporting Children and their Families, eds. by Sarah Morton, David Johnson, (Edinburgh: The Stationary Office, 1996), pp. 58-64, p. 58. 222
Figure 33. ‘I'm HIV, Rosie has AIDS’608
The little boy Andrew’s (left) statement “I’m HIV. Rosie has AIDS.” is embedded within normal childish introductions and the easy disclosure, shared between the HIV- affected children featured in the book, creates a sense of community where the consequences of HIV stigma are absent. Jane’s home, the waiting room, and the clinic are all constructed as safe spaces within the text where HIV can be spoken of freely and serostatus can be disclosed without consequence. Recognisable domestic objects – cups, spoons, plates – litter the waiting room image, creating further continuity between Jane’s home and the clinic space. Before Jane can ask what Andrew means, Mrs Khan, the health visitor, arrives and interrupts the children so she can perform several tests on Jane. The relationship between Jane and the health visitor Mrs Khan is convivial and Jane is pictured seemingly enjoying herself as she is tested, despite her mother’s absence. Again, toys are clustered in the room where Jane is tested and bright pictures decorate the wall, creating a space visually reminiscent of a classroom more than a clinic, tests seeming more like play than a medical procedure.
608 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 7. 223
Figure 34. Mrs Khan keeps Jane very busy609
Jane is reassured by Mrs Khan during the tests: ‘You’ve gained weight, and you’re getting taller. And your head is growing just the way it should.’610 Having been assessed and reassured by the health visitor, Jane is then subjected to more overt medical tests instigated by Dr Green. Again the tone is one of fun, even as Dr Green examines Jane.
Jane giggles “That tickles.” “I’m ticklish there, too, says Dr Green. “But I have to check to see if you have any unusual lumps or bumps. Next, she looks into Jane’s mouth and ears with a little light and listens to her chest with her stethoscope.611 During Jane’s blood test [Figure 35], as promised by her mother, Jane’s previous questions about HIV are answered by Dr Green as she draws blood. The emphasis is on the routine nature of the blood test, which happened last time Jane was at the clinic and which Jane already understands is connected to HIV. The information Dr Green imparts
609 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 10. 610 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 11. 611 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 12. 224 to Jane during and after the test provides a reward for her ‘brave’ and curious behaviour, reinforcing the idea in the young audience that Jane is an apt role model. When her blood is taken, she assures Dr Green that ‘ “It only hurts a little.” says Jane. “And I’m brave…”612In doing this she provides reassurance to the young audience of It’s Clinic Day about any tests in their future, and to the guardians who must put them through regular testing.
“…But why do you need to take my blood and what is HIV?” “My mum says she has it and the boy in the waiting room has it too.” “HIV is the name of a virus,” says Dr Green. “A virus is a bug, so small you can’t even see it. It sneaks into the blood in people’s bodies and can make them ill.” 613 Treating HIV anthropomorphically by ascribing it with intent – it ‘sneaks’ – firmly places blame on the virus for making people ill, rather than on the individual or being ‘at risk’ or engaging in ‘risky behaviour’. This sort of anthropomorphism is a regular feature of picture books within the health education genre, providing reassurance that illness is not the fault of the ill.614
612 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 14. 613 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 14. 614 Turner, ‘Representations of Illness’, pp. 183-184. For a further discussion of the implications of illness causation representation see K Springer and J Ruckel, ‘Early beliefs about the cause of illness: Evidence against immanent justice’, Cognitive Development, 7 (1992), pp. 429–443; H Rushforth. ‘Practitioner review: Communicating with hospitalized children: Review and application of research pertaining to children’s understanding of health and illness. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 40:5 (1999) pp. 683–691. 225
Figure 35. ‘It only hurts a little... and I'm brave.’ 615
Further explanations of HIV are framed once again in tones of reassurance, with a battle between ‘a team of bodyguards called white blood cells’ fighting the ‘nasty’ ‘HIV bug’ as it ‘tries to stop the white blood cells doing their job’.616
615 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 16. 616 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, pp. 14-15. 226
Figure 36. The HIV bug is a nasty one
Predictably, Jane asks further questions of Dr Green, subtly encouraging the young audience of It’s Clinic Day to be curious and the adult audience of the text to expect HIV-affected children’s interest in what is happening to themselves and those they know.
Jane wants to know more. “But what about AIDS?” “When someone has AIDS” Dr Green explains, “it means that the bad bugs are winning the fight. A person with AIDS may become very sick and have to go to hospital where we can try to make them feel better.”617
While death is not addressed here – as a subject it was avoided in AIDS texts aimed at the under-tens – no false promises are made and Dr Green alludes only to palliative
617 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 17. 227 rather than curative medicine with ‘we can try to make them feel better’. Prompted by this explanation, Jane asks about her own serostatus:
“Are there bad bugs in my blood?” asks Jane. “Do I have HIV or AIDS?” “Well, you certainly don’t have AIDS.” says Dr Green. “We know that from your last blood test. And we don’t know yet if you have HIV, so we will have to keep checking. But you seem to be fine and well just now.” 618 The vague answer Dr Green provides here is more than an elision which avoids explaining the difference between being HIV positive and having AIDS, or a complex conversation about chronic illness or death. Until the early 1990s, the HIV-antibody test was unreliable when used to test the babies of HIV positive mothers as maternal antibodies might linger and create false positives.619 The trajectory of the virus in children was also unclear and myths abounded about the rate of transmission between mother and child. Once the blood test has been reassuringly depicted, the conversation between Dr Green and Jane quickly moves on to the transmission of HIV:
“Does everybody get bad bugs in their blood?” asks Jane. “No,” says Dr Green. “It’s hard to catch HIV.” “It’s not like a cold that gets passed around by coughing or sneezing. I’m sorry to say this but even grown-ups don’t know as much as they should about HIV and AIDS. You would be surprised at some of things they are afraid of, when they shouldn’t be.”620
By addressing the fallibility and ignorance of adults here It’s Clinic Day achieves several things. Firstly, it sets up the next section of the picture book which systematically refuted some of the most persistent myths about HIV transmission in order to combat stigma; secondly it provides a simple explanation for why adults might believe something untrue about HIV, blaming fear and ignorance and providing adults with a space to be wrong without accusations of prejudice; thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the text subtly charges the adult audience to educate themselves, to avoid
618 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 18. 619 As maternal antibodies persist in the infant’s body for up to 18 months, only after these antibodies had been lost could serostatus be determined reliably through antibody testing. After the advent and increased availability of viral assay testing, infant serostatus could be determined more reliably before 18 months. See Honigsbaum HIVAIDS and Children, pp. 10, 52-53 for a discussion on diagnostic uncertainty in this area in the early 1990s and, Jennifer S. Read, ‘Diagnosis of HIV-1 Infection in Children Younger Than 18 Months in the United States’, Paediatrics, 120:60 (December 2007), pp. 1547-1562, pp. 1548-1554 for a discussion of practice after the advent of viral assays. 620 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 18. 228
‘being afraid’, partially for their own sake, but certainly for the sake of the imagined child audiences.
“What are they scared of?” asks Jane. “Oh, the list is as long as my arm,” Dr Green sighs.621
The book then takes on a classic repetitive question–answer format which would have been comfortably familiar to any child who had interacted with a few children’s picture books before encountering It’s Clinic Day [Figure 37 and Figure 38]. The list begins with broad statements as to how you ‘can’t’ ‘catch’ HIV:
“They ask me, can you catch it from talking, from touching, from eating or from playing? And I tell them, no you can’t.” 622
The repetitive style then offers several more specific lists of ways you cannot contract HIV which reinforce the first list. Talking, touching, eating and playing are replaced by specific activities which children engage in that would comfortably fall under these four activity groups.
“Then they ask me, can you catch it from petting a dog, or stroking a cat, from having a cuddle or from swimming in a pool? And I tell them again, no you can’t.”623
The images which accompany the text all depict friendly social interactions where physical contact is being made between the figures depicted. This reinforces the statements made in the texts, refuting the possibility of casual transmission with image and text.
621 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 18. 622 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 20. 623 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 20. 229
Figure 37. "They ask me..."624
The recognisable style engages the child, normalises the subject and delivers the information in an easily learnt format which disabuses them of misinformation in a manner designed to build confidence. The predictable repetition of ‘no you can’t’ and the rhythm of each paragraph – when read aloud as intended – encouraged the reading of these words together with the child. Moreover, as the adult reader takes on the role of Dr Green here, the question and answer refrain empowers them as they enact the scene – the adult embodies Dr Green’s knowledge and controls the terms of the discourse. Dr Green’s words also give the adult reader permission to be frustrated by the stigma they have experienced through Dr Green’s expressions of frustration with the persistence of ignorance.
624 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 20. 230
Figure 38. "And I tell them, for the last time, no you can't."625
The placing of the adult carer in Dr Green’s role through the act of reading the text aloud has another subtler effect; it reduces the difference between the doctor and patient/parent, increasing the trust of the child audience in medical professionals, but also, enacting an empathetic link between the experiences of health care professionals and their adult service users. This blurring of roles is reinforced by the adult characters within the book; they collectively teach and care for Jane, echoing one another and sharing expertise. The adult reader’s brief occupation of the knowledgeable medical role is reinforced and concluded when Jane’s mother echoes and reinforces Dr Green’s points when she ‘adds’ ‘[i]f people know more about HIV and AIDS… maybe they wouldn’t be frightened.626 The idea that knowledge bolsters agency and fights fear and prejudice is reinforced when Jane replies to her mother ‘Well, I’ll tell them not to worry …I know
625 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 21. 626 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 22. 231 all about it now.’627 Dr Green then offers Jane her own copy of It’s Clinic Day ‘to remind you of all the things you’ve learned today.’628
Figure 39. Maybe they wouldn't be frightened629
On the final page of the story, Jane’s role as audience surrogate and idealised HIV- affected child is confirmed: she is pictured supported on one side by her mother – whose hand she holds happily – and empowered on the other by knowledge – her other hand clutches her copy of It’s Clinic Day. 630 Her smiling mother is turning to her to say ‘I was very proud of you at the clinic today, Jane’, once again reinforcing Jane’s curiosity and obedience as desirable behaviours.631 Jane replies ‘Can I show my new book about HIV and AIDS to Grannie?’ demonstrating the success of the book as a tool of empowerment and education but also, through Jane, suggesting It’s Clinic Day’s young audience can take on educative roles themselves.632 Furthermore, Jane’s intention
627 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 22. 628 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 22. 629 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 22. 630 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 23. 631 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 23. 632 Stevens, It’s Clinic Day, p. 23. 232 to share her copy of It’s Clinic Day with her grandmother acknowledges the intergenerational nature and effect of HIV; recognising that HIV-affected families included grandparents, often cast once more in parental roles as their adult children became too ill or emotionally exhausted to care for themselves or their children without help. It’s Clinic Day is a representative example of a resource aimed for use with younger children, teaching them about a visit to an HIV clinic, the people they might encounter there, testing and HIV as a virus.633 It’s Clinic Day simultaneously addressed its adult audience, promoted women’s AIDS groups and constructed medicalisation as an empowering collaborative experience between doctors, patients, carers and other health workers. However, what children were told varied according to their age, capacity, how exactly they were affected by HIV, if they were in care or with their parents, and where they were located geographically. While It’s Clinic Day acknowledged the existence of stigma and fear, it represented HIV-status disclosure as unproblematic, choosing instead to focus on internal familial relationships rather than external problems, creating a sense of comfort and providing a much-needed resource for HIV-affected families.
Resources for Older Children Resources aimed at older HIV-affected children represented HIV positive identities in a similar manner to It’s Clinic Day, though with more depth, a little less idealism and the assumption that children might encounter the text independently.634 First published in 1991, What Can I do About AIDS? provides a representative example of a factual text
633 The picture book Come Sit By Me! is a similarly cheerful Canadian offering which enjoyed wide circulation in the UK and US. The book follows a child with an HIV positive classmate as she learns about HIV, rather than close family member. The book suggests ways to be a good friend and explains the ways HIV cannot be transmitted are carefully. Margaret Merrifield, Come sit by me: an educational storybook about AIDS and HIV infection for small children ages 4 to 8 and their caregivers, illustrator Heather Collins, (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1990). 634 The novel Two Weeks with the Queen, which enjoyed wide circulation and several reprints in the early 1990s, is a good example of more creative young adult AIDS literature. Humorous and bitter sweet it tells the story of Colin Mudford’s who, in a search for a cure for cancer for his terminally ill brother in London, encounters a gay man named Ted whose partner Griff is dying in hospital from AIDS-related complications. Colin, while free from any homophobia or fears of HIV/AIDS himself, encounters the prejudice experienced by Ted and Griff. His character provides a proactive example to young adults when he not only befriends the two men, but supports them by acting as their messenger when Ted is too injured after a homophobic attack to visit Griff in the hospital. When Griff dies, Colin and Ted support each other through the loss and Colin is able to face his brother’s imminent death bravely after the experience. The book also contains accurate medical information. Morris Gleitzman, Two Weeks with the Queen, (London: Blackie and Son Limited, 1989). 233 produced for the consumption of HIV-affected adolescents. Produced collaboratively by the Terrence Higgins Trust and Barnardo’s, the ten page booklet was aimed at curious or HIV-affected ‘secondary school children’ who ‘want to understand something about AIDS or who know someone with AIDS’.635 While mainly factual, the booklet was colourfully illustrated, featured a photo- story strip and was stylistically reminiscent of contemporary teenage magazines (such as those explored in Chapter 2).636 The tone of the text was generally chatty, though this was inconsistent, and the language became more formal where particular facts about HIV and transmission were being delivered. Unlike It’s Clinic Day the text explicitly listed transmission vectors, mentioning maternal transmission, sexual transmission, transmission through needle sharing and through infected blood products, but this was done in a manner which detached behaviours from identities. A close reading of the leaflet makes it clear that the intended audience was ultimately children who were closely associated with an HIV positive person or person with AIDS – rather than the unaffected child, the HIV positive child or the child with AIDS. An idealised version of the HIV-affected teenager was offered by the text, empowered and reassured by knowledge to ‘become a very good friend’ to their ‘HIV positive acquaintance.’ 637 This was achieved in the text through a combination of fact-based reassurance, transparent encouragements and the fictional HIV-narrative presented in the photo strip.
635 Anon, What Can I do About AIDS?, p. 1. 636 See Figure 40. 637 Anon, What Can I do About AIDS?, (London: Barnardo’s and Terrance Higgins Trust, 1991), p. 1. 234
Figure 40. ‘become a very good friend’638
The leaflet was presented as a factual and aimed at answering ‘questions’ like other texts within this genre, but the underlying motive of reassurance appears to have guided
638 Anon, What Can I do About AIDS?, (London: Barnardo’s and Terrance Higgins Trust, 1991), p. 1. 235 the selection and presentation of the facts represented in the leaflet. For instance, while blood transfusions are mentioned as a potential vector, it is explained:
Some people need blood transfusions… Some years ago, some of these people were accidentally given blood which had been infected with HIV and so the virus got into their bloodstream. Now there are ways of making sure infected blood isn’t used in transfusions. [Emphasis in original]639 The text goes on to mention transmission through IV drug use:
Some people use drugs illegally. They may use hypodermic syringes to inject the drug into their bloodstream. They may share their syringes and if one of them has HIV, the needle will become infected and the virus could be passed on to the other person.640 The language here is careful to avoid locating the blame for infection with the individual; instead, the emphasis is placed on the behaviours which ‘may’ place IV drug users at risk. The repetition of ‘[t]hey may’ and the conclusion that ‘the virus could be passed on [my emphasis]’ avoids the narratives of inevitable and punitive infection which proliferated in the adult press around IV-drug use. Though not explicitly articulated, by making it clear that it is needle-sharing which puts IV drug-users risk of contracting HIV, (and only if one of the people involved is already HIV positive), the text intimates that were a clean needle to be used, the risk of HIV transmission would be nil. The text then continues with the explicit reassurance:
Don’t be worried if you have an injection at the clinic or at the doctors, because the syringes are sterilised and used only once. It is absolutely safe.641 Curiously, while the text mentions sexual transmission of the virus, it does not mention safer-sex explicitly, eliding a clear explanation of this with:
People have to be very careful when they have sex together (sexual intercourse). If one of these people has HIV, it may be passed onto the other person.642
While explanations of what exactly ‘sexual intercourse’ might be are absent, alongside any explanation of how to ‘be very careful’, judgements of what constitutes appropriate
639 Anon, What Can I do About AIDS?, p. 3. 640 Anon, What Can I do About AIDS?, p. 4. 641 Anon, What Can I do About AIDS?, p. 4. 642 Anon, What Can I do About AIDS?, p. 4. 236 sex or exhortations to avoid sex are also absent. Instead, the text moves on to a list of ways the virus cannot be contracted. The list bears striking similarity to the list in It’s Clinic Day, even using repetition to reinforce ‘it is very hard to get HIV [emphasis in original]’643
You can’t get it through your skin – so you can’t get it from touching someone with HIV. You can’t get infected by standing close to someone with HIV because the virus doesn’t travel through air. It’s not like the virus that gives you a cold.644 The myths of casual transmission and virulent contagion which are refuted here directly address many of the fears perpetuated by sensationalist stories in the adult tabloid press. The readers’ attention is drawn to the pictures which feature in the background of the page, adding another layer to the text, engaging the reader and requiring a greater degree of interaction with the leaflet as they are encouraged to spot the accompanying image for each individual item listed.
On this page are lots of ways that can’t get HIV infection (like cups, knives, forks, toilet seats, towels, musical instruments, shaking hands, hugs, swimming pools, insect bites and dogs and cats.645
After several more factual pages, the booklet ends with a photo strip. While borrowing the associate realism of the photograph, the strip nonetheless presents an idealised – if a little more realistic than It’s Clinic Day – imagining of the experience of an HIV- affected teenager, Mazz.646
643 Anon, What Can I do About AIDS?, p. 5. 644 Anon, What Can I do About AIDS?, p. 5. 645 Anon, What Can I do About AIDS?, p. 5. 646 See Figure 41. 237
Figure 41. ‘Don't talk to her you'll get AIDS!’647
Mazz experiences the stigma of being an HIV-affected teenager because ‘some of the kids [at her school] found out her sister has the HIV virus’. 648 Mazz presents a role model for the HIV-affected teenager – supporting her sister, behaving bravely in the face of prejudice – while her friend Sam presents a role model for the average teenager, offering support to her HIV-affected friend and asking questions to educate herself. The blame for prejudice, and her sister’s HIV-infection, is placed on ignorance, her sister having contracted HIV on holiday in Spain because ‘she didn’t know then about safer sex.’649 This premise is proved on the final page of the photo strip where the boys previously pictured yelling ‘her sisters a junkie’ and ‘slag’ engage in a ‘Talk about AIDS’ which Mazz invites them to in order to ‘help them understand’.650 The talk is transformative, its effects idealistic – the boys not only put aside their prejudice but agree to sponsor Mazz as she walks to raise money for ‘a new AIDS centre’.651 The final panel of the photo strip pictures one of the boys, empowered by knowledge and rid of his ignorance and prejudice, calling an ‘AIDS helpline’ asking to be sent ‘some information’ [Figure 43].
647 Anon, What Can I do About AIDS?, p. 7. 648 Anon, What Can I do About AIDS?, p. 7. 649 See Figure 42; Anon, What Can I do About AIDS?, p. 8. 650 Anon, What Can I do About AIDS?, p. 8. 651 Anon, What Can I do About AIDS?, p. 9. 238
Figure 42. ‘I wish someone had told me about it...’652
652 Anon, What Can I do About AIDS?, p. 8. 239
Figure 43. ‘Hello, is that the AIDS help line?’653
The text presented an idealised version of the HIV-affected teenager – supportive, knowledgeable, engaged – in answer to the question it posed in the voice of its adolescent audience ‘What can I do about AIDS?’ It also addressed the problem
653 Anon, What Can I do About AIDS?, p. 9. 240 presented by information management around an HIV-diagnosis. The threat teenage empowerment could present to adult agency was not addressed directly, rather it is the threat of stigma to any HIV positive individual which is presented as a possible result of an unwise disclosure – placing the blame at the feet of bigot and leaving open the possibility, as with It’s Clinic Day, that in an ideal world education would annihilate fear. Texts, like It’s Clinic Day, provided a means for parents to communicate with HIV-affected children about HIV, but such interventions were reliant on parental access to, and willingness to use, these limited tools. Moreover, useful though these materials were, as texts produced by, for, and mediated through an adult, they were always limited by the bounds of the adult producers’ imagination and ideology. They created spaces for adults to talk amongst themselves about what to tell children and spaces for children to communicate with adults, but always on adults’ terms, the agency of children being limited by adult members of their family or community and the social workers who supported them, regardless of good intentions.
Conclusions This chapter began by discussing how the social services came to recognise the integral role they would play in the representation of HIV positive identities to HIV-affected children. By investigating the way representational practices were placed at the heart of social work training a glimpse, however partial, into the interactions between professionals and service users was provided. Social workers saw their roles evolve from care providers to intermediaries to HIV-affected persons themselves, as the holistic approach required to adequately support HIV-affected families was realised. Working in a context where health pragmatism in public HIV/AIDS education often trumped sensitivity to the unique needs of HIV positive individuals, social workers developed strategies to effectively deliver services which undertook to mitigate the myriad forms of compound stigma which shaped the lives of HIV-affected families. These practices were combined with a desire to recognise and further the agency of HIV-affected children, working within the confines of government legislation and cultural perceptions which caste childhood as a largely passive stage of life offering little opportunity to exercise agency or self-knowledge. Despite the best intentions, interdisciplinary research and concerted attempts to access the voices of the HIV positive and HIV-affected people, the provision of social 241 services often fell short. Carers of HIV-affected children frequently felt unable to represent HIV-positivity to their children, despite acknowledging a clear need for intergenerational dialogues. As this chapter has discussed, this need was filled gradually as expertise in this area evolved, with parents themselves producing material to be used as a tool to explain HIV-positivity to children affected by HIV. This material was produced as much for HIV-affected children as it was for their HIV-affected parents and reflected the practices and ideologies which governed social work with the HIV- affected. Simply read, the picture book It’s Clinic Day depicts an idealised visit of an HIV-affected mother and daughter to an HIV clinic, scripting empowering interactions between health care workers, parents and children while delivering simple HIV/AIDS education messages. Read closely, the picture book presents a fanciful realisation of the destigmatising and empowering practices advocated by the research and manuals discussed above; acting as a script, a demonstration, a much-needed resource and a request for more and better care for HIV-affected children. Similarly, the second text this chapter investigated, What can I do about AIDS?, provided facts and depicted idealised interactions between HIV-affected and unaffected children, with the specific aim of creating allies for the HIV-affected. Texts directed at HIV-affected children continued to develop after the period covered by this study. Material produced wholly for an audience of HIV-affected children, to be consumed without an adult mediator, began to be produced in the late 1990s. Though the production of this material was facilitated by adults, it was produced at least in part by children affected by HIV, for children affected by HIV. Allowing children to represent the HIV positive identities which held meaning for them by facilitating away-days, including them in discussions and creating opportunities for them to produce HIV-related texts, marked a representational departure and a significant move forward in the empowerment of HIIV-affected children and adolescents. It allowed them to construct an idea of themselves, and of childhood, in the presence of HIV/AIDS, where their agency and other identities held sway over a disease which had shaped, but would not define, their lives. 242
Conclusions
This thesis analysed how adults, in negotiating and realising the decision to represent HIV positive identities to children and adolescents between 1981 and 1997, exposed much of their attitudes towards sex, sexuality, gender, agency, childhood and children’s rights. The threat of an HIV epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s was, for some, a key motive behind acts of political and cultural intervention, but as this thesis was careful to demonstrate, the prevention of HIV transmission was not the sole motive behind the representation of HIV positive identities to the young. The fight to prevent HIV transmission was instrumental in the creation and dissemination of HIV positive identities and the concept of safer-sex, but for children and adolescents in the 1980s and 1990s, sex education – if they had it – might not have included a discussion of HIV, AIDS or safer-sex. Condom normalisation aimed to reframe what had previously been conceived of as primarily a contraceptive device to a technology of health and responsible sexual citizenship. However, sex education, HIV/AIDS education and safer-sex education remained separable concepts with both differing and shared aims, and differing and shared audiences. While the adult general public were usually provided with an AIDS education including some information on condom use, the exact content of the safer-sex education provided to adults varied according to whether the education was aimed at an audience presumed to be ‘at risk’ or already HIV positive. Certain information was added or removed from AIDS education according to whether it was deemed necessary for the intended audience. This carefully managed dissemination or omission of safer-sex knowledge and AIDS education was a hallmark of adults' interactions with children and meant that AIDS was effectively culturally constructed as a disease later for children than it was for adults. The necessity of AIDS-related information and safer-sex knowledge was often conceived of on a sliding scale, according to the experience, age and assumed the level of risk the audience presented to themselves or others. Early AIDS education aimed at children primarily focused on the prevention of stigma, rather than transmission, and often failed to mention safer-sex in any detail, the audience presumed to be at no risk of contracting or transmitting the virus. Later, as teenagers began to be seen as a potential risk group, safer-sex rhetoric became a part of sex education and AIDS education aimed at older children and teenagers. Although again, the assumed risk an adolescent audience presented to themselves or others limited the provision or omission of the 243 safer-sex knowledge provided. This was because the risks carried by certain sexual knowledge were perceived to be greater than the risk posed by HIV transmission to certain audiences.
For some of the producers behind the media investigated in this project, AIDS provided an urgent motive and mandate to act on existing beliefs about children as agents. The threat of an AIDS epidemic encouraged some adults to lobby for, and produce, texts aimed at empowering children for the sake of their present wellbeing or future sexual citizenship. In representing HIV positive identities to children constructed as agents, adults drew together more than the mere facts of HIV transmission or AIDS as an illness. Some adults used the fight against AIDS as a frame for a battle against wider problems in society, taking aim at the social structures they viewed as being behind the disempowerment of certain groups – including children and the HIV positive. For instance, for those already engaged in the fight for gender equality and children's rights, the prevention of HIV transmission created a sense of urgency without entirely changing the terms of the discourse. These adults disagreed with the New Right characterisations of childhood as a vulnerable time without agency; instead, they aimed to empower the children they interacted with, encouraging them to believe they could solve society's problems, or at the very least, practice safer-sex and fight HIV-related stigma. These adults championed sex education and HIV education that engaged with children’s present, protecting the child by empowering it with the knowledge and the critical capacity it needed to avoid risk in its present and future. The AIDS education they produced placed safer-sex and anti-stigma education within a politics of gender and sexuality, taking aim at sexism and heterosexism particularly and favouring more explicit explanations of safer-sex and what constituted consent – sexual and medical. For those producers who viewed childhood as a vulnerable period and a time without agency, the threat of HIV provided an opportunity to consolidate a more conservative politics of childhood, education, gender and sexuality. They championed the nuclear family and narrowly construed childhood as a vulnerable time where the child – conceived of as an adult-in-waiting – should be protected from outside threats. These adults still saw merit in sex education and HIV/AIDS education, but viewed knowledge as potentially dangerous, its protective function limited by its potential to corrupt the innocence of the child. The sex education and HIV/AIDS education offered by these adults concentrated on biology, risks, delaying sexual activity till adulthood 244 and where the HIV positive were mentioned, the prevention of stigmatising attitudes. Safer-sex was a subject sign-posted but rarely truly discussed by the more morally conservative producers of AIDS education materials. Here the thesis made an important but subtle point: the threat of AIDS did not change adult attitudes to what an idealised childhood or child should be, indeed these attitudes shaped their representation of AIDS to children, rather the very real threat posed by AIDS forced adults to confront any dissonance between their imagined child audiences and the realities lived by children in the 1980s and 1990s.
This thesis began by identifying a largely ignored avenue of research in the histories of HIV, childhood and children’s media in Britain. This indicated an alternative approach to writing the cultural history of HIV through adults’ representation of the virus’ transmission, prevention and morbid and social aspects to children. Analysing four broadly conceived genres of didactic children’s media across my time period allowed this thesis to recount how adults’ intersecting beliefs about childhood, adolescence, disease, gender, sexuality and agency affected the construction of the HIV positive identities they produced for the consumption of children and adolescents. By scrutinising several genres of children’s media, aimed at a variety of audiences, the thesis examined the production of HIV positive identities for children and adolescents in a range of contexts across my time period, observing how interactions between author, text, audience and context affected the HIV positive identities produced. Due to the assortment of texts and production contexts interrogated in this thesis a flexible theoretical and methodological toolkit was needed to allow the analysis to maintain focus. This was achieved by locating the analysis in the identities and narratives existing within the children’s media and testimonies scrutinised; treating the HIV positive identities themselves as texts or artefacts packaged within differing genres. This allowed an engagement with a variety of media, reflective of the plethora of texts available to children and teenagers, without the loss of methodological, theoretical or subject focus. This approach opened new areas of analysis, allowing me to attend to identities as intersectional, situational, hierarchical and temporally specific intertextual artefacts, revealing the complex interplay between individual agency and the social, cultural and personal creation of HIV positive identities. This thesis was not a history of children’s lives in the age of AIDS – rather it offered a glimpse of how adults reactively [re]invented childhood in the age of AIDS. 245
The first chapter of my thesis interrogated how the parameters of public sexual health education were redrawn, during the 1980s and 1990s, as institutions on the front line of public health education, such as the Health Education Authority (HEA), British Medical Association (BMA) and Family Planning Association (FPA), were charged with producing education materials on HIV/AIDS for adults and children in an atmosphere of utmost urgency and rapid change. As the HIV epidemic developed, the public health message evolved from one of pervasive but indefinite risk to more explicit messages on safer-sex; meanwhile, the perception of AIDS changed from epidemic to manageable and preventable chronic illness. During this time, potential educators fought for the authority to produce education material for the under eighteens while grappling with anxiety over presenting children with explicit content. As the chapter demonstrated, frontline health educators produced AIDS-related education materials through conflict and collaboration, constructing competing and conflicting ideas of the child primarily as a vulnerable innocent or a knowing agent, though at times they were also viewed as ‘at risk’ and potentially dangerous. Focusing on the representation of homosexuality and HIV positive motherhood, the chapter examined how these conflicts emerged, were managed, and ultimately overcome by public health institutions. Demonstrating the cacophony of competing voices that shaped sex education and health policy, enshrining adult anxiety in texts produced for the consumption of children and adolescents. Despite shared aims, collaborations and relatively similar production contexts, the texts explored in the chapter demonstrated a variety maintained throughout the thesis. The chapter concluded by arguing that the education policy of the 1980s and 1990s was conflicted. It ultimately constructed children as vulnerable and best governed by parental authority, placing parents’ rights above the child’s. However, the HIV/AIDS education materials produced at this time were ideologically varied; in some cases constructing and defending an agentic child as its imagined audience. In some instances, the ideological differences manifest in policy and practice resulted in materials that acknowledged government education policy, but then circumnavigated them or provided numerous alternate opinions which championed the agency of children in order to drown out the voice of official ideology.
My second chapter explored the representation of HIV positive identities in teenage magazines, examining the multiple adolescent femininities made available to teenage 246 girls consuming safer-sex information alongside fashion and pop music gossip. It argued that teenage magazines offered destigmatising and empowering counter- narratives to the pessimistic and panic-stricken AIDS coverage that typified the adult media. The chapter questioned how these texts came to play a vital role in the sexual health education of children and adolescents, especially with regard to HIV and AIDS. It argued that the success of magazines in this arena was in part due to their ability to mitigate, through a variety of editorial practices, the pessimistic impact of government- issued AIDS adverts they were asked to carry from 1986. The chapter demonstrated the vital role this popular media played in the construction and dissemination of HIV positive identities produced for the consumption of children and adolescents in the 1980s and 1990s through an examination of the visual and written AIDS-related content in Just Seventeen and MIZZ. The effects of AIDS representations and the accompanying narratives of ‘safer-sex’ in particular were tracked and analysed by examining the place of AIDS in the wider sex-related content of teenage magazines. I argue that adults, in representing STDs, HIV positive identities and safer-sex to children, exposed their own attitudes to identity, particularly with regards to gender, sexuality and personal agency, but that teen magazines often deployed the representation of AIDS to children opportunistically; using the subject to open up discussions on sexuality, prejudice and gender politics. It was argued that this allowed magazines to draw their readers in with critiques of government sexual health and education policy, which rendered the subject salient to their school-girl readership. Constructed as a rebellious space for teenagers and littered with direct reader contributions, these magazines presented themselves in disagreement with the New Right’s characterisations of childhood as a precarious time without agency; instead they viewed their audience as having, and consuming ideas of, empowered teenage agency and identities with worth based in the present rather than invested in futurity. This point was nuanced by noting that Just Seventeen and MIZZ, in constructing their imagined audiences as knowing and empowered teenage agents, simultaneously proselytised the self-realised consumerist individual as an ideal, selling advertising space in their magazines in part by advertising their readers as both present and future consumers to the retailers they engaged.
My third chapter scrutinised the representation of the HIV-affected teenager Lucy Mitchell in the British Broadcasting Company's (BBC) long-running children's soap 247 opera Grange Hill. Placing the five episode AIDS storyline in the context of wider moves by the BBC to engage younger audiences, and producer Phil Redmond’s conceptions of childhood, the chapter asked how a provocative AIDS storyline came to feature in the show in 1995 and what intervention it made into the AIDS education arena. The chapter argued that the AIDS storyline offered by the BBC formed a critique of the sex education policies discussed in chapter one, while attempting to appeal to the teenagers who populated chapter two. I showed how the Grange Hill AIDS-storyline was a deliberate political and didactic intervention into the lives of children, and the adults who cared for them, through a popular but banal media source. The multiple dialogic techniques employed by Grange Hill’s creators received particular scrutiny, allowing the chapter to reveal how this text represented a culmination, response and an intervention into the politics of AIDS and sex education that proceeded and surrounded it. In doing so, I argued that Grange Hill offered an examination of teenage agency and consent within the classroom and the clinic, demonstrated the way childhood is constructed situationally, and emphasised the interplay of education and health policies which shaped and limited the lives, and agency, of children in the 1990s. Through dramatising the contradictory conceptions of children's competence at the heart of education and health policy, Grange Hill presented children as the victims of adult incompetence and offers of protection, without participation. I demonstrated the way children are depicted in a constant battle to have their agency and rights acknowledged, ultimately presenting them as better able to be the masters’ of their own destiny than the adults who anxiously attempted to govern them.
The final chapter moved from the fictive needs of an HIV-affected teenager to the realities of representing HIV to children directly affected by the virus. This ended the thesis by acknowledging the near absence of the voices of those who lived the reality of the HIV positive identities investigated in the research presented here. By investigating how social service practitioners undertook to meet the needs of HIV-affected children, the final chapter relocated the analysis from the textual representation of HIV positive identities to moments of interaction between the social worker and HIV-affected persons. This analysis was achieved by critically engaging with key social work texts, discussion papers, reports and an oral history, tracing how social work practices related 248 to HIV positive children were codified and how narratives were produced and developed in response to the needs of HIV-affected children. The chapter then moved on to an analysis of two rare but representative fictional didactic texts aimed at HIV-affected children and adolescents: the picture book It’s Clinic Day and a pamphlet titled What Can I do About AIDS?, co-produced by Barnardo’s and the Terrence Higgins Trust in 1991. I argued that this material was produced as much for HIV-affected parents as it was for their HIV-affected children, reflecting on the interaction between producer, text and the intended adult and child audiences. This final chapter argued that while adults were apprehensive about frightening HIV-affected children by explaining the morbid effects of AIDS to them, of greater concern was the possibility of an informed child unwisely disclosing the HIV- affected status of their family, which it was feared would result in the family experiencing AIDS-related stigma. Here children’s rights to protection were once again pitted against their participatory rights; children’s agency limited but potentially threatening to the agency of their parents. The chapter concluded by demonstrating that while moves towards strengthening the participatory rights of HIV-affected children were undertaken by HIV-affected parents and social workers, the process was slow, anxious and stymied by the persistence of perceptions of the child as a passive innocent. This final chapter ended my thesis by looking forward beyond the 1981-1997 time period, gesturing to the continuity of ideas, hopes and fears which this thesis as whole investigated.
The selection of literature I chose to engage with was motivated by a desire to write a history which, while attending to the constructed nature of identity, acknowledged the agency of actors, past and present. This thesis did not describe children's lives, but instead focused on the discourses and texts which surrounded, constructed and responded to them; a history of the reactive production of childhoods by anxious adults in the age of AIDS. Nonetheless, the story told here was limited. The pop-cultural investigations documented here examined texts with broad and large audiences like magazines, and television, but left aside AIDS-related adolescent fiction, music and radio. This choice was motivated by the temporally specific nature of popular teenage girls' magazines and after-school soap operas, which represent period pieces as much as they do AIDS artefacts. While radio, music and adolescent literature did contribute to the representation of HIV positive identities to young audiences, these genres of 249 adolescent media persist in the present in a way that the texts investigated do not. This is not to say that their investigation would be without merit, indeed this would be a fruitful future direction for the kind of research demonstrated by this thesis.
AIDS and children after 1997 Since 1997, the representation of AIDS and HIV positive identities to children and adolescents has changed significantly. The teenage magazines which provided a vibrant space for teenage girls to acquire knowledge about sex, sexuality and gender politics have been replaced by interactive websites. Soap operas like Grange Hill have few modern equivalents as the internet, TV-streaming services such as Netflix and an ever greater proliferation of channels make the fixed scheduling of an after-school programme with a captive audience of teenagers an impossibility. HIV-affected children's emotional and medical needs have changed since the advent of highly active antiretroviral therapies (HAART). While HIV is still framed as a chronic illness, it now carries expectations in Britain that medical management and compliance with anti- retroviral therapies will prevent acute phases of illness and render transmission almost impossible when a zero viral load is achieved. Moreover, HIV-affected children and adolescents are no longer entirely reliant on adults and limited resources for information, their emotional and educative needs are now met by a multitude of services, online and offline, with some of these services run by empowered HIV-affected children themselves.654 In general, children's rights prove increasingly difficult to ignore as they gain increased access to the public sphere through new democratising participatory technologies such as social media. With increased access to the world outside the family and classroom through the digital sphere, children can engage with each other and adults, allowing their voices to be heard.
654 Two charities, in particular, are worth mentioning here: Body and Soul launched in London in 1996 and Children's HIV Association (CHIVA) launched in 2002 (previously part of the British HIV Association). Both these charities began life endeavouring to meet the emotional needs of children living with or affected by HIV. Body and Soul was instrumental in facilitating the production and launch of the film Spirit of Youth in 1998. Produced by young people living and affected by HIV, it challenged stigma and was accompanied by an activity book for use in schools. Paula Harrowing, Spirit of Youth, Simon Cross, Jes Benstock, Graeme Kennedy (eds.), (Body and Soul: London, 1998), http://www.bodyandsoulcharity.org/about/history/#s4 [Accessed , 18.10.2016] CHIVA set up its Youth Committee in 2010, made up of 12 HIV positive youths aged between 12-18. Anon, CHIVA Youth Committee, http://www.chiva.org.uk/our-work/youth-committee/, [Accessed 18.102016]. 250
Certain trends in children’s rights, sex education and the representation of HIV- positivity persist, however. Indeed, the sex education policies and cultural outputs of the 1980s and 1990s still cast long shadows over school-based sex education and more general attitudes to adolescent sexuality. Sex education still remains a recurrent hot topic in politics and the media, proving fertile ground for minor moral panics.655 Institutions such as the FPA and the Sex Education Forum still hold powerful positions in policy making and the production and dissemination of sex education for schools and youth groups.656 They also remain powerful lobbyists and command significant presence across the digital media platforms that have replaced the schoolyard and the teenage magazine as key discursive spaces for teenagers to encounter sex education.657 Though still unprotected by statutory status within the curriculum,658 school- based sex education is now expected to include many new subjects alongside the biological and social aspects of sex campaigned for during the 1980s and 1990s. Puberty, contraception, STD’s and discussions of consent are now joined by subjects such as sexting, cyber safety, revenge porn awareness, and more general issues relating to social media. These are included alongside the expectation of thorough and non- judgmental discussions of gender and sexuality made possible by the lifting of Section 28 and the lowering of the homosexual age of consent from 21 to 16. However, because parents retain the right to withdraw children from sex and relationship education classes and non-statutory curriculum design remains in the hands of school governors, huge variations in approaches between schools persists.659
655 As the introduction discussed, rather than fears of explicit sex education corrupting Britain's youth, current topics of media interest include: failures in sex education, the threat of internet pornography, rising STD rates and high teenage pregnancy rates. See for example Verity Sullivan, ‘Sex Education in the UK is Letting Our Teenagers Down', The Guardian, (24 March 2015); Anon, ‘Teachers fear for pupils safety on social media’, BBC Education and Family, (25 March 2016), http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-35881350 [Accessed 26.03.2016]. 656 Sex Education Forum, ‘Policy & Campaigns’, http://www.sexeducationforum.org.uk/policy- campaigns.aspx, [Accessed 18.10.2016]; Family Planning Association, ‘Influencing Sexual Health Policy’, http://www.fpa.org.uk/what-we-do/influencing-sexual-health-policy, [Accessed 18.10.2016]. 657 C. Tanton, et al ‘Patterns and trends in sources of information about sex among young people in Britain: evidence from three National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles’, BMJ Open, (2015). 658 Sex Education Forum, ‘Sex Education, It’s My Right: FAQs’, http://www.sexeducationforum.org.uk/policy-campaigns/faqs-status-of-sre.aspx, [Accessed 18.10.2016]. '659 Sex Education Forum Media Team, ‘Gaps in sex and relationship education leave too many children at risk’, Media Release, (20 January 2016), http://www.sexeducationforum.org.uk/policy- campaigns/gaps-in-sre-leave-children-at-risk.aspx, [Accessed 18.10.2016]. 251
Avenues for future work: limitations and opportunities In focusing on the representation of HIV positive identities to children and adolescents in Britain from 1983-1997, this thesis has prioritised the production and dissemination of ideas over their reception, focusing on the peculiarities of the Britain’s ideological and political context under the New Right. The limitations of this approach lie most obviously in its specificity. What was offered here was not a history of children’s lives in the age of AIDS, but rather an examination of the machinations of adults who would control, champion or empower them as a means of combating a disease that was seen as a threat to children and the future in the 1980s and 1990s. Staying within the 1983-1997 timeframe, further research on the reception of HIV positive identities intended for the consumption of children is needed. Though the purpose of this thesis was to discover how adults made the decision to construct and disseminate HIV positive identities to children, rather than to survey how the children themselves received these identities, the creative process was one of exchange between producers and audience. The timeline for this thesis falls within an established periodisation frequently used in AIDS scholarship. Though it contributes new material and a nuanced view to a period that has seen substantial enquiry, like many other investigations it left the post- 1997 histories of AIDS unexplored. While limiting the period did not create a dearth of material, treating the change in government and the increasing availability of HAART as the end of an era in AIDS’ history can have the effect of obscuring cultural and political continuities between the Thatcher/Major and New Labour eras. As was demonstrated in this thesis, AIDS created no immediate change in the representation of sex to children and adolescents. The Thatcher government drew on existing public health and education policies, practices and institutions, in order to meet what they assumed were the educational needs of their disparate public, avoiding controversy where possible and balancing conservative moralism with public health pragmatism. New Labour, while entering office on a ticket which in part had promised to abolish Section 28 and lower the age of consent between men to bring it in line with heterosexual couples, continued to bolster the idea of the nuclear family; taking aim at single teenage pregnancies as dysfunctional parenthood,660 and leaving the parental
660 New Labour policies aimed at curbing the teenage pregnancy rate have been the subject of useful and substantial scholastic enquiry from a variety of disciplines. For example see Elizabeth Bullen, Valerie 252 right to withdraw children from sex education classes intact. Treating teenage pregnancy as a social calamity and a crisis in public health resonated with constructions of teenage agency and sexuality as potentially dangerous and destructive forces, best controlled by adults. In particular, parallels emerge in the construction of sex education as a protective endeavour aimed at securing the future of adolescents, particularly girls. In this case, sex education is championed as battling contraceptive ignorance, providing a future free of unstable parenthood for teenagers and protection for society from the failed families and ill-brought up children which teenage parenthood is often presented as causing.661 I indicate these continuities in social policies here because they reveal an area where further research would be fruitful. Continuities aside, the changes that took place after my time period also present an exciting opportunity for further historic research. Namely an enquiry into the effect of the internet, as indicated above, upon teenagers worlds and the management of HIV/AIDS and safer-sex related information would benefit greatly from the historian’s perspective. As the number of people living with HIV in the United Kingdom continues to increase,662 the need for research that documents the successes and failures of the past, in hope of finding a path through the difficulties of the present, will remain.
Hey, ‘New Labour, Social Exclusion and Educational Risk Management: The case of “gymslip mums”’, British Educational Research Journal, 26:4 (2000), p. 441-456; Debbie A. Lawlor, Mary Shaw, ‘Teenage pregnancy rates: high compared with where and when?’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 97:3 (2004), pp. 121-123; Jean Carabine, ‘New Labour's teenage pregnancy policy: constituting knowing responsible citizens?’, Cultural Studies, 21:6 (2007), pp. 952-973. 661 Simon Duncan, ‘What's the problem with teenage parents? And what's the problem with policy?,’ Critical Social Policy, 27:3 (2007), pp. 307-334, pp. 307-313. 662 A., Skingsley Z. Yin, P. Kirwan, S. Croxford, C. Chau, S. Conti, A. Presanis, A Nardone, J Were, D Ogaz, M. Furegato, M. Hibbert, A. Aghaizu, G. Murphy, J. Tosswill, G. Hughes, J. Anderson, O. N. Gill, V. C. Delpech and contributors, HIV in the UK – Situation Report 2015 Incidence, prevalence and prevention, (Public Health England: London, 2015), p. 4. 253
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B.35.3.51, Daniels Publishing, AIDS & You Game Order Form
B.35.3.51, Laurie Dervish-Lang, ‘Unsafe’, AIDS and YOU Game: An Educational Resource from the BMA Professional and Scientific Division, ed. by David Morgan, (Cambridge, British Medical Association: 1989), resource sheets
B.35.3.51, Laurie Dervish-Lang, AIDS and YOU Game: An Educational Resource from the BMA Professional and Scientific Division, ed. by David Morgan, (Cambridge, British Medical Association: 1989)
The Wellcome Archive, Euston Road, London, United Kingdom: Items from the AIDS ephemera collection
EPH 503 AIDS: Health Education Authority, AIDS the Test: Yes or No?, (London: Bradleys, 1988)
EPH 503 AIDS: Islington Council HIV Unit, The HIV Antibody Test: Yes or No, (London: Islington Council, 1988?)
EPH 504: AIDS: Awareness & Education 2: DHSS, ‘Government Information 1987 AIDS Guidelines for Ear Piercers’, Don’t Die of Ignorance, (Department of Health and Social Security: Central Office of Information, November 1987).
EPH 524, Laurie Dervish-Lang, AIDS AND YOU GAME: 2nd Edition, (Cambridge: British Medical Association and West Sussex District Health Authority, 1994)
EPH 524, Sarah Easterbrook et al., ‘Installation manual’, AIDS and YOU GAME: 2nd Edition, (Cambridge: British Medical Association and West Sussex District Health Authority, 1994)
RPH 525:2, Wellcome, HIV & AIDS: a resource pack for use with 11 to 14 year olds, (1995).
Items from the Family Planning Association collection
SA.ASG.A.4, Notes from FPA/FPIS meeting with Mrs Annabel Kanabus of AVERT, (22 January 1987) 256
SA/ASG/A/1, FPA Staff meeting on AIDS minutes, (10 November 1986); FPA Staff AIDS Group Agenda, (19 January 1987)
SA/ASG/A/1, FPA Staff meeting on AIDS minutes, (10 November 1986)
SA/ASG/A/1, Joyce Rosse, ‘AIDS Education and Training: Update on the Education Unit’s Involvement’, (16 February 1987)
SA/ASG/A/1, Memorandum from Marie Goldsmith circulated to FPA Staff AIDS Group, (10 February 1987); Angela Mills ‘AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) and Family Planning and Well Women Services: Provisional Guidelines’ (London: The Family Planning Association and The National Association of Family Planning Doctors, 29 January 1987)
SA/ASG/A/1, Notes from FPA staff AIDS Group Meeting, (6 February 1987)
SA/FPA/C/B/31.01, Letter from Alistair Service, FPA General Secretary to AIDS Taskforce, ‘Summary of FPA Involvement in Work with AIDS’, (8 April 1987)
SA/FPA/C/B/31/02, Letter to Alistair Service from Richard Clark on behalf of the Social Services Committee, (13 November 1986)
SA/FPA/C/B/6/2 [2 of 2], FPA Memo regarding ‘The Development of Sex Education: Sex Education Forum and Other Bodies’ Roles (27 July 1987).
SA/FPA/C/B/6/2 [Part 1, Restricted Access] Letter from FPA education unit to Director of Information at FPA regarding DES Health Education from 5 to 16 draft circular, (16th February 1987).
SA/FPA/C/B/6/2 [Part 1, Restricted Access], Family Planning Education Unit, Education and Training Resources 1985-1986.
SA/FPA/C/B/6/2 [Part 1, Restricted Access], Memo, 27 July 1987
SA/FPA/C/B/6/2 [Part 1, Restricted Access], Minutes for meeting between DHSS, DES and FPA, (June 21 1985)
SA/FPA/C/B/6/2 [Part 1, Restricted Access], Minutes for meeting between DHSS, DES and FPA, (June 21 1985)
SA/FPA/C/B/6/2 [Part 2, Restricted Access], Annotated draft of DES Sex Education Circular Number 11/87, (15 September 1987)
SA/FPA/C/B/6/2 [Part 2, Restricted Access], Letter circulated amongst senior FPA committee members, 8 August 1988
SA/FPA/C/B/6/2 [Part 2, Restricted Access], Letter from FPA to DES MP, 30 September 1988 257
SA/FPA/C/B/6/2 [Part 2, Restricted Access], Project Proposal to the Health Education Authority from the Education Unit of the Family Planning Association, (1988)
SA/FPA/C/B/6/2 Education Unit [Part 2, Restricted Access], Letter from FPA solicitors to FPA, 8 August 1988
The National Archives, Kew, London, United Kingdom:
CAB/129/110, C. (162) 102, ‘Broadcasting Policy: The Pilkington Report’, (26 June 1962)
FP1.18 Health Education Council: Minutes and Papers. Health Education Council meetings 1987.
FP2.2.1, Health Education Authority: Minutes and Papers, Part 1 of 4.
FP2.2.2, Health Education Authority: Minutes and Papers, Part 2 of 4.
Newspapers and Periodicals
Aitken, Lucy, Campaign, (August 20, 2004), p. 31
Amis, Martin, ‘Making Sense of AIDS’, The Observer, (June 23, 1985), p.17
Amis, Martin, ‘Mother Nature and the Plague’, The Observer, May 1, 1983), p. 36
Anon ‘AIDS toll by 1991’, Daily Mirror, (January 10 1985), p. 2
Anon, ‘AIDS toll 1m by 1991’, Daily Mirror, (January 10, 1985) p. 2
Anon, ‘British Baby Dies of AIDS’, Daily Mail, (1985)
Anon, ‘Children’s TV ‘too focused on UK and America’, The Telegraph Online, 11 June, 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/2111432/Childrens-TV-too- focused-on-UK-and-America.html [Accessed 08/10/2015]
Anon, ‘Just Seventeen Reduced to Monthly’, Marketing Week, (14 February 1997) https://www.marketingweek.com/1997/02/14/just-seventeen-reduced-to-monthly/ [Accessed 25/07/2016];
Anon, ‘Mystery new killer disease’, Sunday Times, (September 5, 1982), p. 16
Anon, ‘Shame of Grange Hill ‘copycats’: Parents blame BBC series for walkout’, Daily Mail, (March 17, 1995), p. 37
Anon, ‘Teachers fear for pupils safety on social media’, BBC Education and Family, (25 March 2016), http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-35881350 [Accessed 26.03.2016] 258
Anon, ‘The real plague is panic’, The Guardian, (February 19, 1985), p. 12
Anon, 'AIDS 'not a gay plague', The Daily Mirror, (6 September, 1985)
Anon, Campaign, (August 09 1996), http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/news-new- teenage-titles-pick-readers-older-ones-decline/21215, [Accessed 25/07/2016]
Bamigboye, Baz, Peter McKay, ‘“He died a living skeleton – and so ashamed” The Last Days of Rock Hudson’, Daily Mail (October 3, 1985), p. 1
Band, Katherine (Ed), ‘Will Someone Listen? Please’, The European Forum on HIV/AIDS Children and Families Newsletter, 11 (Autumn 2000)
Band, Katherine, Judith Dorrell, Naomi Honigsbaum, What do the children say? Children’s Participation Workshop Project Report, 13-20 August 1999, (The European Forum on HIV/AIDS Children and Families: London, 2000)
Billings, Claire, Campaign, (August 22, 2008), p. 28
Brunt, M., ‘Ban on Deadly Kiss of Life’ Sunday Mirror, (February 17, 1985)
Daniels, William, ‘Secret AIDS Watch on a Mother and Baby’, Daily Mirror, (December 21 1984), p. 2
Dover, Clare, ‘Why we must not panic over AIDS’, Daily Express, (February 21, 1985), p. 8
Dover, Clare, ’10 Million Fall Victim to AIDS’, Daily Express, 25 January 1988, p. 14
Dover, Clare, Colin Pratt, ‘Women victims of deadly gay plague', Daily Express, (February 19, 1985), p 2
Dover, Clare, Colin Pratt, ‘Women Victims of Deadly Gay Plague’, Daily Express, (February 19 1985), p. 2
Freeman, Alice, ‘How the girl’s glossies have gone all the way to seduce their young readers: Teen mags that are sold on sex’, Daily Express, (February 24, 1995), p. 19
Gillan, Audrey, ‘Section 28 gone… but not forgotten’, The Guardian, (17 November 2003), www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/nov/17/uk.gayrights [Accessed 12/09/2016]
Gordon, George, ‘Haunted by the epidemic of fear’,. Daily Mail, (October 3, 1985), p. 6
Green, Jane, ‘Spotlight on the confidantes who give out advice on the sex problems: We meet the teenage mag agony aunts’, Daily Express, (November 30, 1995) pp. 48-49
Groocock-Renshaw, Nikki ‘Got a problem?’, TV Hits, 87 (November, 1995)
Hughes, Gordon, ‘Please Don’t Ever Wake Up, Darling: Tormented mum’s prayer for AIDS boy’, Daily Mirror, (February 2 1987) p. 5 259
Illman, John, ‘Aids Virus Kills Man in Britain’, Daily Mail, (November 19, 1984), pp. 1-2
Illman, John, ‘Myths that scare even the doctors’, Daily Mail, (January 17, 1985) p. 6
Ives Nat, ‘Magazines’ teen sites no match for MySpace: Girls spend little time on web properties weighed down by print partners’, Advertising Age, 78:42 (October 22, 2008, p. 8.
Kent, Peter, ‘Why even doctors dread killer AIDS’ Daily Express, (February 1 1985), p. 5
Lee, Jeremy, Campaign, (February 30, 2004) p. 37
Lymas, Stephen, ‘I’m not risking AIDS says top pathologist’, Daily Mail, (November 2, 1983), p. 11
McKay, Ron, ‘Just Seventeen: Glory without the schmaltz’, Campaign, (1 June, 1984), pp. 32-33
Morris, Stewart 'GAY PLAGUE' IS JUST A MYTH: Killer disease could be caught by almost anyone', South London Press, (6 June, 1986)
Murray, James, ‘Abortion agony for wife who caught AIDS from husband’, Daily Express, (December 6 1986) p. 1
Nikkhah, Roya, ‘Teen magazines are sexualising readers, says watchdog’ The Telegraph Online, (14 March 2009) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/4990907/Teen-magazines-are- sexualising-readers-says-watchdog.html (Date accessed 14/07/2016);
Palmer, Jill, ‘AIDS Baby Nightmare’, Daily Mirror, (20 February 1985) pp. 1-2
Palmer, Jill, ‘Wife Get AIDS from Husband’s Affair: Death risk forces mum-to-be to have an abortion’, Daily Mirror, (October 23 1986), p. 7
Payne, Stephan, ‘Emergency Services call for danger list on AIDS’, Daily Mail, (February 18, 1985), p. 15
Rothman, Lily, ‘How AIDS Change the History of Sex Education: The conversation about what to teach and when shifted in the 1980s’, Time, (12 November 2014), time.com/3578597/aids-sex-ed-history/ [accessed 21/10/2016]
Smith, David, ‘Shut down Grange Hill, says its creator’, The Observer, (13, January 2008) http://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/jan/13/television.bbc [Accessed 01/02/2016]
Stephens, Doreen, ‘Television for Children: A lecture’, Lunch-Time Lectures in Broadcasting House, 1:5 (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1966) 260
Sullivan, Verity, ‘Sex Education in the UK is Letting Our Teenagers Down’, The Guardian, (24 March 2015)
Sutcliffe, Thomas, ‘From soft sell to gritty issues’, The Independent, (May 19, 1995), p. 17
Sutton, Geoff, ‘Web of Fear: after ‘reckless’ HIV Romeo is revealed’, Daily Mirror, (June 25 1992) p. 3
Tyer, Nicola ‘Not in front of the kids’, Daily Mail, (March 30 1995), p. 48
Wilsher, Peter, Neville Hodgkinson. ‘At Risk’ The Sunday Times, (November 2, 1986), p. 25
Televisual Sources
Department of Education and Science, Your Choice for Life, (London: CLF Vision, 1987)
Harrowing, Paula, Spirit of Youth, Simon Cross, Jes Benstock, Graeme Kennedy (eds.), (Body and Soul: London, 1998), http://www.bodyandsoulcharity.org/about/history/#s4 [Accessed , 18.10.2016]
Hood, Kevin, ‘Episode 13, Grange Hill, Series 18, (BBC: 14 February 1995)
Hood, Kevin, ‘Episode 14’, Grange Hill, Series 18, (BBC: 17 February 1995)
Hood, Kevin, ‘Episode 15’, Grange Hill, Series 18, (BBC: 21 February 1995)
Hood, Kevin, ‘Episode 16’, Grange Hill, Series 18, (BBC: 24 February 1995)
Hood, Kevin, ‘Episode 18’, Grange Hill, Series 18, (BBC: 3 March 1995)
Nyswaner, Ron, Philadelphia, Jonathan Demme, (dir.), (United States: TrisStar Pictures, 1993)
Other Published Primary Sources
Anon, ‘Arbitrations’, http://web.archive.org/web/20120401055408/http://www.tmap.org.uk/cgi- bin/wms.pl/668 [Accessed 14/07/2016]
Anon, ‘Home’, The Teenage Magazine Arbitration Panel, http://www.ppa.co.uk/tmap/home/ (Accessed, 14/10/2013).
Anon, CHIVA Youth Committee, http://www.chiva.org.uk/our-work/youth-committee/, [Accessed 18.102016]. 261
British Medical Association, AIDS & YOU: An Illustrated Guide To HIV and AIDS, (British Medical Association and Health Education Authority: London, 1991)
British Medical Association, AIDS AND YOU: An illustrated guide, ed. by David Morgan, (Design) Glynn Bennallick, (British Medical Association: London, 1987)
British Medical Association, Statement on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, (Chameleon Press Limited: London, 1986)
Burgess, Melvin, Junk, (London: Anderson, 1996)
Dada, Mehboob and Kate Tomlinson, ‘Issues for Clients and Workers from Black and Ethnic Minority Communities’, Living and Working with HIV, Discussion paper 3, (London: CCETSW, 1989)
Dervish-Lang, Laurie, ‘Developing AIDS and HIV teaching materials for school children, AIDS: A Challenge in Education, ed. by David R Morgan, (Institute of Biology, London and Royal Society of Medicine Services, 1990), pp. 45-50
Family Planning Association, ‘Influencing Sexual Health Policy’, http://www.fpa.org.uk/what-we-do/influencing-sexual-health-policy, [Accessed 18.10.2016].
Fisher Fleur, The Teenage Magazine Arbitration Panel First Annual Report, 1996-97, (TMAP, 1997)
Gleitzman, Morris, Two Weeks with the Queen, (London: Blackie and Son Limited, 1989)
Health Education Authority, ‘“I thought only gays and drug users could catch it.” That’s his excuse, what will yours be?’, MIZZ, 81 (May 4-17, 1988) pp. 43-44
Health Education Authority, AIDS Resource List, (London, Health Education Authority, 1996, 1988)
Heather, Beryl, Sharing: A Handbook for those involved in training in personal relationships and sexuality, (London: The FPA Education Unit, 1987)
Honigsbaum, Naomi, ‘Children and Families Affected by HIV in Europe: The Way Forward, (London: The National Children’s Bureau, 1994)
Honigsbaum, Naomi, HIV, AIDS and Children: A Cause for Concern, (London: National Children’s Bureau, 1991)
Honigsbaum, Naomi, Living and Working with HIV: Training Guidance for Staff in the Personal Social Services, (London: Central Council For Education and Training in Social Work, 1989)
Kerr M. E., Night Kites, (New York: Pan Horizon, 1987) 262
Lord St. Oswald, ‘The Pilkington Report on Broadcasting’, HL Deb 242 (18 July 1962), cc. 605-765
Luff, Peter, HC Deb, Periodicals (Protection of Children), (6 February 1996), cc. 146- 152
Manning, Nick, ‘Issues and choices: Employment-based Training within the Personal social Services for Hospital and Community-based Social Workers, Planners and Managers’, Living and Working with HIV, Discussion paper 1, (London: CCETSW, 1989)
Massey, Doreen, Teaching About HIV & AIDS. (London: Health Education Authority, 1988)
Merrifield, Margaret, Come sit by me: an educational storybook about AIDS and HIV infection for small children ages 4 to 8 and their caregivers, Heather Collins (illustrator), (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1990)
Miklowitz, Gloria, Goodbye Tomorrow, (New York: Lions Teen Tracks, 1987)
Periodical Publishers Association, ‘TMAP guidelines for coverage of sexual subject matter in teenage magazines’, (February, 1996)
Phillips, Kerstin B., What Do We Tell The Children? Books to use with children affected by illness and bereavement, (Paediatric AIDS Resource Centre: Edinburgh, 1996)
Powell, Pamela, Meeting the Challenge of HIV/AIDS in Women and Children, (Norwich: Social Work Monographs, 1992)
Redmond, Phil, Mid-term Report: From Grange Hill to Hollyoaks, via Brookside, (London: Arrow Books, 2013)
Sex Education Forum, ‘Policy & Campaigns’, http://www.sexeducationforum.org.uk/policy-campaigns.aspx, [Accessed 18.10.2016]. Sex Education Forum, ‘Sex Education, It’s My Right: FAQs’, http://www.sexeducationforum.org.uk/policy-campaigns/faqs-status-of-sre.aspx, [Accessed 18.10.2016]
Stevens, Ruth, It’s Clinic Day, Illustrator Fiona Menzies, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh District Council Women’s Committee, 1992)
Sutton, Ann, ‘Key Issues in Working with Children and HIV’, Children and HIV: Supporting Children and their Families, ed. by Sarah Morton, David Johnson, (Edinburgh: The Stationary Office, 1996), pp. 8-15
The Grapevine: the sex education board game for ages 12 and above, (Leicester: First edition – New Grapevine, 1985) (Leicester: Second edition – Youth Work Press, 1992)
Thomas, Graham, AIDS EDUCATION GAME: HIV SIMULATION, (Cambridge: Daniels Publishing, 1992) 263
Tomlinson, Kate, ‘The experience of Voluntary Organisations’, Living and Working with HIV, Discussion paper 2, (London: CCETSW, 1989)
Tomlinson, Kate, ‘Training Needs of Staff Working with Drug Users’, Living and Working Tomlinson with HIV, Discussion paper 4, (London: CCETSW, 1989)
Wellings, Kaye, The Role of Teenage Magazines in the Sexual Health of Young People, (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine: Department of Public Health and Policy, November, 1996)
WHO/GPA/DIR/89.12, ‘Paris Declaration on Women, Children and the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS)’ in Report on the International Conference on the Implication of AIDS for Mothers and Children: Technical Statements and Selected Presentations, (27-30 November 1989)
Just Seventeen
A worried Matchstick to Just Seventeen, ‘Letters page’, Just Seventeen, 29 (November 15 1984) p. 37
Anon, ‘AIDS: The Answers To Your Questions’, Just Seventeen, 127 (November 19 1986), pp. 30-31
Anon, ‘AIDS: The Facts’, Just Seventeen, (March 13, 1985), p. 53
Anon, ‘Dangerous Drugs: Facts of Life’, Just Seventeen, 16 (May 17 1984), pp. 30-31
Anon, ‘Facts of Life: The Female Body’, Just Seventeen, 2:6 (March 22, 1984) p. 15
Anon, ‘For Your Eyes Only’, Just Seventeen, (13 October 1983), p. 3
Anon, ‘Homosexuality: Facts of Life’, Just Seventeen, 17 (May 31 1984), p. 27
Anon, ‘Just Ask: Straight Answers To Hundreds of Questions’, booklet in Just Seventeen, 38 (March 6, 1985)
Anon, ‘Teenage Mothers,’ Just Seventeen, 26 (October 4 1984), pp. 20-21
Anon, ‘When the Air Raid Warning Sounds’, Just Seventeen, 27 (October 18 1984), pp. 20-21
Baker, Janette, Anita Naik, ‘Clause 28: How will it affect you?’, Just Seventeen, 207 (June 1 1988), p. 19
Chissick, Rosalyn, 'It'll never happen to me' Just Seventeen, 96 (April 30 1986) pp. 20-
Le Good, Bridget ‘The Pill: Whose Right to Choose?’, Just Seventeen, 34 (January 24th 1985), p. 20
McFadyean Melanie, ‘Advice’, Just Seventeen, 52 (June 12, 1985), p. 43 264
McFadyean, Melanie, ‘Advice’, Just Seventeen, 2:6 (March 22, 1984) p. 40
McFadyean, Melanie, ‘Advice’, Just Seventeen, 28 (November 1, 1984), p. 47
McFadyean, Melanie, ‘Advice’, Just Seventeen, 38 (March 6, 1985), pp. 41-42
McFadyean, Melanie, 'Contraception for Under 16s ', Just Seventeen, Issue 90, (March 5 1986), p. 19
Teddern, Sue, Mates, Just Seventeen, 30 (November 29 1984) pp. 34-35
MIZZ
Anon letter to Tricia Krietman, ‘Can gays get married? Body & Soul’, MIZZ, Issue 61 (July 29 - August 11 1987), p. 37
Anon, ‘My brother has a boyfriend: How to cope when you discover your brother is gay’, MIZZ, Issue 11 (August 30 – September 12 1985), p. 32
Anon, ‘The MIZZ AIDS Survey – help us to help you’, MIZZ, 51 (March 11-24, 1987), pp. 10-11
Anon, ‘THE MIZZ AIDS SURVEY: WE BRING YOU THE RESULTS’, MIZZ, 58 (June 17-30 1987), pp. 10-11
Brodie, Richard, ‘Everything you ought to know about drugs but no one ever told you’, MIZZ, Issue 38 (September 12-267 1986), pp. 48-49
Department of Health and Social Security, ‘You know what’s in his mind but do you know what’s in his blood?’, MIZZ, 48 (January 28-Februrary 10, 1987), p. 35
Department of Health and Social Security, ‘Your next sexual partner could be that very special person: The one that gives you AIDS’, MIZZ, 45 (December 17-30, 1986), p. 29
Geller, Simon, ‘Hetero- Trans- Homo- Bi- A- Sexual’, MIZZ, Issue 56 (May 20 - June 2 1987), pp. 30-31
Health Education Authority, ‘“I thought only gays and drug users could catch it.” That’s his excuse, what will yours be?’, MIZZ, 81 (May 4-17, 1988) pp. 43-44
Irvine, Isobel, the MIZZ book of AIDS, (London: IPC Magazines, 1991)
Joyce, April ‘Rape: A positive approach to prevention…’, MIZZ, Issue 67 (October 21 – November 3 1987), pp. 48-49
Joyce, April, ‘Abortion’, MIZZ, Issue 73 (January 13- 26 1988), pp. 18-19
Kenny, Ursula, ‘Enough is Enough: girls fight back against street violence’, MIZZ, (April 12-25, 1985), pp. 48-49 265
Kenny, Ursula, ‘Talking Heads: Samantha Fox takes the hot seat’, MIZZ, (April 12-25, 1985), pp. 59-60
Kreitman, Tricia, ‘The best thing anyone told me about sex...’, MIZZ, 5 (June 21 – July 5 1985), p. 16
Anon, ‘Contents’, MIZZ, 1 (12-25 April 1985) p. 3
Anon, MIZZ, 37 (August 29-Septemeber 11, 1986) p. 45
Kreitman, Tricia, ‘Body and Soul’, MIZZ, 6 (June 21 – July 4, 1985), pp. 52-53
Anon, ‘New Wives Tales’, MIZZ, 4 (May 24 – June 6, 1984) p. 53
Anon, ‘New Wives Tales’, MIZZ, 4 (May 24 – June 6, 1985), pp. 52-53
Kreitman, Tricia, ‘Body and Soul’, MIZZ, 9 (August 2-15, 1985), pp. 26-27
Kreitman, Tricia, ‘Body and Soul’, MIZZ, 7 (June 5 – July 18, 1985), pp. 44-45
Kreitman, Tricia, ‘Body and Soul’, MIZZ, 1 (April 12-25 1985), p. 26
Oral histories
Author’s interview with David Hepworth on 16/10/2013
Author’s interview with Naomi Honigsbaum, 04/09/2013, Track 1
Author’s interview with Naomi Honigsbaum, 04/09/2013, Track 2
Author’s interview with Naomi Honigsbaum, 04/09/2013, Track 3
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Adkins, Lisa, ‘Taking the HIV test: self-surveillance and the making of heterosexuality’, in Contagion: historical and cultural studies, ed. by Alison Bashford, Clair Hooker, (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 183-200
Adrian Bingham, ‘Newspaper problem pages and British sexual culture since 1918’, Media History, 18:1 (2012), pp. 51-63
Alderson, Connie, The Magazines Teenagers Read: with special reference to Tren, Jackie and Valentine, (London: Pergamon Press, 1968) 266
Aldridge, Mark, The Birth of Television: A History, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
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Alonzo, Angelo A., Nancy R. Reynolds, ‘Stigma, HIV and AIDS: an exploration and elaboration of a stigma trajectory’ Society Science Medicine, 41:3 (1995), pp. 303-315
Arai, Lisa, Teenage Pregnancy: The Making and Unmaking of a Problem, (Bristol: Policy Press at the University of Bristol, 2009)
Aries, Philippe Centuries of childhood: A social history of family life, Trans. Robert
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Barber, Michael, Education and the Teacher Unions, (London: Cassell, 1992)
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Blair, Ann, Daniel Monk, ‘Sex Education and the Law in England and Wales: The Importance of Legal Narratives’, Shaping Sexual Knowledge: A Cultural History of Sex Education in Twentieth Century Europe, ed. by Lutz D. H. Sauerteig, Roger Davidson, (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 37-51
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Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity, (New York: Routledge, 1990)
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Campbell, Colin. "Distinguishing the power of agency from agentic power: A note on Weber and the “black box” of personal agency." Sociological Theory, 27:4 (2009), pp. 407-418
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Carricaburu, Daniele, Janine Pierret, ‘From biographical disruption to biographical reinforcement: the case of HIV positive men’, Sociology of Health & Illness, 17:1 (1995) pp. 65-88 268
Coates, R.J.L., M.T. Schechter, ‘Sexual Modes of Transmission of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)’, Annals of Sex Research, 1 (1988), pp. 115-137
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Crowther, Barbara, ‘The Partial Picture: Framing the Discourse of Sex in British Educative Films of the Early 1930s’ Shaping Sexual Knowledge: A Cultural History of Sex Education in Twentieth Century Europe, ed. by Lutz D. H. Sauerteig, Roger Davidson, (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 176-196
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Damukes, William E., ‘Cryptococcal Meningitis in Patients with AIDS’, Journal of Infectious Diseases, 157:4 (April 1988), pp . 624-628
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Davidson, Roger, Dangerous Liaisons: A social History of Venereal Disease in Twentieth-Century Scotland, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000)
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