HIV Risk Reduction for South African Youth: Creating a Trauma-Informed Family-Bas

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The stunning beauty of the South African landscape and the palpable sense of hope pervading South African society in the post-apartheid era contrast starkly to the burden of approximately 5.5 million people infected with AIDS (UNAIDS, 2006). HIV prevalence among South African youth is particularly alarming. Existing research illustrates the potential of families to shape adolescent behavior in general. Families may, therefore, hold one key to slowing the epidemic. Our long-range goal is to advance the state of family-based preventive interventions that stem the spread of HIV. Our objective is to develop an efficacious family-based preventive intervention for families before their children become sexually active. The central hypothesis that guides our work is that enhancing caregivers' capacity to care is related to reduced risk and vulnerability among children and young adolescents. Our first specific aim is to design a culturally sensitive family-based intervention modeled after the Parents Matter! Program and informed by existing general parenting interventions in Southern Africa and formative research with community stakeholders, leaders, and families. Our second specific aim is to implement the intervention with 80 families recruited through a local non-governmental organization. Our third specific aim is to evaluate the intervention's efficacy and effectiveness with process and outcome measures, tailored to the South African context. In our proposed work we plan to move beyond simple dissemination of an existing successful intervention to thoroughly adapting it to a vastly different culture, address concretely the existence of HIV and violence in parents' lives, including how these factors can compromise parenting, and how they can be overcome, and bring together a diverse team of researchers, practitioners, parents, children, and community leaders to develop, implement, and evaluate the intervention. We expect this initial study to lay the groundwork for a full-scale family-based intervention trial with an ultimate outcome of reducing HIV transmission among South African youth. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: South Africa faces dire threats posed by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which compromises public health and the well-being of over 5.5 million South Africans and their communities. This project will develop, implement, and evaluate a family-based intervention to stem the tide of the virus among South African youth.