Posted on November 16, 2016
Source: Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health Magazine
"Terrinieka Powell's epiphany came seven years ago in Flint, Michigan. Powell was talking with young people about the sexual health messages they heard in church. Then a postdoc in community psychology at the University of Michigan, she worked at the YOUR Center on a faith-based HIV prevention program led by Ms. Bettina Campbell. For the first time, Powell was hearing directly from adolescents themselves. They knew very little about the disease and how to prevent it.
'I remember one girl saying something like, "All we hear is, don’t have sex or you’ll get pregnant, get AIDS and die,"' says Powell, PhD, an assistant professor in Population, Family and Reproductive Health. 'I thought, "Yikes! How did we get here?"'
Even allowing for imperfect recall, 'That’s how young people were interpreting messages,' Powell says. 'It was then that I realized we had to do better.'
The adolescents’ remarks made plain that many African-American churches in Flint and nationwide were failing young members by stigmatizing homosexuality and refusing to talk about sex and drugs—even as the HIV/AIDS epidemic devastated their communities."
