No abstract

Sexual minorities are stigmatised in much of sub-Saharan Africa, restricting their access to sexual health services and undermining their mental health. Although public attitudes and social representations inform the experience of sexual stigma, little is known about how young Africans make sense of sexual diversity. We conducted a thematic analysis of 56 texts contributed by young people from 10 countries in response to a prompt in a scriptwriting competition inviting participants to 'tell a story about someone who is attracted to people of the same sex'. We analysed accounts of the origins of same-sex attraction, a prominent theme in the narratives. Two-thirds of the texts provide an explicit or implicit explanation, presenting same-sex attraction as innate (15/38) and/or the consequence of environmental influences (32/38), including parental behaviour, gender separation, trauma, foreign influences and evil spirits. Expressions of the potential to avert or cure same-sex attraction are common. Young people's sense-making around sexual diversity draws on available sociocultural and symbolic resources, some of which may be highly stigmatising, and reflects local, national and transnational influences. The need to explain same-sex attraction and the preponderance of harmful explanatory frameworks compounds sexual minority youth's vulnerability to sexual stigma, harmful coping strategies and mental health challenges.

Despite widespread recognition of child sexual abuse (CSA) as a serious problem in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), few far-reaching programmatic interventions addressing CSA in this setting are currently available, and those interventions that do exist tend to focus on response rather than prevention. Parents are in a unique position to engage their children in dialogues about sexuality-related issues and thereby both help prevent CSA and take swift action to stop CSA, address trauma, and minimize harm, in the event CSA does occur. The Families Matter! Program (FMP) is an evidence-based intervention for parents and caregivers of 9-12 year-olds in sub-Saharan African countries that promotes positive parenting practices and effective parent-child communication about sex-related issues and sexual risk reduction. This paper describes the enhancement of a new FMP session on CSA, drawing on authentic narratives contributed by young people to the Global Dialogues/Scenarios from Africa (GD/SfA) youth scriptwriting competition. The GD/SfA data permitted incorporation of young Africans’ voices and resulted in an interactive curriculum that is grounded in contextually-relevant and emotionally-compelling scenarios and adapted to the needs of low-literacy adult learners in SSA. Experiences are shared with a view to informing the development of interventions addressing CSA in SSA.

Narrative is a primary tool in human meaning-making and communication. Frequently value-laden, it plays an important role in global public health communication and advocacy efforts. State-endorsed homophobia is widespread across much of sub-Saharan Africa, severely restricting access to sexual health services and undermining human rights and mental health for sexual minorities. Young Africans' narratives about same-sex attraction (SSA) can both inform message framing and provide a source of creative ideas for communication and advocacy efforts. We conducted an analysis of 56 narratives about SSA submitted by young people aged 13-24 years from 10 African countries to a spring 2013 scriptwriting competition in response to a prompt inviting participants to 'Tell a story about someone who is attracted to people of the same sex.' We categorised the narratives across a spectrum of attitudinal perspectives vis-à-vis SSA and identified characteristics of each category, ranging from condemnation (including characterising SSA as satanic), through ambivalence (e.g. 'love the sinner, hate the sin'), to acceptance, activism (including petitioning for same-sex marriage), and normalisation. The texts shed light on potential message frames and cultural narratives that can be countered or leveraged in communication efforts to improve the health and human rights of sexual minority Africans.