When given time to develop, CABs appear to be a good strategy for building partnerships between researchers and communities for collaborative research projects. This approach has the potential to build sustainable capacity to identify and address ethical issues in research as well as community needs.
We undertook qualitative interviews with 209 injecting drug users (primarily heroin) in three Russian cities: Moscow, Barnaul, and Volgograd. We explored drug injectors' accounts of HIV and health risk. Policing practices and how these violate health and self emerged as a primary theme. Findings show that policing practices violate health and rights directly, but also indirectly, through the reproduction of social suffering. Extrajudicial policing practices produce fear and terror in the dayto-day lives of drug injectors, and ranged from the mundane (arrest without legal justification; the planting of evidence to expedite arrest or detainment; the extortion of money or drugs for police gain) to the extreme (physical violence as a means of facilitating 'confession' and as an act of 'moral' punishment without legal cause or rationale; the use of methods of 'torture'; and rape). We identify the concept of police bespredel -living with the sense that there are 'no limits' to police power -as key to perpetuating fear and terror, internalized stigma, and a sense of fatalist risk acceptance. 'Police besprediel' is analyzed as a form of structural violence, contributing to 'oppression illness'. Yet we also identify cases of resistance to such oppression, characterised by strategies to preserve dignity and hope. We identify hope for change as a resource of risk reduction as well as escape, if only temporarily, from the pervasiveness of social suffering. Future drug policies, and the state responses they sponsor, should set out to promote public health while protecting human rights, hope and human dignity.
Both interventions were effective in reducing high-risk sexual behavior among MSM repeat testers. PCC participants demonstrated significant behavioral change more swiftly and reported a more satisfying counseling experience than UC participants.
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