Publication year: 2011
Source: Social Science & Medicine, In Press, Accepted Manuscript, Available online 21 July 2011
Shanti A., Parikh
In 1990 women’s rights activists in Uganda successfully lobbied to amend the Defilement Law, raising the age of sexual consent for adolescent females from fourteen to eighteen years old and increasing the maximum sentence to death by hanging. The amendment can be considered a macro-level intervention designed to address the social and health inequalities affecting young women and girls, particularly their disproportionately high rate of HIV as compared to their male counterparts. While the intention of the law and aggressive campaign was to prosecute “sugar daddies” and “pedophiles,” the average age of men charged with defilement was twenty-one years old…
Highlights: ► Conventional public health evaluations are not equipped to examine how interventions are shaped by local power dynamics. ► Longitudinal ethnographic research and case studies reveal unintended consequences of macro-level interventions. ► Analysis of the age of consent law highlights how planners and communities hold conflicting views about gendered HIV risk. ► The article demonstrates how ethnography can help design and evaluate theoretically-grounded macro-level interventions.