Situation Analysis

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Situation analysis of AIDS patients and their children in Goa city: Goa is the place of occupants of migrating people from different parts of the county. In most of the families the male left the family in the native village and engage in the casual labors in the private sectors for survival. These workers indulge in sex activities with commercial sex workers and become high risk of HIV /AIDS. Children born from this group are almost HIV positive. Denial of the problems experienced by people with HIV/AIDS is caused by stigma, fear, rejection and persecution. These factors prevent a person living with HIV from relating to their parents, friends and families. As a result many abandon their children in the streets.In slums it is alarming factor that among the high risk groups of AIDS carries are street children. Risky sexual behavior and disinformation are the reasons for the pandemic. It is estimated that 1000 to 1500 street kids (age 10-15) found in Goa slums. Every day 5 to 10 children board trains bound for all the corners of the other states and reach the stations as cleaners and beggars. Most of them indulge in unsafe sex activities, and have one or two venereal disease. One percent of HIV positive cases are children 15 years.Thus poverty makes whole communities vulnerable to AIDS by forcing men to leave their families in search of work, by leaving people hopeless enough to turn to the solace of drugs, or by making prostitution a survival strategy for women and children. HIV/ AIDS then complete the vicious circle by making the community even poorer.A look at the world population HIV prevalence tells that the epidemic has its tightest grip covers the poorest countries. And the highest concentrations of HIV/AIDS with in rich countries coincide increasingly with packets of misery and deprivation mostly in urban slums. This underlines a truth that is fundamental to the understanding of the epidemic- that poverty is at once the line of least resistance, and one of the most powerful driving forces behind the spread of HIV/AIDS.
Far From Home: The decision to leave home involves both elements of “need to leave” and “desire to be elsewhere”. The economic boom has drawn people from far and wide with the promise of jobs in the industries and other sectors. It is a migration that often takes the heart out of communities, disrupting family life and stable relationships and loosening traditional controls on behavior. Men and women try to reconstruct their lives far from home, taking new sex partners during their long absences. Further more many who leave their homes in search of work find that prostitution offers the best and sometimes the only, way of earning a living.
Children Caught in the Trap: Children too are being pushed out of their homes by poverty and institutions where they are at increased risk of concentrating HIV. Street children are extremely vulnerable to HIV infection, both because they are outside all formal structures of society such as school, and hence are difficult to reach with health education and health care; and because risk taking is part and parcel of existence on the knife edge of the survival. Many use drugs to escape from the pain- a habit that ranges from sniffing glue to injecting heroin or cocaine. Hard drugs are usually way beyond the means of destitute children, and their biggest risk of contracting HIV comes from sex. Some are at risk of HIV infection through sexual relationships that they get from other youngsters in the street.
High Risk Environment: Poverty not only imposes on people patterns of living which increase their risk of exposure to HIV, but it often robs them of the knowledge or the means to protect themselves. To make the matters worse, in many part of the developing world, educational facilities are poor and illiteracy rates high (especially among women), make it even more difficult to reach a large segments of population with information about AIDS. Despite the severe handicaps, surveys show that many developing countries have achieved remarkable successes in informing their population about HIV/AIDS. How ever their efforts continue to be undermined by chronic shortages of the basic necessities for HIV prevention such as disposable syringes, test kids for screening blood, rubber gloves and most important of all condoms. Under such circumstances, the concept of “high risk environments” is at least as important to the analysis as “high risk behavior”, since people in such environments can do little to protect themselves against HIV infection, or matter how well informed or well intentioned they are.