Putting Risk in Perspective

Reviews / Votes

Renee White listened carefully to teenage women speaking about love, sex, motherhood, HIV disease and the future, keeping in sight the links between the women's personal behaviors and broader social contexts. Her meticulous analysis shows us that adolescents and health organisations may hold different views about what constitutes risky sexual behavior, why condoms are so seldom used, and why current health education fails to have an impact on the lives of young black women living in poverty. Dispensing with many popularly held assumptions about teenage sexual behavior, this book clears the path for more finely tuned and effective forms of health intervention and evaluation. -- Shirley Lindenbaum, City University of New York This book demonstrates why the fight against AIDS must include a responsibility to improve the social and economic opportunities available to young black women. * Siecus Report, Vol. 27, No. 5 * Putting Risk in Perspective is a powerful, thought-provoking book that examines one of the most challenging problems confronting young black female Americans today-their increasing risk of infection from HIV. White's book does succeed on many levels. First, it points to the importance of the relative meaning of the risk. Secondly, she bases her analyses largely on the assumption that racial identity and social class affect sexual and reproductive behavior. Third, her research provides compelling evidence that efforts to reduce poverty and inequality would immediately diminish the new cases of HIV infection among young women who are poor. -- Carrie E. Foote-Ardah * Qualitative Sociology * White's work goes beyond a mere identification of the issue of condom negotiation. She explores poverty, social class, parental relationships, friends and community role models as contributing factors in the development of sexual attidues and behaviors of Black adolescent females. It is a valuable tool as a reader for social work, nursing, education, psychology, medicine and other human services students. * Journal Of Hiv/Aids Prevention and Education * Reports on results of an investigation of the sexual lives of 53 urban, female, African-American teenagers in the era of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the early 1990s in New Haven, CTTTTT * Sociological Abstracts, April 2000 * Reports on results of an investigation of the sexual lives of 53 urban, female, African-American teenagers in the era of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the early 1990s in New Haven, CT * Sociological Abstracts, April 2000 * Putting Risk in Perspective is a powerful, thought-provoking book that examines one of the most challenging problems confronting young black female Americans today-their increasing risk of infection from HIV.
White's book does succeed on many levels. First, it points to the importance of the relative meaning of the risk. Secondly, she bases her analyses largely on the assumption that racial identity and social class affect sexual and reproductive behavior. Third, her research provides compelling evidence that efforts to reduce "poverty and inequality would immediately diminish the new cases of HIV infection among young women who are poor." -- Carrie E. Foote-Ardah * Qualitative Sociology *