About Us
Current News
Resource Bank
Special Initiatives
Join Us
Contact Us
New - User Feedback Form
Home

SPECIAL INITIATIVES:

TEEN Sense

Most adolescents who are confined in foster care and juvenile justice facilities are from the vulnerable communities and populations most affected by HIV/AIDS. They are poor, Black and Latino, and survivors of gender-based violence. These youth, wherever they are on the spectrum of sexual orientation and gender, are at great risk of HIV and other STIs, and yet they are systematically denied access to appropriate and effective HIV prevention, sexual health education and sexual and reproductive health care. To ensure that these youth have consistent access to quality sexual health education and HIV prevention information, policymakers must recognize that youth in state custody are legally entitled to these services and that failure to provide them has serious public health consequences.

All youth in state custody have the right to comprehensive sexual health care that includes both medical services and scientifically-sound sex education and HIV prevention counseling.  United States federal courts long have recognized a constitutional requirement that state officials provide services for the health, safety and well-being of children in their custody. 
The right of juveniles to comprehensive sexual health care and education also is central to their right to make decisions about and conduct intimate personal relationships.  Federal case law also is clear that especially in the areas of reproductive health—pregnancy, abortion and sexually-transmitted disease prevention—juveniles hold fundamental privacy rights to choose their care despite their age.

Nonetheless these and other legal protections for children in state custody have not translated into specific, uniform policies and guidelines needed to ensure that these rights are a reality. To the contrary, sexual health care programs exist only in a very limited fashion in a relative handful of facilities. In most cases they exist at all only through the intercession of concerned individuals working outside of these institutions. 

The Center for HIV Law and Policy’s Teen SENSE initiative advances the principle that respect and accommodation for all gender expression and sexual orientation is central to HIV prevention and sexual health. Comprehensive sexual health care for juveniles in state custody preserves health, reduces HIV and STI transmission risk, and increases the odds that severely at-risk youth will secure the essential skills and understanding that enhance self-respect and tolerance of difference, and encourage ongoing HIV/STI testing and care.

Teen SENSE is a multidisciplinary project that has engaged experts in adolescent medicine, sex education, foster care and juvenile justice to develop a complete advocacy model and then coordinate its implementation. We have developed a legal “roadmap” and model guidelines for comprehensive sexual health care and HIV prevention to support local leaders in bringing this central part of health care to youth detention programs in their communities.

Teen SENSE establishes a powerful legal and human rights framework and the on-the-ground alliances that we believe eventually will make meaningful, appropriate, non-judgmental sexual health care and real HIV prevention a mandated service for youth in confinement around the country.


Women’s Advocacy Resource Collection (WARC)

The heart of CHLP’s work is the development of its national legal and policy resource bank and advocacy strategies for use by people with HIV and their advocates. A new focus in this work is the creation of a Women’s Advocacy Resource Collection (WARC). Our goal is to build the capacity of women with HIV and their representatives for effective advocacy, wherever they are in the United States. We will do this by amassing in one web-based, accessible location a broad array of materials—model legislation, case law and legal analysis, public health policy, and analyses of the science and medicine informing it all—that affect women living with HIV at local, state and national levels. We expect that these resources will enable advocates and activists nationwide and, potentially, around the world to advance the rights and health of women living with HIV/AIDS.

Women of color represent the majority of new AIDS cases, have been affected disproportionately by the epidemic, and fare more poorly than men on several important health care access and quality measures. For example, women are less likely to be hospitalized when they are seriously ill or to receive combination antiretroviral therapy. Women with HIV/AIDS also face significant social and financial barriers in getting care, and are far more likely than men to postpone their own medical care due to sickness, child care demands or lack of transportation. Studies show that many HIV affected women also avoid health care due to misinformation about both HIV and the drugs used to treat it, denial about the importance of health care, distrust of government agencies that sponsor health and service programs for those in need, and intense community-level HIV-related stigma. Racial disparities in AIDS care have actually widened since the introduction of effective drug therapies in 1996, with the greatest disparities found among women of color.

While there is great diversity of background and experience among women with HIV across the country, statistically they are more likely to be poor and women of color. There also are common denominators of experience for many women with HIV. For example, one recent study found that women’s immediate reactions upon learning that they are infected with HIV typically are devastation, shock, and indignation, and that for many women long-term responses included depression, escalated drug and alcohol use, and vulnerability to suicide. For the women in this study, it typically took many months, even years, before women could move beyond these response patterns.

The WARC initiative is our response to an increasing need for advocacy models that help to alter these patterns by clarifying and extending women’s options and rights. Our experience tells us that it is particularly important to address the needs and rights of women who are pregnant or are mothers, who are incarcerated or who have a history of substance abuse. Their need for appropriate and comprehensive access to care, for full and accurate information about their HIV diagnosis and treatment options, and for protection of rights to autonomy in personal and parental health treatment decision-making, frequently goes unaddressed.

For more information about WARC—or to talk about how you might get involved—please email Ashley Burczak at CHLP.