In a reflective mood, I took a look back at my past articles for RH Reality Check, and in so doing, noticed a common theme. I write a lot of the need to re-shape cultural values, and the inherent tension that exists between those who address reproductive health issues from a moralist perspective, and those who approach these issues from a rights-based value system. I have seen, both in my pieces and in others that I have read, the commitment to recreate our cultural value systems through education, with the hope that such efforts will shift the fundamentalist tides that seem intent on challenging any viewpoints that are not based on religious underpinnings.

It is leading me to ask, now what? This is a question (and in many ways a challenge) that I actually want to throw out there. I want to hear real suggestions and real comments. I'm feeling a little jaded. Although I unquestioningly believe in the value of education, particularly as it relates to providing information as a means of challenging the status quo, I really do want to know how to move beyond the rhetoric.

These questions arose after I read an article in the Jamaican newspaper, outlining plans by the current government to implement a policy that will protect the rights of HIV/AIDS infected and affected persons within the workplace. In light of statistics that indicate that a large majority of the HIV/AIDS infected population fall within the 20 - 60 age group, or the working class, such a policy would appear to be long overdue.

Amidst a cultural climate in which there still remain too many strong - and sometimes shocking - examples of stigma and discrimination, such a move could symbolize a major step in the ways we treat with this key issue. What it could do is move the discussions around HIV/AIDS away from a strictly health-centered or moralistic approaches, to one that recognizes that HIV/AIDS affects far more than health and behavior, but affects development at all levels - from the workplace, to the economy, to the social advancement of our respective countries.

Importantly, the proposed policy also appears to address the gendered nature of HIV/AIDS, an acknowledgment that will hopefully take account of the significantly different ways in which women and men understand, manage and react to their sexual lives, and by extension, the sexual health choices that they make. Such analyses will hopefully take what has worked from disciplines such as feminism, by fully incorporating key concepts such as "power" into their analysis.

The policy also speaks to the issue of education, calling on employers - in conjunction with their employees - to develop "culturally appropriate" and "gender-sensitive" education programs that will collectively work to shift the ways in which we speak of, understand, and deal with HIV/AIDS and those affected by it.

Undeniably, this is a necessary move, as the lack of accurate information has proven to be one of the major forces that retards progressive change -- but is it enough? When placed in a cultural environment in which some people still believe that contracting the disease is a punishment for immoral behavior (particularly as it relates to the issue of homosexuality), how will such policies fare?

Admittedly, research has shown that there have been positive changes in local attitudes towards persons living with HIV/AIDS. Access to information does play a vital role in shaping our cultural belief systems. It does go a far way towards debunking harmful myths such as "sleeping with a virgin cures AIDS," and "white rum and marijuana kills AIDS." However, when information is not contextualized, and provided alongside concerted participatory efforts to reshape our old, troublesome values, it can only go so far. Which brings me back to my initial question: where do we go from here?