OpenForum – a blog by the Health and Human Rights community

In Ukraine, only 158 men who have sex with men (MSM) have registered officially as living with HIV since the country’s first case was reported 20 years ago – in a country with a population of 46 million. Compare this to more than 38,000 officially reported cases of HIV infection among MSM in Britain between 2002 and 2006 alone, according to a UNAIDS feature article. Understandably, health experts and activists believe official statistics from Ukraine, as well as much of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, are deceptively low for MSM living with HIV and with newly acquired infections.

Why the underreporting? In Ukraine and throughout the region, the stigma attached to MSM prevents many from reporting their sexual orientation. Many would rather admit to being a drug user. Since the problem is estimated to be much larger, stronger prevention programs are needed for this marginalized group of men. Another factor worsening the situation is that governments in the region are reluctant to implement prevention programs geared toward the group. Take Russia, for example, who has no state-funded HIV prevention programs for MSM. Instead, programs are run by NGOs funded by international donors. Read more

Olga Shevchenko and Renée C. Fox write:

From the inception of our joint fieldwork in Moscow, and throughout the drafting of this article based upon it, we repeatedly said to one another, “I couldn’t have done this without you!” More than our reciprocal enjoyment in working together was expressed in this recurrent exclamation. It also contained our mutual recognition and appreciation of the distinctive contribution that each of us made to the participant observation, interviewing, the acquisition of primary and secondary documents, and the analysis and interpretation of the data collected by these methods. Read more