‘Safe Sex’ and ‘Compassion’: Public Campaigns on AIDS in the Netherlands

Abstract

In two separate series of public information campaigns people in the Netherlands are being encouraged to have safe sex in order to prevent sexually transmitted diseases/AIDS and to react with compassion towards HIV-infected people and people with AIDS. These public information campaigns are part of a broader AIDS education program including specific preventive activities developed for risk groups. The authors describe the theoretical and empirical background of the two public information campaigns the difficulties in evaluating their effects the development and implementation of both campaigns and the available process and effect evaluations. In reality however the campaigns did not explicitly follow theory and research in the way it is presented here as research results often become available only after they are desperately needed and theoretical principles are often difficult to apply in practice. (authors)