Enabling Environments: the Role of the Law

In the context of HIV prevention, a distinction may be drawn between approaches which aim to persuade individuals to change their behaviour, and approaches which enable behaviour change by focusing on the social and environmental factors which assist or impede that change. These enabling approaches are directed towards removing barriers to protective and preventive action, and constructing barriers to the taking of risks (Tawil, Verster and O’Reilly 1995). The provision of an enabling social environment becomes all the more necessary when we consider how much the success of individual ‘persuasion’ approaches depends on a vast range of socio-cultural, historical and psychological factors— factors which vary not only from country to country, but between individual communities in a country as culturally diverse as Papua New Guinea, and which often sabotage even the most well-designed prevention efforts.