Practices of partnership: Negotiated safety among couples who inject drugs.

Despite the majority of needle-syringe sharing occurring between sexual partners, the intimate partnerships of people who inject drugs have been largely overlooked as key sites of both hepatitis C virus prevention and transmission, and risk management more generally. Drawing on interviews with 34 co...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Rance, J., Rhodes, T., Fraser, Suzanne, Bryant, J., Treloar, C.
Format: Journal Article
Published: Sage Publications 2016
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/24939
_version_ 1848751568000647168
author Rance, J.
Rhodes, T.
Fraser, Suzanne
Bryant, J.
Treloar, C.
author_facet Rance, J.
Rhodes, T.
Fraser, Suzanne
Bryant, J.
Treloar, C.
author_sort Rance, J.
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description Despite the majority of needle-syringe sharing occurring between sexual partners, the intimate partnerships of people who inject drugs have been largely overlooked as key sites of both hepatitis C virus prevention and transmission, and risk management more generally. Drawing on interviews with 34 couples living in inner-city Australia, this article focuses on participants' accounts of 'sharing'. While health promotion discourses and conventional epidemiology have tended to interpret the practice of sharing (like the absence of condom use) in terms of 'noncompliance', we are interested in participants' socially and relationally situated 'rationalities'. Focussing on participants' lived experiences of partnership, we endeavour to make sense of risk and safety as the participants themselves do.How did these couples engage with biomedical knowledge around hepatitis C virus and incorporate it into their everyday lives and practices? Revisiting and refashioning the concept of 'negotiated safety' from its origins in gay men's HIV prevention practice, we explore participants' risk and safety practices in relation to multiple and alternative framings, including those which resist or challenge mainstream epidemiological or health promotion positions. Participant accounts revealed the extent to which negotiating safety was a complex and at times contradictory process, involving the balancing or prioritising of multifarious, often competing, risks. We argue that our positioning of participants' partnerships as the primary unit of analysis represents a novel and instructive way of thinking about not only hepatitis C virus transmission and prevention, but the complexities and contradictions of risk production and its negotiation more broadly.
first_indexed 2025-11-14T07:54:47Z
format Journal Article
id curtin-20.500.11937-24939
institution Curtin University Malaysia
institution_category Local University
last_indexed 2025-11-14T07:54:47Z
publishDate 2016
publisher Sage Publications
recordtype eprints
repository_type Digital Repository
spelling curtin-20.500.11937-249392017-12-14T04:07:52Z Practices of partnership: Negotiated safety among couples who inject drugs. Rance, J. Rhodes, T. Fraser, Suzanne Bryant, J. Treloar, C. Despite the majority of needle-syringe sharing occurring between sexual partners, the intimate partnerships of people who inject drugs have been largely overlooked as key sites of both hepatitis C virus prevention and transmission, and risk management more generally. Drawing on interviews with 34 couples living in inner-city Australia, this article focuses on participants' accounts of 'sharing'. While health promotion discourses and conventional epidemiology have tended to interpret the practice of sharing (like the absence of condom use) in terms of 'noncompliance', we are interested in participants' socially and relationally situated 'rationalities'. Focussing on participants' lived experiences of partnership, we endeavour to make sense of risk and safety as the participants themselves do.How did these couples engage with biomedical knowledge around hepatitis C virus and incorporate it into their everyday lives and practices? Revisiting and refashioning the concept of 'negotiated safety' from its origins in gay men's HIV prevention practice, we explore participants' risk and safety practices in relation to multiple and alternative framings, including those which resist or challenge mainstream epidemiological or health promotion positions. Participant accounts revealed the extent to which negotiating safety was a complex and at times contradictory process, involving the balancing or prioritising of multifarious, often competing, risks. We argue that our positioning of participants' partnerships as the primary unit of analysis represents a novel and instructive way of thinking about not only hepatitis C virus transmission and prevention, but the complexities and contradictions of risk production and its negotiation more broadly. 2016 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/24939 10.1177/1363459316660859 Sage Publications restricted
spellingShingle Rance, J.
Rhodes, T.
Fraser, Suzanne
Bryant, J.
Treloar, C.
Practices of partnership: Negotiated safety among couples who inject drugs.
title Practices of partnership: Negotiated safety among couples who inject drugs.
title_full Practices of partnership: Negotiated safety among couples who inject drugs.
title_fullStr Practices of partnership: Negotiated safety among couples who inject drugs.
title_full_unstemmed Practices of partnership: Negotiated safety among couples who inject drugs.
title_short Practices of partnership: Negotiated safety among couples who inject drugs.
title_sort practices of partnership: negotiated safety among couples who inject drugs.
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/24939