Miami Herald - June 15, 2005
Fred Tasker, ftasker@herald.com

It's not easy being young, female and Hispanic -- in other words, una senorita -- at Florida International University, or any college. Your family expects you to meet a future husband. They presume he will be sexually active; they expect you to remain a virgin.

Stereotypes, sure. But they're the problems nursing instructor Sande Gracia Jones heard during focus groups of Hispanic nursing students at FIU, leading her to start a program to fight HIV on campus.

"It's a double standard that you must be attractive enough to find a mate while remaining a virgin," said Jones, who spoke to delegates at the 2005 National HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta on Tuesday. "But that's what it's like to be a senorita. And girls sometimes do interesting things to cope with it. Like having oral or anal sex, because then they still maintain that they're virgins."

As questionable as that logic is, it's even worse in terms of avoiding HIV, Jones says.

Indeed, new HIV diagnoses among Hispanic women were four times as frequent as among non-Hispanic white women in 2003, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. "The HIV epidemic continues to devastate the lives of minority women across the U.S.," said Dr. Lisa Fitzpatrick, director of the CDC's HIV/AIDS Research Initiative.

In 1985 when the AIDS epidemic was relatively new, only 15 percent of women were infected by heterosexual contact, with most contracting it through injecting drug use. Today, 71 percent of new HIV cases among women are from heterosexual contact.

In 2003, Jones created SENORITAS -- Student Education Needed in Order to Reduce Infection and Transmission of AIDS/HIV and STDs (sexually transmitted diseases).

Selecting 32 FIU nursing students, Jones devised a program in which the students counsel undergraduate Hispanic women by telling a fictionalized story of a group of amigas.

The amigas grow up in Miami, go to high school together, hang out in South Beach, go to grad night at Walt Disney World, then scatter to different colleges around Florida. During Christmas vacation, they meet in South Beach to gossip about men and sex.

"Each girl talks about different sexual activities," Jones said. 'Then the peer counselors stop the story to ask, `If you were this girl's friend, how would you advise her?' "

The stories cover several themes:

* Why being faithful might not protect you: "Just because a girl is faithful to her partner, there's no guarantee he's faithful to her. So it won't protect her from HIV," the counselor said.

* Misperceptions about what kinds of men might have HIV: ``He's a college student. He has a beautiful car. He can't have HIV. But anyone who's having sex could have HIV."

* Not having sex in certain situations: "You can make the decision to be abstinent at this time in your life, even if you're not a virgin," the counselors say. "As obvious as that sounds," Jones said, 'sometimes the girls say, `Wow, is that right?' It never occurred to them."

The peer counselors suggest that young women always go in pairs to parties where alcohol is served.

"You have a designated driver. You should have a designated amiga, to make sure you get home safely," Jones said.

In questioning students immediately after the peer counseling sessions and eight weeks later, Jones found excellent results in terms of facts remembered, attitudes about condoms, even attitudes about abstinence, she says.

Next step?

"Boys," Jones said.

She's already setting up a program for fraternity houses.

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