Youth, sin and sex in Nigeria: Christianity and HIV/AIDS-related beliefs and behaviour among rural-urban migrants

In Nigeria, popular understandings of HIV/AIDS and individual risk assessment and behaviour unfold within an interpretative grid that draws on a religious moral framework. This paper reports results from a two-year study of HIV/AIDS -related beliefs and behaviour among adolescent and young adult rural-urban migrants in two Nigerian cities. The young people in the study originate from south-eastern Nigeria; they almost uniformly identify themselves as Christian; and they commonly situate their understandings and explain their behaviours in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in terms of religion, especially in relation to the increasingly popular and dominant religious discourses of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity. Findings suggest that popular religious interpretations of HIV risk pose real dangers, leading many young migrants to imagine themselves as at little or no risk, and contributing to inconsistent protective practices. The study highlights the limitations of intervention strategies that ignore the extent to which religion, health, sexuality and morality intersect in people's everyday lives.