In the wake of the Health Protection Agency revealing a rise in HIV diagnosis rates, Sheffield-based charity worker Zoe Davies says it’s not only gay men and black Africans who need to worry about safer sex.

Mary is 38 and lives in Rotherham. She got married at eighteen, had kids and made a home for herself. But when things went wrong with her husband, she decided it was time to move on. Now she’s divorced and looking for someone new.

Eyes opened to new possibilities, she’s already met a bloke she likes. She’s not promiscuous, and she isn’t worried about pregnancy: she’s had her kids and she’s on the pill. So as she gets closer to her new partner she never thinks about using a condom.

But without knowing it, Mary has become part of a new high-risk group for contracting HIV.

Last week, Health Protection Agency (HPA) figures revealed that the number of people diagnosed with HIV since 2001 has doubled. Zoe Davies (29) wasn’t surprised by the news. As Strategic Director of Sheffield-based HIV charity Shield, she is responsible for helping more than 200 people living with or affected by the condition in South Yorkshire. And not all of them are from the backgrounds you might expect.

Zoe Davies, Strategic Director of HIV charity Shield.

“We get more people registering every week,” she tells me, as we chat in Shield’s smart city-centre building, a space which doubles as a meeting-place for her clients. “There is a presumption that it’s only because of asylum and immigration, but it’s not.”

She points out that while the media often focus on the risks to black Africans or gay men, this is often at the expense of raising awareness of the dangers of HIV in other communities.

Older women at risk

One group she’s particularly concerned about is older white women who have already had children, become divorced and stopped using condoms as their main method of contraception. ‘Mary’ may not be real, but women like her are. And with media attention focused on other groups, they could easily become complacent to the risk of HIV.

“Our eldest client is a 70 year-old white British woman who became positive five years ago,” Zoe points out. Later she tells me that STI’s are on the increase in care homes, citing Viagra as the cause.

Zoe explains that the groups we tend to associate with HIV “come into contact with health agencies more and are offered HIV tests.” Both she and the HPA note that higher testing rates may well contribute to the higher rates of diagnosis seen in gay men, for example. But for other communities the disease can often remain hidden.

“It is a big problem within the gay men community and it is a problem within the black African community. However, it is also within all the heterosexual community, but they don’t always find out. “

Zoe’s not shy about how frustrating it is to face an apparently one-sided media picture, as director of a charity that works to spread awareness of HIV in South Yorkshire. “A fifteen year old British boy in Maltby, which is a small mining town in Rotherham, ain’t gonna be bothered if all you do is mention black Africans.”

“There’s all this talk about whether we need another national campaign, which I think we do, which needs to hit everybody because if you’re having unprotected sex, everybody’s at risk.”

However, she suggests that even well-known initiatives like World AIDS Day aren’t always as useful as they could be. “They try and get the publicity round that. But if you noticed it doesn’t feature in the papers that much. There’ll be a little column somewhere about Africa, but that’s it. And usually it’s scaring people and it’s all about black Africans and gay men.”

That’s why her charity aims to put people in touch with HIV positive locals, to give them a direct reminder that the disease isn’t a distant fairy tale, but something which could easily affect them.

“The best way to make awareness is for somebody with a local accent, someone from Sheffield, stood there saying ‘it can happen to you, it happened to me.’ Not somebody from London, not somebody from America.”

The gay community

Still, it’s important to point out that gay and bisexual men (the unflatteringly labelled ‘Men Who Have Sex with Men’ or ‘MSM’) have shown a particularly steep increase in their diagnosis rate, according to the HPA. Zoe admits there are specific problems for this group, too.

“The new population of MSM weren’t around in the 80’s, this is the whole thing. We’ve had one young man say to our worker ‘oh, I don’t need to worry about that, I don’t sleep with older gay men.’ Now if they’re saying that they’ve got this presumption that as long as they don’t sleep with people forty years old and plus they’re fine. Well it’s stupidity, but somehow they now believe that.”

As a group, gay men can also be hard to find and offer help to, especially in places like Rotherham where, Zoe suggests, just admitting to sleeping with a man could be problematic.

Whatever your race or sexuality, most of us are aware of the advice on how to stay safe: wear a condom (sentiments echoed by the HPA). Zoe realises that this is sometimes more easily said than done, but she has little time for people who don’t take the message seriously: “If you can’t talk about sex, why are you doing it?” she demands. “It’s an intimate act, and if you can’t say ‘don’t you think we should wear a condom?’, why are you sleeping with them? Why are you doing such an intimate thing with them?”

“The only person that’s going to look after you is you. And you don’t know who they’ve slept with.”

Problems with funding

Given everything she’s said – and the HPA’s figures and recommendations  – what Zoe has to tell me about Shield’s funding comes as a jolt, though perhaps not a surprise.

“If you’re a UK HIV charity there’s no point public fund-raising, because no one will give to you,” she says flatly. “We do a little bit. We have tins in Poundland and things like that. We’re always actually amazed that people put stuff in because it is quite difficult sometimes. I know there was a case a few years ago… where we had a stall [and] somebody put money in, realised who we were and took it back out.

“Not everybody’s like that. But we’ve had clients [who’ve had] dead animals put on their doorstep and [been] hounded out. So I don’t particularly, as an agency, spend too much time public fund-raising.”

Instead, Shield’s work is founded on money from local councils and the NHS, among other sources. But even this has become scarcer recently.

“The AIDS Support Grant was set up years ago, which was given to councils, which was a specific grant to be ring-fenced and spent on HIV,” Zoe says. “That’s gone now. So we don’t have that designated amount of money.”

As a charity, raising money is also the focus of Shield’s future. But Zoe adds, somewhat pessimistically, that the future is never certain. “I don’t want to create dependency on the support team, because we could go at any point. Charities can come and go.”

Instead she wants to concentrate on providing clients with the skills to live fulfilling lives and “to make sure that we support people by creating independent nature. That they go back to work, that they get the skills, that they take control of their lives. Because HIV diagnosis can take away anyone’s control.”

“I’d also like to expand into training sessions for companies, because they’re going to have an obligation regarding the Disabilities Discrimination Act, to make sure that they can accommodate HIV” she adds.

“That would be a good way to generate money, because I’m not relying on funding contracts, we can charge them. And hopefully make somebody’s life a bit easier if they work there.”

Zoe Davies talks to us about the new generation of people who are at risk of becoming HIV positive.

Click here for a case study of an HIV positive woman in her thirties.