Westchester County, New York
Impressions Of HIV/AIDS In America
Finding Three: Fears About Transmission
Finding Four: Cause, Effect, & Stigma
Finding Five: Focus On Education
Finding Six: What About A Vaccine
Finding Seven: Strategies & Opportunities
Community Profiles
Community Profile: Tarrytown, New York
(Westchester County)
Community Characteristics
- Population: 11,090
- State population: 18,976,457
- Median age: 37
- Race/ethnicity: 77% white, 8% black, 16% Hispanic, 7% Asian
- Annual HIV cases reported (New York State): 5,197
- Persons living with AIDS (New York State): 75,253
- Federal funding (New York State): $493,058,849
Despite being the most highly-educated group included in this project, these participants—all parents of children college-age or younger in Westchester County, a suburb of New York City—demonstrated a very mixed knowledge of HIV. Some people were fairly educated and vocal about what they knew, but others were clearly guessing as to how HIV is transmitted and treated.
A few participants said that their age and lack of contact with the disease meant that they were drawing on their knowledge from the 1980s. “I graduated in ’89,” said one man, “so I’m 37, and at that time no one really knew exactly what it really was yet, so because of that, I don’t have the knowledge.”
At the end of the focus group, many participants acknowledged that they did not know as much about HIV/AIDS as they had originally thought and expressed a strong desire to better educate themselves and their children.
“It goes back to really letting people know how you can and how you cannot get the disease,” said one participant. “I think it’s a pretty educated group here, just because of where we all live, and yet we couldn’t all agree on just about every question.”
As with other groups, participants in Westchester displayed anxiety about the transmission of HIV, with one man saying that an HIV-positive employee would need to “give me the respect to tell me you are positive,” suggesting that if the employee gets AIDS and dies, he’d be leaving behind his family. Another participant, who is an elementary school physical education teacher, felt conflicted about giving CPR to one of his students who is HIV-positive should she need it. “What am I supposed to do?” he wondered. “This girl has done nothing wrong…she got HIV from her parents.”
Despite expressing their own fears about people with HIV, all participants thought that people with HIV are discriminated against, and they had a lengthy discussion on how to best serve the mental health needs of those with HIV.
“I think there should be lots more locations [of support groups],” said one woman. She advocated for more choices as to where patients could get help after other participants pointed out that people with HIV may face discrimination if their neighbors “catch” them attending local support groups.
Like the participants in other groups, participants in Westchester County favored education and vaccine research as primary strategies for combating HIV/AIDS. Unlike the other participants, however, they were actually able to resolve a tension that came up during a discussion about education. One participant said that educating children about HIV was not sufficient, because poor self-worth, especially in young girls of color, inhibits decision-making in sexual relationships, and she insisted that parents need to foster better self-esteem in their children.
Another participant however pointed out that poor self-esteem works in a vicious cycle, in which a parent feels no self-worth and passes on that feeling to his or her children. This problem was settled toward the end of the forum, with one participant saying that any role model in a child’s life—a coach, a teacher, a minister—could provide this emotional support for children and break the cycle of feeling worthless.
