Faith in God, But Not in Condoms: Churches and Competing Visions of HIV Prevention in Namibia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Namibia is both one of the most Christian countries in Africa, as well as the fifthmost affected by HIV/AIDS-an estimated ninety percent of the population identifies with one of the various Christian denominations, while nearly one in five are currently infected with HIV. Although the government has promoted and distributed free and socially-marketed condoms for HIV prevention since the 1990s, doubts about the efficacy of the devices proliferate in both urban and rural areas, particularly among Pentecostal religious leaders. This article explores the ways in which these religious leaders, in a similar fashion to Christian groups worldwide, are using scientific data to challenge the promotion of condoms as a viable HIV prevention strategy. In this way, they are able to exploit the scientific ambiguities concerning condom efficacy to challenge established HIV prevention wisdom, thus reframing abstinence and faithfulness as the only truly safe forms of "safe sex."
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".