We are not advocating that people don’t hookup, we’re just advocating that people are safe.' 'It doesn’t take much to go online and get someone to hookup with very quickly. 'The flipside of that is that we know that some men online may be at increased risk because you have easy access to multiple partners,' Rhodes said. They are especially important in rural areas where it is hard to find someone to talk with anyways.'īut, Rhodes said chat rooms do have a darker side. Chat rooms can be fine places, just another venue to find, to meet and to socialize. 'They are very important means for men who are just figuring themselves out, or just having physical needs. 'It’s really important that chat rooms can be risky and people have stories to share, but chat rooms are not all that bad,' Rhodes said.
Rhodes found that chat room-based HIV prevention interventions, such as the ones enacted by CARES, are being implemented to reduce the risk of HIV exposure, infection and reinfection among men who have sex with men.
Scott Rhodes of Wake Forest University School of Medicine was primary investigator in a study published in the journal Health Education Research, February 2008, which compared the HIV-risk profiles of southeastern men who participated in HIV prevention chat room-based outreach and those who did not. A study done last year shows that CARES is reaching out to the ideal audience with its online education.ĭr.
