[Youth and HIV: information campaigns by and for adolescents]

This article describes a pilot project carried out in collaboration between the Istituto Superiore di Sanita and the Azienda Sanitaria Locale Roma E without any specific funding. The aim was to take a group of adolescents and provide them with a grounding in both HIV/AIDS infection and social communication, and with the instruments necessary to develop an informative campaign with other adolescents as the target group. The project was divided into three phases: sessions for raising levels of HIV/AIDS information and awareness involving 702 secondary school students; workshops to provide 120 selected students with communication and advertising know-how, to allow them to develop an HIV/AIDS infection information campaign targeted at their peers; a final event for the presentation of the students' findings. Prevention was the focus of the adolescents' resulting products, with particular attention to condoms as means of protection. The target population was judged as best influenced by channels such as posters and television ads, and the resulting messages were cartoon based, both ironic and fun yet accompanied by strong and direct statements designed to shock the viewer. The methods used in the project turned out to be particularly suitable for giving importance to the input of the participants who went from being publicity targets to developers.