Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Resilience And Syndemic Risk Factors Among African-American Female Sex Workers, Mance E. Buttram, Hilary L. Surratt, Steven P. Kurtz

CAHSS Faculty Articles

Research on street-based female sex workers documents a multitude of problems faced by these women, such as substance use, HIV risk, mental health problems, victimization, and homelessness. The presence of problems such as these is understood as a syndemic, or co-occurrence of two or more risk factors that act synergistically to create an excess burden of disease. However, the syndemic framework has not previously incorporated the examination of resilience to understand what protective factors enable female sex workers to cope with syndemic risk. Using 562 baseline interviews from street-based African-American female sex workers enrolled in a randomized intervention trial, this …