Disrupting “High-Risk Behaviours” For Good

Last month I read Saving Our Own Lives by Shira Hassan, a collection of essays and “love notes” about liberatory harm reduction. The whole collection was well worth the read, but the biggest learning I had was a framework that helps us challenge the problematic term “high-risk behaviours.”

As Hassan notes, “‘High-risk behaviour’ is a stigmatized way of talking about the gorgeous and varied coping strategies we reach for when we are trying to heal from trauma or just survive day to day.” She goes on to acknowledge that the term likely comes from expanding a medical term “high-risk” for actions that are statistically more likely to result in disease transmission or harm in general. Still, “it is a limited understanding of risk that’s based in stigma.”

The phrase sounds clinical and neutral. But it subtly centres the behaviour (and by extension, the individual) as the problem. It rarely asks what conditions made that behaviour more likely in the first place.

Enter Risk, Set, Setting. 

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