AIDSfree appeal: How your donation will help lost generation of children in Ukraine

A boom in recreational drugs and ignorance of safe sex is fuelling Eastern Europe’s second worst HIV epidemic in Kiev, Ukraine.

Tucked away on an industrial estate in the city’s north-eastern suburbs sits the StreetPower youth club, providing a safe space for vulnerable teens.

Alla Melnyk, the centre’s project manager, says the idea came after outreach workers noticed more and more teenagers on Kiev’s streets after violence erupted in the country in 2013, leading to the overthrow of the government.

“Many children were left to their own devices, often because their parents were too busy trying to make ends meet,” she says. “Quite a few of the girls went east to offer sex services, and returned with kids. We knew we needed to do something.”

Since opening its doors, the StreetPower club has worked with 1,500 children, some as young as eight or nine. In the main, they come from difficult families, often with a history of alcohol or drug use.

Once the teens are inside, Melnyk’s team offer “love, attention and hugs”, before getting to work with what are for Ukraine cutting-edge harm-reduction strategies.

They are tested for HIV, hepatitis, TB and other sexually transmitted diseases, offered free contraception and taught about safe sex.

HIV transmission in Ukraine has in recent years moved away from injection drugs to sex, which is now the main route of infection. Only half of people with HIV know their status, and knowledge of safer sex practices remains low.

“Ukrainian kids aren’t told about sex in school,” says Melnyk.

A large part of the club’s work is about making timely interventions on drug use and preventing the progression to more harmful injection drugs.

“The drugs scene in Kiev is changing,” says Slava Kushakov, a senior adviser at the the Alliance for Public Health, an umbrella organisation that supports the StreetPower youth club.

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“Our job is to watch and to explain that some drugs are much more harmful than others.”

Many of StreetPower’s young clients are already established drug users and they choose drugs based on cost. That usually means spice, or synthetic marijuana, low-quality amphetamines and synthetic cathinones, known as “bath salts”.

According to the Alliance’s internal statistics, recreational drug use has increased by 40 per cent over the last four years alone, with much of that increase down to Kiev’s expanding clubbing scene. This in turn has opened a new front for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.

“We tell people at festivals about safe sex, about HIV and hepatitis,” says Galya Sergienko, co-ordinator of Drugstore, a harm-reduction programme operating under the Alliance aegis. “But often they won’t take our condoms, saying it’s not cool. In truth, many of them don’t know how to use them.”

In addition, children’s health services are neglected by the government.

“The kids are afraid to speak out, so you never see them,” says Melnyk. “They are the lost generation, quite literally.”

This is where the Evening Standard’s AIDSfree Christmas appeal comes in, she says, which is raising funds for the Elton John AIDS Foundation, who work with the Alliance and StreetPower.

“We want the government to see that people across the world care,” says Melnyk. “That spaceships aren’t delivering alien drug users to our shores. These are our kids who deserve our protection.”