Beyond awareness: Towards a critically conscious health promotion for rheumatic fever in Aotearoa, New Zealand

Since 2014, the Rheumatic Fever Prevention Programme has targeted communities in Aotearoa, New Zealand affected by high rates of rheumatic fever (RF): namely, Maori and Pacific families. Initiated with the aim of reducing ethnic health disparities, the Health Promotion Agency attempted to use culturally appropriate approaches by engaging in consultative processes with Maori and Pacific communities and health leaders in developing the intervention. However, these consultations largely focused on evaluating strategies for reaching priority audiences with the message to get sore throats checked and on changing health-seeking behaviours. There was little regard for what the structural roots of RF in Aotearoa might suggest about equitable interventions, nor for the potentially harmful effects of the messages and their presentation. The concept of structural violence can be a useful analytical tool to critically evaluate such interventions which attempt to address health disparities but do not meaningfully attend to equity. Drawing on three ethnographic studies with: 1) Northland Maori families (Anderson et al., 2015); 2) North Island Maori and Pacific families (Anderson et al., 2017); and 3) Maori and Pacific children at a South Auckland school (Spray, 2020), we show how recategorising RF disparities as expressions of violence reveals how, despite including cultural consultation, interventions may still inequitably distribute responsibility. In particular, by responsibilising communities affected with the highest rates of RF, the intervention creates collateral damage of stigma, internalised blame, emotional suffering and hypervigilance that reproduces structural violence. We suggest that attending to how families experience public health messaging in the context of their daily lives may guide a more critical and culturally safe health promotion that looks beyond awareness and behaviour and towards equity.