open Democracy News Analysis - HIV/Aids: beyond stigma, Ian Hodgson - Comments

JimKlich on "HIV/Aids: stigma’s curse and cure "

JimKlich — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 21:28:36 +0000

I live in Charlotte, North Carolina and have a disabled adult in the home. I am the guardian of the person and they are HIV positive. I never thought I would take care of somebody with HIV or let them live in my home. I am HIV negative but I am gay. When you have a person in the home who has HIV many people think everybody in the home has HIV. When you are Gay people jump to the point that I must have HIV and have given this to the disabled adult in the home. I know many people from social services thought this about me. I have lost jobs and the Stigma of HIV in many ways has destroyed my life. I lost my last job due to getting outed at work. Many people at my last job thought I had HIV also. I am still out of work. People are so nasty today about Gay people and HIV. I am a good person and take care of a disabled adult who has HIV. Many people in the south treat me like dirt because I am Gay. People with Aids and HIV should not be treated so bad. This is 2008 and many people are sick. The world needs to treat everybody better who is suffering. The world as a whole needs to do much better when it comes to the stigma of HIV.

HIV/Aids: beyond stigma, Ian Hodgson

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:50:03 +0000

The results of a survey that one in five of British people aged between 14-25 would not care for a family member infected with HIV, and one in seven would not stay friends with someone diagnosed with HIV, makes salutary reading in the run up to World Aids Day on 1 December 2007. And its not just in Britain: the report, commissioned by the British Red Cross, also suggests that significant numbers in Ethiopia, Kyrgyzstan and South Africa just don't want to be with HIV-affected people.

What does this mean? This report adds to the overwhelming evidence that HIV stigma is alive and well, and as we near the beginning of the epidemic's fourth decade, many people living with HIV (PLHIV) remain marked as different - or dangerous - by their fellows. Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland who now leads Realising Rights: The Ethical Globalisation Initiative, has stated that HIV stigma is "exceptional in its scale, its context, and its causes". At the sixteenth international AIDS conference in Toronto in August 2006, she added that stigma "hurts and imprints on the soul".

Stigma as a social process

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