A Quote by Shereen El Feki
Where you criminalize people living with HIV or those at greatest risk, you fuel the epidemic.
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Laws that treat people living with HIV or those at greatest risk with respect start with the way that we treat them ourselves: as equals. If we are going to stop the spread of HIV in our lifetime, then that is the change we need to spread.
Some countries have good laws, laws which could stem the tide of HIV. The problem is that these laws are flouted. Because stigma gives unofficial license to treat people living with HIV or those at greatest risk unlike other citizens.
We must walk in solidarity with those who are living with HIV/AIDS and with those at risk. As witnesses of Christ, we are called to respect the dignity of each person and to promote healthy living - physically, spiritually, morally and psychologically - through prevention and treatment
Civil society must be strengthened to help raise awareness among people living with HIV, and those at risk, of their rights, and to ensure they have access to legal services and redress through the courts.
An ex-boyfriend of mine is living with HIV. He has an undetectable viral load so I know first-hand how this can affect people in a serodiscordant couple - which is where one partner is HIV-negative and one is HIV-positive.
It's a misnomer to say you can criminalize one part of the transaction and not criminalize the entire transaction. For example in Sweden, where the law was passed in 1999. Those laws didn't actually decriminalize people who sell sex; they introduced new criminal penalties for the people who buy sex. Nothing changed in the legal status for the sex workers themselves. It's impossible for them to operate a legal business. When you criminalize part of a transaction, you're creating collateral damage for all those engaged in it. You are now making them work in a criminalized context.
I just want to recognize, the HIV epidemic was solved by the community, the HIV advocates and activists who stood up when no one was listening and got everyone's attention.
As of 2013, according to the World Health Organization, 35 million people were estimated to be living with HIV or AIDS globally, and 39 million have died from the disease. The epidemic of denial won, and now everyone knows there is money in the making of drugs for AIDS.
If we love and identity people with HIV and other oppressed people, we can help transform the epidemic.
Drug warriors' staunch opposition to needle exchanges to prevent the spread of HIV in addicts delayed the programs' widespread introduction in most states for years. A federal ban on funding for these programs wasn't lifted until 2009. Contrast this with what happened in the U.K. At the peak of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1990s, the HIV infection rate in IV drug users in the U.K. was about 1%. In New York City, the American epicenter, that figure was 50%. The British had introduced widespread needle exchange in 1986. That country had no heterosexual AIDS epidemic.
The two greatest enemies of the individual in the modern world are communism and psychiatry. Each wages a relentless war against that which makes a person an individual: communism against the ownership of property, psychiatry against the ownership of the self (mind and body). Communists criminalize the autonomous use of capital and labor, and harshly punish those who "traffic" in the black market, especially in foreign currencies. Psychiatrists criminalize the autonomous use of the self, and harshly punish those who "traffic" in self-abuse, especially in self-medication and self-destruction.
Those of us who lived through the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the early 1980s through the mid-1990s have a very special spot in our heart for home-based health care.
Young people were once considered relatively safe from HIV/AIDS. Today, their lives and futures are at risk throughout the world because of this disease. I believe it is young people throughout the world who offer us the greatest hope for defeating this deadly pandemic.
The greatest risk is the risk of riskless living.
Leaders in all spheres who are living with HIV should be encouraged, not coerced, to lead by example and disclose their HIV status.
to love is to risk, not being loved in return. to hope is to risk pain. to try is to risk failure. but risk must be taken because the greatest hazard in my life is to risk nothing.
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