In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Women and AIDS

Jill

Yesterday was World AIDS Day, which predictably unleashed a flurry of suggestions for how we can improve our current HIV/AIDS policy. So it’s worth noting that domestically, the AIDS crisis has been particularly damaging to black communities. AIDS is the #1 cause of death for black women between the ages of 18 and 34. Black women are almost 15 times as likely to be infected with HIV than white women. They are 23 times more likely to be diagnosed with AIDS than white women. African Americans generally make up 12 percent of the population, but 45 percent of new HIV infections.

And only 4 percent of the domestic HIV/AIDS budget in the United States focuses on prevention.

People living with AIDS are stigmatized and sometimes criminalized. We live in a country where African Americans are imprisoned at staggering levels; where bodies of color have been maimed and abused as part of “public health” measures; and where racialized social institutions have done harm to people and communities of color for as long as anyone can remember. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that such a history — and such a present — breeds a rational distrust of state authority and public health outreach.

The solution most certainly is not to criminalize people living with HIV. A man in Texas was sentenced to 35 years in prison for spitting on a police officer — he had committed “assault with a deadly weapon,” because he was HIV-positive. An HIV-positive Georgia woman was sentenced to three years for spitting on another woman. Another HIV-positive Texas man was charged for biting a police officer.

And these prosecutions aren’t limited to the United States:

In Switzerland, a man was sent to jail earlier in 2008 for infecting his girlfriend with HIV, even though he was unaware of his HIV status …

In Uganda, proposed HIV legislation is not limited to intentional transmission, but also forces HIV-positive people to reveal their status to their sexual partners, and allows medical personnel to reveal someone’s status to their partner.

Most legislative development has taken place in West Africa, where 12 countries recently passed HIV laws. In 2004 participants from 18 countries met at a regional workshop in N’djamena, Chad, to adopt a model law on HIV/AIDS for West and Central Africa.

The law they came up with was far from “model”, according to Richard Pearshouse, director of research and policy at the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, who maintains that the model law’s broad definition of “wilful transmission” could be used to prosecute HIV-positive women for transmitting the virus to their babies during pregnancy.

Considering that in the U.S. we sometimes prosecute women for murder if they are drug users and their babies are stillborn (or child abuse if the baby is born alive), it’s not totally off the mark to suggest that an overzealous prosecutors may very well target pregnant women and mothers.

Criminalizing HIV transmission doesn’t do much to stem its spread; but it does speak to the relative lack of power that HIV-positive people have in their respective societies. I’m pretty sure we can come up with better solutions than this.

14 thoughts on Women and AIDS

  1. Here in France a trial just started ; the accused is a woman who knowingly transmitted AIDS to her husband. He’s saying he never knew, she’s saying he agreed to having unprotected sex because he loved her. It’s rather confusing…and I’ll admit that I don’t quite know what to think about it, because she knew she was sick, and even if he agreed, which he vehemently denies, how would you want to inflict this disease on your loved one?
    Rest of the time, those cases are crazy.
    How can anyone be jailed for spitting on someone? Please don’t tell me judges and lawyers and the like don’t know you can’t get AIDS like that, making the deadly weapon claim preposterous…

  3. I don’t know about this. Failing to tell your sexual partner you’re HIV-positive is a pretty jerkass thing to do. Criminal penalties might very well be appropriate.

    Ditto for spitting on or biting a cop when you’re HIV-positive. I agree that 35 years is way excessive, but I don’t think police officers should just be expected to endure those kinds of situations either.

  4. Bitter Scribe, HIV is not passed like that. And there is a difference between knowingly transmitting it and not knowing you had it.

  5. I agree that intentionally infecting someone with HIV should be a crime. But I’m not sure that it should be more of a crime to spit on a cop if you’re HIV-positive than if you’re not, considering that HIV isn’t spread through saliva. And I’m not sure that women should be criminally prosecuted for not taking AIDS meds when they’re pregnant.

  6. Dunno. I think it probably turned on the technical meaning of assault. I’m not sure it matters whether there was any actually risk of harm, so long as you cause someone to fear harm it’s assault. If this had been a case of someone shooting at police with blanks from a replica gun, as opposed to live rounds from a real gun, none of us would be debating the risk of harm. Either way he’d have still caused them to fear for their lives. 35 years does seem an awfully long time though.

  7. I think biting *is* dangerous, though, right? If you have any kind of sore or cut in your mouth, that could result in blood-blood contact. (The spitting thing is ridiculous–that should just be “assault” or “assault of a police officer” or whatever you call it, just like anyone else spitting at people.)

    I think whether it’s criminal to transmit HIV should absolutely be about intent. If someone raped someone else *knowing* they were HIV positive I think that should be an “attempted murder” charge tacked on the rape charge right away, for example (even if the victim were not infected). Or something to reflect the fact that they *intended* for their victim to die. It could be like poisoning or something; if you actively purposefully poison someone, that’s terrible, but if you happen to give peanuts to someone allergic without realizing it, that’s not criminal, that’s a tragic accident. Or like in the case of transmission through pregnancy: if your kid eats paint chips and gets sick, that’s not criminal, that’s a result of crappy circumstances.

    As for disclosure to sexual partner(s), I’m on the fence about that. Ideally, I think it should be mandatory, but the stigma should be reduced to the point that knowing someone was HIV positive would merely result in careful precautions, not in criminal charges or shunning or whatever. But it doesn’t strike me as always a safe thing to demand of the person with HIV; maybe it would endanger them for people to find out about it somehow…

    On the other hand, I would be extremely distraught if I found out *after* having sex with someone that they had *any* STD, but it would be worst with HIV. Purposefully putting someone in a deadly situation like that without telling them in general should be criminalized, if it isn’t illegal already. If you can’t tell your partner that you have HIV, *don’t have sex with them.*

  8. Perhaps tort law is a better tool against HIV transmission. What if knowingly transmitting HIV was classed as an exceptionally hazardous activity?

  9. On the other hand, I would be extremely distraught if I found out *after* having sex with someone that they had *any* STD, but it would be worst with HIV. Purposefully putting someone in a deadly situation like that without telling them in general should be criminalized, if it isn’t illegal already. If you can’t tell your partner that you have HIV, *don’t have sex with them.*

    This.

    I hate that this concept in today’s society treads so close to criminalizing HIV, but only I have the right to choose what risks I take; my sexual partners do not get to decide for me that risking my infection is worth it for them to get laid. I deserve to know so I can decide what precautions I want to take, or if the added risk is too great for me to justify continuing.

    It sucks, utterly, that STI’s are so stigmatized—AIDS included. But (non-solo) sexual activity is not a right like free speech or a fair trial; it’s a privilege, provided by and negotiated with another human being, and everybody owes it to the person providing that companionship to be upfront and honest about the risks as accurately to their own situation as possible.

    This is another one of those difficult “your rights end where mine begin” situations, and certainly needs some working on and consideration. But if I decide to let someone have sex with me, I deserve an accurate picture of what I’m getting into. My body is not theirs; it is mine.

  10. On the issue of HIV in the African-American community, there was a study by researchers at the Veterans Administration this past summer that demonstrated that the absence of a specific red blood cell antigen protein (the Duffy antigen) is associated with a 40% increase in the risk of HIV infection, but also a slower progression of the infection. About 90% of Africans, and about 60% of African-Americans, lack the antigen, due to a mutation that provided protection against a certain strain of malaria (nearly all Caucasians have the antigen). A model by the authors suggested that as much as 11% of the AIDS pandemic in Africa might be accounted for by this factor. There is an article on the study here.

  11. I took a look at the Swiss case (it’s of special interest to me since I’m Swiss). The argument made by the judges was that the man should have taken a HIV test, since, before infecting his girlfriend, he had had unprotected sexual intercourse with a woman who was HIV-positive, which he knew. So the idea was that anyone who has reason to suspect he could be infected is required to take a test. This judgment was interpreted as going rather far, since this was not a case of intent, but of neglect.
    Concerning not the legal but the moral question, I definitely think that the girlfriend had a moral claim towards him that he should avoid harming her. That includes him taking reasonable precaution in order not to infect her with HIV, and if you know you had unprotected sex with someone who is infected then reasonable precaution includes taking a HIV test.

  12. Dunno. I think it probably turned on the technical meaning of assault. I’m not sure it matters whether there was any actually risk of harm, so long as you cause someone to fear harm it’s assault. If this had been a case of someone shooting at police with blanks from a replica gun, as opposed to live rounds from a real gun, none of us would be debating the risk of harm. Either way he’d have still caused them to fear for their lives. 35 years does seem an awfully long time though.

    I agree with a lot of other stuff in this thread. But the idea that spitting could be assault because it “causes someone to fear harm” is rather ridiculous. Transmitting HIV by spitting on someone is a myth, an urban legend, a delusion born out of ignorance. You might believe that seeing your reflection in a mirror will cause your soul to be trapped and your body to slowly wither and die — I’ve actually run across people who believe things like this, and go out of their way to avoid mirrors, as a phobia.

    Someone with epistrophobia can’t sue or press assault charges against two guys from a mirror company who are carrying a huge mirror across the street when they come around the corner. I’m not even sure it would be assault to chase someone like that around with a mirror, although it certainly might involve intentional infliction of emotional distress. There’s no real bodily harm and the fear is imaginary as well, based on unreasonable expectations. It’s unreasonable to think that someone can spit on you and give you HIV — especially if your work brings you into contact with these types of situations. It’s ignorant.

    I was taught that HIV can’t be transmitted by spitting on somone TWENTY years ago, in an underfunded inner-city middle school. If I knew about it as a preteen bcak then, there’s no excuse for a police officer not to know about it now.

  13. Yes, a bite can transmit both diseases – hiv and Hep. C. Although hiv is minimal, it is possible if the party has an open sore and a cut inside or outside the mouth. It can also be transmitted if an Hiv party spits in someones face. The saliva – if any blood is present- can enter through the pores in the eyes, This is one reason why medical personal wear goggles in surgeries. In addition, if blood splatters into unprotected eyes, they must flush for at least 10 minutes, Hiv patients are commonly known to have sores casued from the disease. So, the man belongs in prison for not only a violent act, but for his reckless behavior by placing someone else
    at risk. Certainly, I would’nt expect anything less from the law.

  14. It’s still somewhat unlikely. If someone had just eaten peanuts and spat in someone’s face there’s a very small chance it could kill someone. But the fact is, most people don’t have peanut anaphylaxis and anyone trying to kill a poice officer wouldn’t use peanutty saliva as a ” deadly weapon”.

    The difference with HIV is that people juge HIV+ people in a way they don’t judge people who just ate peanuts.

Comments are currently closed.