As the Obama administration promotes
its goal of an AIDS-free generation, people living with HIV continue
to face stigma and discrimination, especially in the developing
world.
(Related: Hillary
Clinton unveils AIDS-free generation blueprint.)
In an op-ed marking World AIDS Day,
Human Rights Campaign (HRC) President Chad Griffin and AIDS United
President and CEO Michael Kaplan wrote that social stigma “limits
our ability to tackle HIV/AIDS at all levels.”
“This particularly holds true for
LGBT Americans,” they
wrote. “Too often, the LGBT community has reinforced
AIDS-related stigma with labels such as 'clean' to refer to those
uninfected. In addition, anti-LGBT bias breeds fear, causing
individuals to hide their sexual identity. These combined forces
drive the rising rates of HIV, particularly among young gay men, to
alarming rates.”
Stigma in other parts of the world
often leads to outright discrimination.
Al Jazeera's Inside Story
recently reported that hospitals in China have been accused of
refusing to admit people who test positive for the virus and that
many Nigerians believe that being HIV-positive is a death sentence.
“Stigma and discrimination remains
one of the challenges that we do face,” Lynette Mabote of the
Rights Alliance for Southern Africa said. “One of the leading
causes of this is because we've got too many laws that criminalize
people. So this is the major hindrance that is actually reversing
the gains that we've made so far. We've got punitive laws in
countries that criminalize same-sex relations, that criminalize sex
workers, as well as HIV exposure and transmission. So, this actually
keeps people away from accessing essential services.” (The video
is embedded on this page. Visit
our video library for more videos.)