Journal raises concerns about HIV prosecutions
Creating ‘AIDS criminals’ doesn’t slow transmission rates, researchers argue
By DYANA BAGBY
Friday, August 12, 2005
New research published in an online sexuality research journal raises concerns about the rise in criminal prosecutions of people living with HIV and the creation of “AIDS criminals.”
“Reckless Vectors: The Infecting ‘Other’ in HIV/AIDS Law” is the title of the new issue of “Sexuality Research and Social Policy: Journal of NSRC.” It contains research on the impact of criminal prosecutions of HIV-related offenses on public health, said journal co-editor Terry Stein.
“As one of our reviewers and commentators, Gary Kinsman, said: Reckless Vectors ‘addresses what has become a largely neglected aspect of AIDS research, the continuing stigmatization and criminalization of people living with AIDS/HIV,’” Stein said, explaining why the journal decided to publish the research.
Titles of articles in the issue include “Legislating the Pandemic: A Global Survey of HIV/AIDS in Criminal Law” and “Social Responses to HIV: Fearing the Outlaw.”
The journal closely examines the 1999 criminal cases of a New Zealand man prosecuted for not telling his male sexual partners he was HIV positive and the 1992 case against Ed Savitz of Philadelphia, who was portrayed as a “sex monster” for preying on young boys but who died in custody a year later after never being charged with an act that could have resulted in HIV transmission.
The journal also examines the recent trials of a man in Nova Scotia charged with knowingly sexually transmitting HIV to pregnant women and an HIV-positive prisoner in New Jersey charged with biting and spitting on prison guards.
The guest editor of “Reckless Vectors,” Heather Worth, serves as the deputy director of the National Centre in HIV Social Research at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Worth said her interest in the topic of HIV criminalization was sparked several years ago when a Kenyan man was charged with numerous offences relating to reckless endangerment and grievous bodily harm because he did not inform his partners he was HIV-positive.
“This case brought out some of the most insidious racism about Africa as a viral continent and Africans as unnaturally sexual,” Worth said in an e-mail interview. “It also engendered increasing public calls and sympathy for a range of interventionist and regulatory practices, such as mandatory HIV testing of immigrants and refugees.
Worth said alternative legal models rather than ones based on retribution and deterrence are needed to grapple with the complex social and cultural contexts that lead to HIV transmission.
Shared responsibility
Among gay people especially, disclosure of HIV status is considered a mutual responsibility between partners, Worth said. HIV transmissions also do not occur in a vacuum, but within cultural and social circumstances that the law has no adequate means to interpret, she added.
“Numerous recent studies demonstrate that there are many valid cultural reasons why individuals do not disclose their HIV status, including fear of domestic violence, fear of familial or partner abandonment, and community rejection.
“To a considerable extent, the cases that come to the attention of the law indicate a failure to take into consideration the complexity of human relationships,” she said.
The HIV Criminal Law & Policy Project, which receives funding from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, documented 326 prosecutions of HIV transmission cases in the U.S. between 1986-2001, according to Zita Lazzarini, the project’s principal investigator.
While the research is not complete, preliminary results show that these prosecutions have not had an effect on the AIDS epidemic, said Lazzarini, whose work is cited by several researchers in the “Reckless Vectors” journal.
“There is no overwhelming evidence these laws effect public health,” Lazzarini said.