Adam Hayes remembers the dynamic Body Shop founder
hether distributing condoms with San Francisco AIDS activists, or fundraising for affected children and families in the UK, Anita Roddick was never far from the fight to break down public prejudices about HIV.
The millionaire Body Shop founder, who died from a brain haemorrhage on September 10, was an especially outspoken about the way HIV is stigmatised.
“In many ways, life for people living with the virus is incomparably better than it was 20 years ago,” she wrote on her campaign website on World AIDS Day 2006.
“However, the stigma and discrimination which shroud HIV, right here in the UK, are as scathing and detrimental as ever.”
Dame Anita regarded HIV as a political, social and economic as disease - as well as a medical one - that exiled people from their families and communities.
“With no other condition are people denied life insurance, a mortgage, or the right to travel into certain countries. With no other disease do children have to live in silence about their status; in fear and isolation from a world that will not touch them, hug them and befriend them because of an immune system that doesn’t properly work,” she wrote.
“As a society, it is important we do not become complacent about our sexual health and the support we give to causes such as HIV.”
She was horrified that people were being jailed for sexually transmitting HIV and abhorred the massive expenditure on the Iraq war in the face of the global AIDS epidemic.
Anita got involved with the fight against AIDS in the eighties when she opened the first San Francisco branch of The Body Shop in Castro Street.
At the heart of the gay quarter, the shop fast became a vibrant centre for AIDS activists distributing condoms and pushing the anti-stigma message.
In the nineties, she helped to launch the HIV charity Body & Soul after becoming aware of the growing number of children and families living with and affected by HIV in the UK without peer support.
It was Anita who stumped up the £1 million to enable Body & Soul to acquire new premises in Clerkenwell, London, where families and children can meet and support each other in a safe space.
She was also the force behind the charity’s 2007 Scissor Sisters successful benefit concert and their Smile is a Gift campaign, getting top brands, as well as the public, to pledge their support.
In a recent interview, Dame Anita berated city financiers and London banks for failing to support such a worthwhile organisation on their doorstep.
After her death, Body & Soul director Emma Colyer told the BBC:
“Anita carried out campaigns on so many issues - often issues not publicly popular and took some strength of character to become involved in.
“It was through Anita that we initially raised the issue through the Body Shop that we had managed to challenge the stigma and prejudice that sadly surrounds HIV.”
When recently diagnosed with hepatitis C, Anita was quick to use her wealth and influence to raise that issue too. Always expert at using the media, Anita ‘came out’ as hep C positive on her website, ensuring world wide media coverage of this poorly understood virus.
She also became patron of The Hepatitis C Trust, handing them the £45,000 in compensation awarded to her by the NHS for accidentally infecting her through a blood transfusion 1971.
Anita had unknowingly lived with the virus for more than 30 years and had developed cirrhosis of the liver which was untreatable. But right up until her death, her spirit and enthusiasm for supporting human rights remained undiminished.
When asked how hepatitis C had affected her, her answer was all too prescient.
“It has given me sharper sense of my own mortality,” she said.
Although Anita’s death last month, aged 64, was unrelated to hepatitis C, it was nonetheless untimely as she felt there were so many battles still to fight.
But few would dispute that Anita Roddick in her relatively short life was able to make a difference people with living with HIV.
www.anitaroddick.com Anita’s campaigning website
www.bodyandsoulcharity.org –
Body & Soul, children and families
HIV charity
www.hepcuk.info The Hepatitis C Trust
