are you positive about prejudice?
Looking back, I wonder where that climate of fear and prejudice came from. It's my personal view that the
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Government's 'Don't die of ignorance' campaign played a major part.
It used fear as a tool, and I don't believe that fear helps anyone to
do anything other than be afraid. In the campaigning trade that's what's
known as an 'unintended outcome'. It certainly didn't help me avoid becoming
infected.
Sixteen years later, and we're about to see a government-funded national
campaign about HIV prejudice for World Aids Day. My understanding is that
this is an extra UK theme and it will actually run in January, so it'll
be separate and following on from this year's international World Aids
Day theme looking at so-called 'Aids complacency'.
Of course there still is discrimination around, and there always will
be. Illness has always brought out fear in people throughout history,
from the plague and leprosy, to syphilis and TB. HIV is just the last
in a long line of stigmatised illnesses, unless anthrax has taken over
by the time you read this.
And yet when it comes to prejudice and stigma, there's relatively little
actual collected evidence of stigma and discrimination against us as people
with HIV. The best figure
anyone's been able to come up with is that a surprisingly low 15 per cent of us have experienced direct discrimination.
