feel embarrassment, disgust, or fear. You wait to
see if the almost universal stigma against HIV overwhelms
them. And, if it does, you may make damn sure that next time you keep
quiet.
To quote Edwin Cameron: "Stigma is treating someone differently in
a way that goes beyond fairness, beyond reason, beyond appropriateness."
Julie Becker of the Engender Health Charity did a survey in Nigeria of
health workers. She said: "We found that stigma showed itself in
'disconnects' between people's knowledge and their behaviour. We found
they did not judge or disdain PWAs, but were so afraid of being infected,
in unlikely ways, that what they did was unintentionally discriminatory.
Stigma is fear."
What People with HIV are doing with their physical presence at meetings
like Barcelona is to diffuse that fear. The more people know you, the
less they can treat you as a feared outsider.
That's why our presence, and our power, remains essential.
HIV 'dole layabouts' - nonsense!
One little bit of HIV stigma that frequently surfaces in, among other
places, the UK gay press, is that people with HIV are all still dossing
around on huge levels of government benefit, despite being essentially
well. This particular assertion may have contributed to the regular attempts
to purge people with HIV from the register of those claiming Disability
Living Allowance (DLA).
Well, we found out an interesting statistic the other day. There are,
it's true, a pretty startling number of people claiming that they are
disabled enough to be entitled to
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DLA. 2.32 million, to be precise. One in 26 of all Britons.
