FEAR eats the soul

Many HIV positive people that you speak to say that although they personally have not come face to face with discrimination in their daily lives, they still have difficulty in telling others about their status for fear of being rejected or discriminated against. One young woman commented: “It’s the fear that if I tell my friends, I’ll lose respect and confidence. They might pity me; I wouldn’t want that.” It’s often when children are involved that fears of stigma intensify. The most distressing experience comes from a woman and young son who were both ostracised from their small town community in west Ireland: “I find that with a small child I am always worrying about the next leak about my HIV status,” she says.
Will stigma ever be eradicated? Some say yes, others say it will never go away because of the stigma around the way the virus is transmitted. You decide...

Molly - 19-year-old HIV negative daughter to mum with HIV - hasn’t really experienced stigma, due to her mum’s openness:
“My mum told me about her status when I was 15 years old. Because she’d already been doing HIV work and we were acquainted with it and informed on the subject, it wasn’t such a shock. It didn’t really faze me. She told me and my siblings just after she’d been diagnosed.
She thought we should get some support and guidance so we joined a group at Body & Soul, the London families’ HIV centre. I’m now really involved in it and would like to pursue peer education as my vocation.
It’s weird telling people. I don’t think I need to unless it’s really necessary. With

my best friend, I put it off for a while. Now I have told her about my mum, I think she has changed her views about people with HIV. I think she always thought that having HIV meant you automatically went on treatments because you would be ill.