HIV criminalization statutes are antiquated
The state of Florida has laws that are used to prosecute people living with HIV (PLWH) for non-disclosure. These laws are replicated and live under the umbrella of HIV criminalization
— an unjust and antiquated use of policies and practices based solely on a person’s HIV status.
The actual transmission of HIV is usually not factored in prosecutions, even when the transmission is extremely unlikely.
Also, current statutes don’t take into consideration condom use, HIV treatment, or even viral load suppression. These laws are used against people even in cases of biting or spitting, which are not modes of transmission. Disclosure laws do not always take into consideration a person living with HIV and their proof of disclosure.
Many forms of disclosure are determined as not enough as judges and prosecutors add in the caveat that a PLWH also has to prove that their sexual partner understood the disclosure before a sexual interaction.
These laws were written in the early 1980s when fear, hysteria, and lack of information were all that folks used to create public health measures around HIV/AIDS.
This federally guided response to an epidemic lead to PLWH being stigmatized, discriminated against, and criminalized in ways that negatively impacted their lives.
When you look at the HIV epidemic and the root cause of HIV you see how this policy issue intersects with racism, classism, and bigotry, and how that negatively impacts the communities already marginalized by the epidemic.
These policies continue to disenfranchise women and Black communities (which are the two most impacted), other people of color, LGBTQ+ communities, sex workers, immigrants/migrants, people who use drugs and people living in poverty — and is something that can be changed by policy reform. Criminalization creates stigma, and the understanding in public health is that stigma and other social determinants influence the HIV care continuum before a diagnosis of HIV touches a person’s life.
The existence of racism, poverty, homophobia, classism and violence through the lens of policing is what fuses the issue of HIV and criminalization. No research supports putting a person living with HIV in jail or prison as a way of decreasing HIV transmission rates. A decrease in transmission rates over the years is attributed to the medical advances in prevention strategies like PrEP and treatment as prevention strategies like undetectable equals untransmittable. Knowing that these two major milestones in the response to HIV/AIDS treatment are overlooked in the use of these policies, demonstrates that criminalization laws work against public health.
The impact of HIV criminalization goes even further than that. A lot of people that gravitate to utilizing these laws as a form of justice don’t look at what prosecution under these laws looks like, it’s all based on alleged or unintentional HIV exposure. The media fearmongering alone is problematic when someone is accused or charged with an HIV-related crime and their name, photo, and sometimes their address are in the local news. The headlines are usually clickbait or sensationalized to grab attention and perpetuate panic and judgment. While most states that have these laws have a felony penalty, other states have the additional penalty of a convicted person registering as a sex offender for life, reducing opportunities for equitable employability and housing, along with many rights and freedoms.
Understanding all the nuances of the issues around HIV criminalization has built a movement to create change for communities impacted by and vulnerable to HIV.
This has led to coalition-building, leadership development in communities of PLWH, and catalyze 12 states to modernize or repeal their antiquated state statutes.
Collaboration in PLWH-led organizations has created policy and justice institutes for learning like the biannual HIV Is Not a Crime Training Academy.
These same networks of PLWH define how they want to be described and how their response to HIV should be designed by implementing the first-ever policy agenda called Demanding Better. Most recently advocates across the country have launched and supported HIV Is Not A Crime Awareness Day, which is today. Education is amplified through this day by talking points around resources like Five Things You Should Know, prosecutorial guidelines, and case studies that highlight the racial and gender disparities in communities hit hardest by the criminalization of HIV.