A dictionary meaning of stigma is “a disgrace or reproach attached to someone.” This seems very appropriate to the way that people with HIV are often perceived.

People who are stigmatised are marked out from the rest of society and feared as different and dangerous. In this way, stigma is used as a form of control by those with power to deny rights to others.

The stigma attached to HIV can lead to discrimination. This can involve governments using laws to deny freedoms to people with HIV, or imposing restrictions on what they can or cannot do. A good example is the ban on entry that some countries impose on people with HIV. People with HIV can also encounter discrimination or prejudice in their day-to-days lives.

Ever since the first cases of AIDS were reported in the early 1980s, people with HIV and the condition itself have been stigmatised. There are several reasons for this:

• HIV is a serious illness and, even now, many people think it’s invariably fatal.
• HIV is infectious and is transmitted through behaviours, such as sex and illegal drug use, that are subject to moral judgements.
• HIV affects communities that society already discriminates against.
• HIV is simplistically interpreted by some people as a punishment or a fulfillment of scriptural warnings.

The groups most affected by HIV in the UK are gay men and people from Africa of all sexualities.

Gay men are still sometimes viewed as being on the edges of society, at best tolerated rather than accepted, and are often associated with sexual decadence, mental and physical illness and a lack of morals. African people are often blamed for bringing illness into the country, and are accused of unfairly using health, housing and welfare resources. Injecting drug users are condemned for their illegal behaviour and its anti-social consequences. In addition, heterosexuals who have contracted HIV through sex are often suspected of having engaged in illicit or “deviant” behaviour.

These prejudiced views make it easy for some to see people with HIV as somehow deserving their infection and as being outside the general, healthy, economically productive mainstream of society. In a word, people with HIV in this country are thought by some to be “guilty” of some fault that led them to be infected with the virus.

In contrast to this is the sympathy afforded to some people with HIV – those who are deemed to have become infected with HIV through no “fault” of their own. The press and the public may regard such individuals as “innocent victims of HIV”. Usually, this term refers to babies with HIV, people who became infected with HIV because they received blood or blood products before effective screening was introduced, or, more recently, those who made criminal complaints against their sexual partners in cases of reckless HIV transmission.