What is stigma?
Stigma means different things to different people.
One dictionary’s definition is: “The shame or disgrace attached to something regarded as socially unacceptable.”
There may be a feeling of ‘us and them’. People who are stigmatised are marked out as being different and are blamed for that difference.
Many people have fears, prejudices or negative attitudes about HIV. Stigma can result in people living with HIV being insulted, rejected, gossiped about and excluded from social activities. At its extreme, stigma can drive people to physical violence.
People living with HIV often feel nervous about telling others that they have HIV due to the fear of stigma or discrimination. This can lead to isolation and feeling unsupported, which can have a significant impact on health and wellbeing.
Stigma, whether perceived or real, often fuels myths, misconceptions and choices, impacting people’s HIV education and awareness. It can result in people with HIV believing some of the things that other people say about HIV, even when these are not true.
Stigma is often attached to things people are afraid of. Ever since the first cases of AIDS in the early 1980s, people with HIV have been stigmatised. There are a number of reasons for this:
- If undiagnosed and unmanaged, HIV can still be a serious, life-threatening illness. There is a long history of illnesses being stigmatised – cancer and tuberculosis are two other examples.
- People who don’t understand how HIV is transmitted may be afraid of ‘catching’ it through social contact.
- Some people have strong views about sexual behaviour. They may think that there are situations in which sex is wrong or that certain people shouldn’t behave in particular ways.
- The way people think about HIV depends on the way they think about the social groups that are most affected by HIV. Some people already have negative feelings about women, gay men, immigrants, black people, people who use drugs and others.
“Some people when they hear that someone’s HIV positive – especially us Africans – they’ll be seeing someone who’s dying, someone who is not supposed to touch anyone.”
Stigma leads to people not being treated with dignity and respect.
Stigma is one of the main reasons that some people end up having quite negative feelings about themselves in relation to their HIV diagnosis. This is sometimes called self-stigma or internalised stigma; you can read more about this on another page.
What is discrimination?
Discrimination means treating one person differently from another in a way that is unfair – for example, treating one person less favourably simply because he or she has HIV.
While stigma is sometimes hard to pin down (it may be found in people’s attitudes or beliefs), discrimination is a little easier to describe. It’s about actual behaviour.
Depending on the situation in which discrimination occurs, it may be against the law. The Equality Act protects against discrimination at work, in education and when using shops, businesses and services.
The Equality Act applies in England, Wales and Scotland. In Northern Ireland, similar protections are given by the Disability Discrimination Act.
Here are some examples of what is against the law:
- A dental surgery that refuses to register people with HIV as patients.
- A company that pays a lower salary to employees with HIV.
- A sports club that excludes people with HIV because of unjustified fears of HIV transmission.
All people living with diagnosed HIV are protected by the law, in the same way as people who are discriminated against because of their race, sex, age, sexual orientation or religion.
Although many people living with HIV would not consider themselves to have a disability, the legal protection comes from HIV being defined as a disability for the purposes of the Equality Act.