In the Life: Ep. 2105, "Perpetuating Stigma"

In the life is funded in part by the Hvan Amaringan Foundation, Dewey and Labbuff, the estate of Richard Wyland, Orcus Foundation, the Ted Snowden Foundation, and these funders [Music] and by the annual support of in the life members like you. Over the past three decades, scientists have learned much about HIV and how it is transmitted. Yet often our legal system does not reflect these medical advances. Last season, In the Life reported on laws criminalizing the exposure and transmission of HIV. Our report, Legalizing Stigma, led public education efforts, beginning with the first ever congressional briefing on this issue. Legalizing stigma was the first documentary which looked at the issue of HIV criminalization from the perspective of people who have been targeted by criminal laws. Tonight on In the Life, we continue our investigation into the injustices that arise when a person's HIV status becomes a legal challenge with a special report on how women have been stigmatized and prosecuted under these laws. They fingerprint me and they took my picture. They told me that I was going to be looking at 8 to 12 years. We brought everybody together. act up and we're married. There was nothing for him to hide. [Music] 36 US states and two US territories have laws that criminalize HIV exposure and failure by an HIV positive person to disclose their status. Stigma and fear continue to motivate criminal prosecutions, often on a felony level. The United States has the unfortunate distinction of being number one in the world in terms of the actual number of HIV specific criminal laws and the number of documented prosecutions of people with HIV in this country. Women and their experiences have been a central part of the debate over whether or not HIV criminalization laws are effective. From reproductive rights and child custody to sex offender status and gender dynamics, the lives of HIV positive women can dramatically be affected. It was estimated at the end of 2010 that 34 million adults worldwide are living with HIV and AIDS. Half are women. The US Centers for Disease Control have suggested that eventually more women than men will be living with HIV. In September 2011, Congresswoman Barbara Lee introduced House Bill 3053, the repeal HIV discrimination act, sparking new conversation about HIV criminalization. many uh states are very uh extreme. They're very right-wing in how they see people who um have HIV and AIDS. They just haven't gone back to revisit their statutes. And I think they need to do that. And that's what we're asking really in my bill is for states to go back and look at this and bring your laws current. A lot of women are going to be very reluctant to talk about their status because the stigma, the distrust, the possible prosecution will keep them very, very fearful. The bill is really historic in the sense that it lays out a lot of the reasons that these HIV criminalization laws just aren't doing what they were proposed to do. People who are um in a position of transmitting the disease are being held to a higher or different legal standard. So in situations where a person might spit on another individual in a simple assault case, that could be simple assault. It could be prosecuted under the law. But if you have HIV, there are heightened levels of criminal penalties that are being applied to those individuals even though there's absolutely no medical evidence that HIV in fact can be transmitted. So there's a little bit of an irony of course that the criminalization laws actually aren't based in medical evidence but in fact are based on fear. Fear of what we think is going to happen. Fear of what we think positive people are doing to other people who are negative. Hello everybody. This is Jessica Busard and besides me is my daughter Betsy. I just want to thank all of you who did so much to bring us together and to help Betsy get out of prison and start receiving the nutrition and the medical treatment she needs. And I want to thank God above all for bringing everyone together to do all that work that they did and just putting their heart out there. Our life was pretty conventional. We raised our family in a small town in Indiana. We were active in our church and I was asked to help organize a clinical mission trip to Haiti. and that the hospice for sick and malnourished children. There was one little 10year-old girl as thin as a rail but had a wonderful smile and a beautiful spirit to her who would go through the wards helping the babies and the toddlers herself. Her name was Betsy. She had AIDS and uh she wasn't expected to live. And so Jessica came home from Haiti and she kept talking about this little girl and we just decided that she was coming. That was first communion Sunday. Betsy was convinced that she was going to get better someday. And you know what? She did. Betsy moved down to Florida about 5 or 6 years ago. She loved the beach. Betsy told us she couldn't actually remember any of the details of what happened when she was arrested. We do know that she had had an argument with her boyfriend and he gave her a pill and said, "Take this. You need to calm down." And the pill was Xanax. And she left and she got in her car and she drove her car off the road into the ditch. She didn't hit anything. Nobody was hurt. When a police officer came to help her, she lashed out at the police officer and she was spitting and kicking. And I believe that that's because of some things that happened in Bets's past. She had been repeatedly raped by a police officer when she was a child and living in Haiti. And she had a lot of post-traumatic stress issues. She called me one day and she said, "Mom, my lawyer said I'm going to go to prison." I said, "You know, Betsy, you haven't been in trouble." And she said, "No, it's because when I was in jail, I asked for my HIV medicine." And when the prosecutor found out now he changed the charges and my lawyer says, "I'm going to prison." Betsy went from an offense that she would have gotten probation on to being charged with an offense that was basically attacking a police officer with deadly intent. She was mortified that she was in prison. She was embarrassed. And finally, I got a phone call. Betsy started crying on the phone. She said, "The doctor said that I have cancer and I'm going to die." The prison doctor had told her that there wasn't really any use dragging this out, that she was dying and she needed to just accept that and get on with it. She noticed these abdominal pains within a month of being there and they didn't give her an X-ray for half a year. She didn't just get sentenced to five years in prison for spitting on somebody. She got a life sentence. She was skinny as a rail. She wasn't getting anything but IV fluid, no nutrition, and we just started contacting everybody. We contacted every person that we knew on our email list and we said, "Call the governor." We went before the parole commission and they were going to make the final decision whether or not we could bring Betsy home. News media in the state of Florida closely followed Bets's story in January of 2011. First Coast News covered the parole board hearing. I'm so happy that the commission made this decision. And in Miami, CBS4 interviewed the family before they traveled home to Indiana. The ocean is like the last place I want to be when all is end and everything is over with. I want my body right in the ocean. We had two wonderful weeks right here in this room with Betsy. Our kids live they've scattered around the country. So they all came and they were all staying in the house and we had beds everywhere and suitcases everywhere. And we were with her and she was just fighting, fighting, fighting for every breath. And um finally um it was time and we just we told her Betsy it was okay to quit fighting. I think about her learning to ride a bicycle and learning English and first joining ballet. I think about her being my little girl and I miss her desperately. A harm reduction organization called Women with a Vision was formed in 1991 to improve the lives of marginalized women. When you criminalize someone for a particular act, especially when we talk about sex in a country where we are supposed to protect each other's rights to make decisions, are we helping someone by incarcerating them? No. Are we lessening the risk of HIV for anybody outside? No. Have we changed the rates of HIV in this country? No. When you think about women who are HIV positive, I think that society forgets that that woman is a woman because all we see is the status. What you've done is isolate that person. It's like putting them in their own personal jail where women who are positive don't date. They don't interact with other people because they fear someone knowing. They don't share their pain with anyone because they fear what will happen. Will I lose my job? Will people in my church turn against me? Will people in my family turn against me? If you are tested and you are positive for HIV in many states in this country, you can be prosecuted and you can be incarcerated for years and even decades because your partner says you did not disclose your HIV, even if the sex was consensual, even if protection was used, even if you have no measurable viral load and therefore very little risk of transmitting. ing the virus even if no transmission occurred. [Music] Looking at everyone's story sometimes even when we tell our status we still you know we still get charged because we are HIV. So now I look at it like if I tell someone now hey I'm HIV but I also want to be loved you know I'm not no murderer. Monnique Morray lives in Somerville, South Carolina with her three children and her new husband, Steven. She was diagnosed as HIV positive in October 2005 after her former husband had an affair. Why me? How did this happen? I felt like my life was just crumbling in. I felt that I've done something wrong as a wife. I just felt like I didn't deserve any of this. You know, I was very afraid of fear, the stigma. July 2006, moved on with my life. I wanted to find love. Want love to find me. I wanted to be happy. I was a administrative clerk in the army. In-N-Out process soldiers. They walked in my office all day long. But this one man comes in my office and he just wanted to be nice. Just wanted to take me out. I just want to live like a human being. I just want to be like anybody else. So, he comes over and I'll never forget that night either. Before he walked out that door, we're talking and next thing you know, he kissed me and it started leading to one thing to another. I stopped him and I said, "Before we go any further, you need to go get a condom." You know, kind of like thinking you need to get a condom is my words of saying I have HIV. That's all I could say because he said, "No, I'll be okay." I allowed him to have unprotected sex with me. The cops from Fort Jackson called me and asked if I can come in the office. They fingerprint me and they took my picture. I was just in a shock. I was scared. They assigned me a military lawyer. He told me that I was going to be looking at 8 to 12 years for aggravated assault, not disclosing my status. As a mother, you know, you don't want to see a child go through and and this was one time I said I could be there to help you with everything else, but with this one, I didn't know what to do. eight to 12 years just for you know sleeping with someone that just like if you know they sentencing her like she killed somebody. The guy that I slept with he said in his statement that him and my supervisor and a couple other men were together one night talking laughing like the men do talking about females and how nice certain females look. My name came up in their conversation. So my supervisor, he invaded my privacy by telling another soldier. How did he not know that other soldier was lying? What if that other soldier was just lying about he having sex with me? The trial lasted roughly 6 months. At the beginning of the trial, they were waiting on the solders's test results. His test results came back negative. He was the last person to testify. And when he testified, he said, "Hey, yes, I had unprotected sex with Mon'nique. Yes, Mo'Nique told me to get a condom." He said, "I chose not to get a condom." He said, "I'm a grown man." until you realize the whole emotional roller coaster that I was dealing with having HIV, newly diagnosed with HIV, you would know that it is very hard to just come forth to to someone that is falling in love with you and tell them I have HIV. The next day, my colonel said the trial has been dismissed. He did say that I would have to get out the service. I could have been labeled a sex offender. Turn around. If I was a sex offender, that means I wouldn't have my children. Means I wouldn't even be around children. Turn around. Everyone looking at me through the streets, my license saying sex offender. Let's go get something so we can go. In a number of states, when you're prosecuted under these HIV criminalization laws, your name also goes on the sex offender registry. Some of the most fundamental responsibilities that women have are affected. You know, if you are a mother, you may lose custody of your children. If you don't lose custody of your children, you may not be able to live in a neighborhood anywhere close to a school because now you're a sex offender. You may not be able to take your child to school. When a woman who's living with HIV who was charged under one of these laws is being treated like a child molester or rapist, it tells you something's a little bit off here. Reproductive rights are put into question when vague HIV criminal laws are applied to pregnant women. If a woman is HIV positive and pregnant and living in a state that has a criminalization statute that makes it a crime to expose another to HIV, then her every move during the course of her pregnancy and in the care of her baby after birth potentially subject her to criminal liability. and a judge could step in and say, "We the state are finding you criminally liable for that exposure." Physicians will uh more direct and manage rather than empower women in terms of their health care. Women will get dos and don'ts and rules rather than information that can be used to help them to make smart decisions. And I think a lot of that is crystallized in in the use of the criminal law. I have a lot of young ladies that come up to me now after they hear my story and they'll say, "Monique, you know what? You make me realize that sex is not everything. Education is more voices, more HIV positive women needs to come forth to bring HIV AIDS awareness especially to our younger generation. Let's not spend tens of thousands of dollars a year imprisoning someone when we could be spending that same money on effective prevention measures, on sex education, on condom programs. There is lots of evidence that the laws do absolutely nothing good, that they have no positive impact. They don't affect uh anybody's risk-taking behavior or disclosure behavior. the felony sentencing, the sex offender registry, and these HIV criminalization laws in general feed into a really terrible cycle that prevents people from becoming economically independent um getting the treatment and access to services that they need um and living a long and healthy life, which is actually a possibility these days [Music] in December. 2010 in the life premiered legalizing stigma a report on the human cost of laws criminalizing HIV transmission and exposure. Legalizing stigma was the first documentary of any kind which looked at the issue of HIV criminalization from the perspective of people who have been targeted by these laws. Katherine Hansen's is the executive director and founder of the center for HIV law and policy. She has worked on HIV legal and policy issues since 1984. Not only was legalizing stigma the first video of its kind, but it wound up being an extremely useful educational tool in part because there was nothing else out there. And it also in a very three-dimensional way communicated what some of the problems are that advocates have been talking about for many years. In the life media examined the lives of men prosecuted under HIV criminalization laws. I think that there are a lot of misconceptions about HIV, how it's transmitted, how infectious people are. You know, can you just can you be in the same room with them? The story on the street is I have AIDS and gave AIDS to this poor unsuspecting kid. This is someone I was actually planning on spending the rest of my life with. Gregory Smith was African-Amean. He was poor and he had HIV. It is much easier to get policymakers to look at a video than it is to meet with attorneys, uh, sit down and read some of the medical and scientific information that demonstrates why these policies are so harmful and so ineffective. In fact, we were able to use legalizing stigma as a central part of the very first congressional briefing on criminalization. And at an international gathering of experts hosted by UN AIDS in Geneva, In the Life's decision to continue coverage of HIV criminalization, specifically with a report on women, was motivated by the lack of fair media perspective on this issue. Every now and then there is some kind of sensationalist story of women who trusted some man and were exposed without their knowledge. None of those stories consider the possibility that there are women living with HIV. None of them consider the possibility that we all need to be responsible for our sexual health. Advocates like Hansen's believe that public education on HIV criminalization must reach a broader audience in order to be effective. The audience for legalizing stigma will be not only community members who will see it but people from the Department of Justice, officials from departments of health around the world. So this is an important audience and a great way to demonstrate to people who may be looking at this issue for the first time, maybe coming to a meeting about criminalization for the first time, a great way for them to get the picture. Thank you for watching In the Life. To watch more of our coverage on HIV discrimination, visit our website at itlia.org. org. You can also sign up for monthly program alerts and connect with organizations featured in this month's episode. I think I needed to go through the rough part of my life with HIV. It actually made me who I am today. I need to release that anger. HIV only made me stronger. HIV allowed my voice to be heard. HIV allowed me to help other people and tell other people, you're going to make it. If I can sit here and make it dealing with HIV, so can you. What I want people to do to remember my daughter and to remember that friend of theirs that they lost is to pick up the phone and to call their senator and to call the president and to write letters and say, "This is wrong and you need to change these laws. You need to throw them off the books. And if you're not willing to throw them off the books, we're willing to throw you out of office. In the life is funded in part by the H. Van Amaringan Foundation, Dewey and Labbuff, the estate of Richard W. Wland Orcus Foundation, the Ted Snowden Foundation, and these funders, and by the annual support of In the Life members like you.