Media outlets often use extreme or exaggerated cases that are sensationalized, stigmatizing, and inaccurate that, as one collaborator described, “perpetuate stigma and stereotypes about…who people living with HIV are, who sex workers living with HIV are, and the types of people that are living with HIV”.
In doing so, media representations construct a public identity of the imagined PLHIV as ‘dangerous’ and ‘criminal’ that somehow authorizes anti-HIV laws. This might be elucidated by the horrifying treatment and media coverage of one woman charged under anti-HIV laws:
“A woman who was homeless, obviously with mental health issues, was arrested while negative. Just cause she has mental health problems. And she was spitting at officers and somebody, when they took her to the hospital, said she has HIV. They put a bag over her head and now she's being held. And we were writing the D.A. trying to say, this is a person with a mental health issue because the charge became attempting to transmit or aggravated assaulted and with the HIV forcing. Well, this person was really just a person who was homeless with mental health issues and substance abuse issues that needed to be dealt with versus focusing on the HIV. And those cases make it into the news. So, not only does it increase the fear of others about us, but it also stigmatizes us in a very sensationalized way, as well. And I mean, it just serves no purpose other than to make it more difficult for folks living with HIV.”- Venita
These representations cast PLHIV and PWUD as ‘dangerous’, ‘out of control’, and a ‘threat’ thereby further authorizing state-sanctioned violence against the populations that media construe as living with HIV, namely Black and non-Black people of color and poor ‘immoral’ whites (Boyd 2002). These representations are especially harsh toward those in the sex industry who are seen as particularly problematic:
“I think historically, folks have been generalized and probably treated a certain way as though there's a good or a bad version of a person that lives with HIV and that potentially sex workers who are living with HIV are considered, like empathy is not expressed. It's almost the same as the person, well not just the person. But I've been under their lens of "well I must have done something to deserve it", especially from a religious background, like I sinned so therefore I deserved HIV as my punishment and putting sex workers in that same kind of lens because they're doing something people find morally wrong, even if it's not about that” - Kamaria
Media portrayals of the imagined ‘bad’ PLHIV who also uses drugs and/or is in the sex industry advances political agendas such as drug and sex work specific sentence enhancements that protect white middle-class protestant interests and values. These portrayals therefore act as a political tool to invoke shock and disgust in the general public by constructing a public identity that is alarmingly different than the lived experiences of people charged under these laws, yet still somehow justifies state-sanctioned violence against them.
Sensationalized, stigmatizing, and inaccurate media portrayals of PLHIV collectively construct the public identity of PLHIV as ‘criminal’, ‘threat’, and ‘dangerous’. Media representations are especially harsh for sex workers and people who use drugs who are experience multiple layers of stigma and criminalization and are cast as ‘monstruous’, while also spreading inaccurate misinformation, particularly around the nature of arrests:
“The officers that work the leads on the streets are not the officers that you think. I mean, they're exactly the kind of cops right now we're seeing on TV. It's very dirty and grimy. I got picked up, and I had just gotten beat by the person that I was with, and it was a very bad morning. And, I'd gotten in the car with this gentleman, and he took me up to a Motel, and said that his friend was in there and wanted a girl. And, I was just not in the mood to play games at that time. And, I was like, well, I'm not sure, I might want to hang out for a minute. I didn't agree on anything. And, so we went up to the room and we stood, and he goes, well, he needs to know how much money. I'm like, I'm not doing any of that right now. So it was just a point blank, no agreement conversation. And, he kept trying to get the price out of me. At that time, I wasn't even thinking he was an undercover, he was just getting on my nerves at that point. I thought he had run out of drugs, and they were just being silly. At that time, I was over it. So, actually, I said, you know what? I've had enough. You guys can figure this out. And, I just turned around and walked away from the room door. It was one of my nemesis with cops that had constantly threatened me out there on the streets... I walked away and I went back to the room and laid down and about 30 minutes later, knock at the door. And it was a police car and said, we need you to get in. So I got in and sure enough, rode me right back up in front of that door and walked me in. And he told me that he got special permission from the DA to take me into custody. And they took me in on that charge. And the officer did lie on the stand and said that I agreed to the blowjob and that absolutely did not happen because had I agreed, I would have been taken into custody right there at the door. You don't walk away from a sting. So, yeah, it happens out there all the time. It's set up. We don't have a say. It's what's written down. I even wrote a letter to the district attorney, walked the entire scenario out. They knew what they did. And I think that did that to land me. To doing what they did with the public, with the newspaper. But I think it was already pretty set up. I was not guilty at all, of that interaction. What do you, you don't have, you can't do nothing. You're a known sex worker.” – Tiffany
These representations both reflect and authorize state-sanctioned violence, notably policing and incarceration, against already over policed individuals at the intersections of race, gender, and class. Importantly, the public identities of PLHIV, sex workers, and PWUD are not representative of the vast range of experiences and identities that constitute all three groups broadly construed but rather of who is policed due to structural violence and systemic racism. The criminalization of HIV further enacts the narrative that collapses PLHIV, sex workers, and people who use drugs as individuals engaged in street-based survival sex work, especially sex in exchange for drugs, are overrepresented in both arrests and media representations. While this includes poor white women, Black women, trans women, and im/migrants are particularly vulnerable due to intersectionality and structural violence.
Lydia Babcock, (She/Her) MA, MPH, is a Project Consultant at Collaborative Action Consulting and a graduate of University of Memphis. She conducted research around the criminalization of HIV in 2020 in Tennessee, Florida and Texas and wrote a series of posts from the results of that research that we will be releasing over the next few weeks.
"The purpose of these reports are to make clear the ways in which the assumptions that sex workers, are both ‘public health threat’ and ‘criminal’ has become common sense to the public. To do so, it examines the logics behind the idea that sex work is always related to HIV and/or drug use and that sex workers, people living with HIV (PLHIV), and people who use drugs (PWUD) are always the same people. Moreover, it hopes to shed light on the ways in which this narrative has been used as a political tool to both (1) justify the state-sanctioned killings of sex workers, PLHIV, and PWUD and (2) employ a variety of strategies (surveillance, policing, incarceration) to rework the social killings of sex workers, PLHIV, and PWUD as a ‘necessary’ social process. Importantly, the intent here is not to insinuate that any one individual cannot have intersecting experiences with sex work, HIV, and/or drug use. This would not only be inaccurate but also harmful as some project collaborators have experienced increased violence because of this intersectionality. Rather, it is to examine the ways in which the different yet overlapping public identities of sex workers, PLHIV, and PWUD have been created and used as a political tool to ultimately prevent the sex worker rights, HIV, and harm reduction movements from working together toward more structural, systemic change." -Lydia Babcock
Comments