A 49-year-old man is arrested in Germany for having sex without a condom with two women. It is alleged that the man did not disclose his status before having intercourse. I must say that the German tabloids are at their best when it comes to such stories. First the German singer, arrested with lots of publicity – and now the next case.
I must say that I don’t agree with the basics of such cases. If consent adults have a sexual relationship or a sexual affair both parties are responsible to negotiate safe or unsafe sex. It cannot be that only one of the two takes the full blame and consequently legal punishment while the others are portrait as pure victim. My sense of justice and fairness does not agree.
I do agree that there must be consequences when somebody lies in knowledge of his or her HIV infection when asked before having sex or he or she is not insisting on condom to prevent infection.
For the prevention work of HIV and the quest to de-stigmatise the infection, those cases are a nightmare – and they are handled in a fashion which basically adds to stigmatization and will produce at the end less testing and more infections. The criminal code is not a good tool to prevent infections or combat HIV and AIDS.
Filed under: General, HIV and AIDS, HIV Prevention, Politics and Society, Aids, arrest, condom, criminal, Germany, hiv, infection, people living with the virus, prevention work, stigma
