I Love a Man in a Uniform

A coalition of 400 AIDS and human rights groups are drawing attention to the ways officials around the world have fanned rather than contained the spread of AIDS. For example:

HIV and AIDS services geared toward men who have sex with men and toward sex workers are also hampered by punitive laws and abusive government practices. Officials charged with enforcing prostitution laws routinely extort bribes, confessions, testimony, and sexual "favors" from sex workers.

There's a drug angle, too:

effective measures to reduce HIV infection, such as needle-exchange programs and medication-assisted treatment with methadone, are banned by law in many countries or undermined by abusive police practices. Police abuse, sometimes amounting to torture, keeps people who use drugs away from basic HIV-prevention services, even where government policy supports these services. Police also routinely extort money and confessions from people who use drugs, sometimes using the mere possession of syringes as an excuse to harass or arrest drug users or outreach workers providing services to them.

Similarly, cops in some countries "confiscate condoms from AIDS outreach workers, and use them as evidence of sex work or sodomy." Presumably they don't use them when coercing coitus from actual prostitutes.

Comments

Vlad Drac | July 17, 2008, 10:39am | #

And the Gang of Four hits keep coming.

J sub D | July 17, 2008, 11:02am | #

Officials charged with enforcing prostitution laws routinely extort bribes, confessions, testimony, and sexual "favors" from sex workers.
...
Police also routinely extort money and confessions from people who use drugs, sometimes using the mere possession of syringes as an excuse to harass or arrest drug users or outreach workers providing services to them.

Damn those ignorant third worlders.

Episiarch | July 17, 2008, 11:04am | #

Packing a Musket, by Jerri Blank.

When you work from your home and Johns call on the phone, you're a call girl.

When you walk till you limp and give a cut to a pimp, you're a street whore.

When they're begging ya "please," to get down on your knees, near their groinage, 'scusa me, but ya see, don't ya touch where they pee, without coinage.

T | July 17, 2008, 11:15am | #

Oh my stars and garters, police all around the world are corrupt! I must run and let Lord Acton know, for surely he will have some comment on the situation!

I've also heard rumor that water is wet. Will no one investigate this and expose the awful truth?

Marshall | July 17, 2008, 2:02pm | #

And the Gang of Four hits keep coming.

Haha, just what I was thinking.

Lil F*ck | July 17, 2008, 4:18pm | #

"officials around the world have fanned rather than contained the spread of AIDS. For example:"

Officials around the world don't spead AIDS; infected fuckers and IV drug users do.

joe | July 17, 2008, 6:03pm | #

To have ambitions was my ambition
But I have nothing to show for my dreams.

Bobster | July 17, 2008, 6:14pm | #

HIV doesn't cause aids.

http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/