“The police come to my job, they’re telling me that this gentleman that I had dated is pressing charges on me because I didn’t tell him I was HIV positive.”
Lashanda Salinas faced criminal charges in Tennessee after her former partner accused her of exposing him to the HIV virus. Although Lashanda had been on medication since she was a teenager, and says she was open about her status, she was convicted and is now on the sex offender registry.
“I had to take a lie detector test every six months to prove to them that I [hadn’t] been around a child,” Salinas tells Hannah Moore.
“Everyone’s perception is that if someone’s having sex with someone who is HIV positive, they must be being deceived or they must be being tricked into doing that, and that is so not the case,” says Robert Suttle, who was also convicted in Louisiana after being reported by his former partner.
“You’re being arrested, you’re losing your job, you’re losing your livelihood, over something related to your status,” Suttle tells Moore. “So it’s almost like you’re guilty before you’re even proven innocent when it should be the opposite.”
Campaigners say these laws are reinforcing stigmas about HIV, and discouraging people who don’t know their status from getting tested. Edwin Barnard, the Executive Director of the HIV Justice Network, tells Hannah Moore how these laws, often relics of the 1980s before medication was available, are a danger to public health. Reporter Amelia Abraham explains why ethnic minorities and women are disproportionately criminalised.
Photograph: Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images