Human Rights Watch is scheduled to release a report later this week detailing how laws in Louisiana that prohibit access to clean syringes and criminalize sex work has led to an “uncontrolled HIV epidemic and an extremely high AIDS death rate” in the state.
The 57-page report entitled “In Harm’s Way: State Response to Sex Workers, Drug Users, and HIV in New Orleans,” documents the state government’s violations of a person’s right to health, among other human rights violations in New Orleans, and calls for changes in state and local laws that “stigmatize, discriminate against, and facilitate police abuse of sex workers and drug users, and interfere with health services for people at high risk for HIV.”
According to a report from the New Orleans-based non-profit Women With a Vision, which obtained an advanced copy of the HRW report, the southern U.S. — “where deep poverty combines with harmful laws and policies that increase risk of acquiring, transmitting and dying of HIV” — has the fastest-growing number of HIV cases and the largest number of people dying of AIDS than any other region in the country.
Louisiana alone has two cities with the second and third-highest rates of new HIV infections in the nation — Baton Rouge and New Orleans. In New Orleans, it’s estimated that 40 percent of people with HIV are not receiving any treatment.
“The HIV epidemic in New Orleans is one of the worst in the U.S., and proven strategies for addressing it are being ignored,” said Megan McLemore, senior health researcher at Human Rights Watch and the report’s author.
For the report, HRW interviewed 170 New Orleans residents who said they had exchanged sex for money, drugs, or life necessities. The report also interviewed police, public defenders, state and local government officials, public health providers, and advocates for those living with HIV. Three-quarters of the interviewees were black and one-third were transgender women.
During their research, HRW researchers found that sex workers were often abused by law enforcement and harassed for carrying too many condoms. Transgender sex workers reported that they were often subjected to “vulgar and degrading verbal abuse as well as extortion for sexual favors.”
“Police went through my purse and called me a ‘thing’ and asked what I needed all those condoms for,” a transgender woman said.
Another transgender woman reported that she was arrested for prostitution 10 times during a three-year time span and that while in jail she received no HIV medication and was not allowed to keep her appointments at an HIV clinic.
In Louisiana, people of color, as well as members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, and intersex community, reported that because of the state’s “crimes against nature” laws, which require those convicted of engaging in “unnatural acts” such as anal and/or oral sex to register as sex offenders, HIV prevention efforts are impeded because the law has harsher penalties than anti-prostitution laws.
In addition to the sex-driven HIV epidemic, HRW found an estimated 45,000 people in the state inject drugs into their bodies with needles. Since the state has few programs to reduce HIV and hepatitis among injection drug users, such as syringe exchanges, HRW says HIV/AIDS is spreading.
“People who use drugs can’t get clean needles, and police are confiscating condoms from sex workers and those suspected of sex work, such as transgender women,” McLemore said. “Louisiana’s government should choose improved public health over punishment for sex workers, drug users and others at high risk for HIV. For too long the state has neglected investing in health care and other basic human needs.”
Release of the report is tied to the third annual Southern Harm Reduction and Drug Policy Conference in New Orleans, which is scheduled to begin on Dec. 12.
Deon Haywood, executive director of Women With A Vision, which is a co-sponsor of the harm reduction conference, said New Orleans and the state of Louisiana should be leading the charge against HIV by funding programs that have been proven to prevent HIV.
“But when it comes to saving the lives of people who use drugs, it’s left to advocates to do the work of the New Orleans Health Department,” she said.