THE STIGMA attached to youth infected and affected by HIV/AIDS is being seen as one reason why scores of teenagers are turning to gangs and putting their health and lives in danger with risky behaviours such as drug trafficking.
A situational assessment of Jamaican orphans and children made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS suggests that stigma contributes to more children being in trouble at school and results in rises in absenteeism, the number of street children, abuse, abandonment, suicide, early pregnancy, depression and crime.
"We have heard anecdotal evidence here about HIV-positive children being actively recruited as drug mules because the drug leaders say to them that if you are caught, you will be put into a children's home where you'll get treatment, and if you, for example, swallow drugs inside a condom and the condom bursts and you die, you were gonna die anyway," United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) consultant, Mark Loudon, told The Gleaner last week. "A lot of these kids are in a position where they need the money to survive," he said.
However, the Narcotics Division in Kingston said yesterday that it has had no reports of children being used as drug couriers.
The assessment, carried out over two weeks in May among caregivers, orphans and children living with HIV-positive parents in Jamaica, was commissioned by the counselling and caring committee of the National AIDS Committee and was funded by UNICEF.
Mr. Loudon and local consultant Hope Ramsay presented the assessment's findings last week during a two-day forum at the Altamont Court Hotel in New Kingston.
The forum was held to sensitise representatives from organisations involved in child care, welfare, development and health. Representatives also met to begin developing effective policy recommendations and strategies for a plan of action aimed at making sure the organisations, ranging from the national to the community level, respond quickly to needs of children orphaned or made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS.
Mr. Loudon said children who are "shifted" from one relative to another, as well as those who are stigmatised, stood a much higher risk of developing aberrant or dysfunctional behaviour.
"They become more prone to HIV exposure not from birth but through prostitution or drug use or to behaviour that may put them in danger," he said.
The presenters said that if there were no vaccine, cure or changes in behaviour, one in 20 Jamaican teenagers could die from AIDS.
In addition, the stigma, which is often based on ignorance, makes the experience worse for everyone involved. It also prevents several persons from accessing existing services, they said.
During the forum, health and child care representatives also debated whether medical officials should test street children without guardians' consent and if HIV-positive women should be given mandatory tubal ligations (tying the fallopian tubes) to prevent them from having children after discovering their HIV-positive status.
