Children are being turned away from schools, clinics and orphanages because they or their family members are HIV-positive. Human Rights Watch in its in depth report has listed number of cases of children who had been denied admission to school in —Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Maharashtra.
The best-publicized case of children being denied access to school is that of Bency and Benson (their real names), two HIV-positive orphans in Kerala who were six and eight years old at the time I interviewed their grand parents in late 2003.
In contrast with the cases above, I also found instances in which well-informed NGOs and individual teachers had successfully educated school officials and other parents about HIV and gained the admission and acceptance of HIV-positive children. The director of a hospice in rural Tamil Nadu and NGOs in Chennai were able to get HIV-positive children into schools by educating school officials. While, these interventions were the exception, they demonstrate that discriminatory practices are not inevitable or cultural but instead can be and have been successfully challenged by courageous individuals.
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