Widespread discrimination against children with HIV

Widespread discrimination against children with HIV in schools, medical facilities, orphanages, neighbourhoods and their own homes is fuelling the AIDS epidemic in India, says a new report by Human Rights Watch, a US-based charity.

“Doctors, both government and private, have refused to treat and sometimes even touch HIV-positive children,” says the report, titled ‘Future Forsaken: Abuses Against Children Affected by HIV/AIDS in India’, released in New Delhi on July 29.

“Discrimination, combined with corruption and a failing public health system, leaves many children living with HIV/AIDS without even the rudiments of healthcare.”

Often, children from families affected by AIDS are forced to drop out of school to care for sick parents or to work, or are orphaned. They are often pushed onto the streets, forced into the worst forms of child labour, or otherwise exploited, raising the HIV risk, the report says.

“If the Indian government is serious about fighting the country’s AIDS epidemic, it should stop ignoring children affected by AIDS and start protecting them from abuse,” said Zama Coursen-Neff, the report’s author and senior researcher with Human Rights Watch’s children’s rights division, in a press note.

In India, hundreds of thousands of children are living with HIV/AIDS, according to official statistics.

The Human Rights Watch report supports its claims with a few case studies of children living with HIV/AIDS.

Six-year-old Anu P’s teacher sent her home from kindergarten, telling her older sister to tell her not to return to school. Her grandfather, who had been caring for Anu and her siblings since their parents died of AIDS, was afraid that if he protested her elder sister might be sent home as well.

A nearby private doctor told Anu’s family not to bring the girl to his clinic, “because if you do, other people won’t come,” the report says.