On World AIDS Day Let’s Promote Prevention Policies that Actually Work!

On December 1, the United Nations (UN) celebrates World AIDS Day, highlighting the need to end the AIDS pandemic and to alleviate the suffering of those living with HIV and AIDS.

On this World AIDS Day, we recognize the many orphans who no longer have a family due to HIV/AIDS. We also commemorate those families who have adopted orphans and provided a safe and loving home. We implore you to watch this moving video and share it to remind us of the true inequality of AIDS for orphans, like Luis, Amelia and Afonso, who watched their father, mother and older brother die from this deadly disease.

For decades the HIV/AIDS pandemic has been exploited by sexual rights activists within UN agencies and by a number of Western countries and well-funded NGOs to advance a radical sexual rights agenda. Sadly, this is often done at the expense of enacting proven, effective, commonsense HIV prevention policies.

Despite a significant reduction in new infections among homosexual men in Western countries since 1996, according to statistics released in 2018 by UNAIDS, the risk of HIV acquisition among men who have sex with men was 28 times higher than it was among heterosexual men. The risk of acquiring HIV for people who inject drugs was 22 times higher than for people who do not inject drugs, 13 times higher for female sex workers than adult women aged 15-49, and 13 times higher for transgender women than adults aged 15-49 years.

We should approach individuals living with HIV/AIDS with compassion and truth. While no one should be stigmatized based on their HIV status, the truth is that certain behaviors put people at the highest risk for contracting the deadly HIV virus, and those behaviors should be stigmatized. Yet HIV/AIDS policies promoted by UN agencies increasingly are calling for the destigmatization of the very same behaviors that research shows are driving the AIDS pandemic.

Sexual rights activists use deceptive strategies to hijack billions of dollars of aid money allocated globally for HIV prevention, treatment, and care to advance controversial sexual rights. They do this at the expense of promoting the truly lifesaving prevention policies that could and should discourage the highest risk sexual behaviors for contracting HIV.

Instead of destigmatizing and celebrating dangerous behaviors, Family Watch International calls on governments to conduct public safety campaigns that identify specific behaviors that carry high risks for acquiring HIV infection and discourage them.

Let’s also, as a world community, rally around the many orphans who have lost their parents to AIDS and who need a loving family.