On the most vivid side of the rhetoric, you will perhaps be carried through the story by more clamorous, and more extreme, journalistic HIV language: a lethal illness, sinful lifestyle and death verdict, just to mention a few epithets that some journalists tend to stamp their stories on the subject with.
“When it comes to covering HIV in the media, there are a lot of misstatements, sensationalism, even intolerance, which all works against HIV-positive people. Simply speaking, it pushes them deeper into the outcast territory,” says Daiva Ausėnaitė, a journalist who got hooked on the HIV issue in a strange way - teaching peers how to address the matter.
A butch lesbian and NGO behind the same table
To make the change, she founded a public institution with an intricate name - Information Dissemination Strategy (IDS) - that mostly focuses on raising HIV awareness.
When it comes to covering HIV in the media, there are a lot of misstatements, sensationalism, even intolerance, which all works against HIV-positive people.
A couple of years ago, the public entity was given a grant to carry out the project “On HIV for journalists and the public.”
What Daiva is engaged in most of the time does not probably seem very complicated: she is monitoring HIV-related stories in the Lithuanian print media and regularly brings together journalists covering health issues.
In the seminars she organizes, invitees come from astonishingly marginal layers of society: you may see an ex HIV-positive inmate, a butch lesbian, drug addicts, NGO and Health Ministry’s representatives elbowing each other behind a school-desk type table.
They come to talk about the virus and, some of them, about their lives with it. Throughout the discussions Daiva may refer to the biggest blunders and gaffes she may have stumbled upon in a recent story on the virus and its patients.
She would not refer to the journalists by their names, of course.
Superstitions still strong
“Part of the Lithuanian media tends to portray HIV patients as big-time debauchers who engage in shameless insatiable sexual activities, relished with drugs and alcohol. This kind of media representative rarely focuses on HIV carriers’ health issues, their right for free treatment and guarantees of necessary medicine,” Ausėnaitė says. She adds: “Such a stance only enhances the existing stereotypes and stigmatizes those people.”
The biggest reward for her is witnessing transformation, which, in fact, could be a matter of several hours.
“Many journalists come to our seminars believing that the virus is lethal and its carriers are mostly outcasts: drug users, hookers, and homosexuals. But in the seminars, they quickly discover how wrong with their prejudices and judgments they were,” Ausėnaitė noted to The Baltic Times.
“HIV is perhaps one of very few illnesses that are twined with an abundance of unsubstantiated superstitions, prejudice and, therefore, fears. Most of the time they are quite unfounded,” says the journalist.
Many believe that the virus is lethal and its carriers are mostly outcasts: drug users, hookers, and homosexuals.
Over 20 years, HIV treatment methods have advanced so significantly that the virus can be successfully subdued from developing into its final and so far lethal stage, AIDS, she claims.
The only HIV-field journalist
Ausėnaitė, an alumna of Vilnius University’s Institute of Journalism, had juggled different writing jobs before becoming what she calls a “health journalist.” In the Lithuanian print media, the specialization is a rarity even in the biggest dailies, and she is one of them. But her HIV interest narrows it to yet uncharted field of Lithuanian journalism - writing only on the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV.
“The whole issue of health is too wide to grasp the nitty-gritty, professionally. Therefore, with my long interest in HIV problems, I narrowed my focus on the subject,” explains the project spearhead.
She has been writing about HIV for over 10 years now. And not only this: with the project under way for two years, she is monitoring and scrutinizing what others produce on the subject.
Covering HIV and HIV patients’ problems is an extremely hard task for a journalist, Ausėnaitė claims.
“When it comes to quality writing on the matter, very few good and unbiased stories could be found in the pages. Sensationalism, stigmatization and sometimes sheer ignorance prevail. I dare say that even journalists who sincerely want to grasp the topic and put much effort into this, ultimately find themselves as if talking to the wind, so adverse, alien and repulsive the subject of HIV is to many newspeople, let alone readers,” the journalist asserts.
She says state health policy-makers, instead of contributing to raising HIV awareness, are often deliberately downplaying the importance and threat of the infection.
“Because of them we often see a distorted picture of the HIV situation: the illness rate is purportedly low and HIV patients are ostensibly satisfied with the treatments they receive. None is true,” the IDS head says.
Health policy-makers, instead of contributing to raising HIV awareness, are often deliberately downplaying the importance and threat of the infection.
She explains: “The rate is low because prophylactic programs do not work so well, like, for example, in Estonia, where over 8 thousand HIV carriers have been diagnosed. In other words, Estonians have worked out so effective HIV education and HIV testing programs that most of the carriers were diagnosed with HIV in initial stages. In Lithuania, however, we don’t have programs that are as successful, and most HIV patients learn about the virus only in its advanced stages. That is a big problem in Lithuania,” says the project leader.
People in the margins
Due to illusions that HIV is not an issue in Lithuania, she says, not only the patients, but also the entire public have succumbed to them. “Such a relaxed, downplayed stance has turned into a large-scale HIV pandemic in some countries. I am sure it will hit Lithuania soon if the approach doesn’t change,” Ausėnaitė says. She also encourages journalists to take a more critical stance against complacent state HIV policies.
She says that even seasoned journalist might find it hard to delve into the subject of HIV due to its marginality.
“Professor Artūras Tereškinas has come up with another term, describing HIV carriers as people of margins. I really like the expression,” says the IDS leader and goes on: “I guess the expression needs an explanation for some. Do you remember high school notebooks? What is right and normal, one writes in the pages until margins; these are left for incoherent, silly, and meaningless scribble. That is exactly what is happening with HIV carriers: they exist invisibly with their problems somewhere in the margins of the society.”
She says the state –and media! – is making a big mistake closing their eyes before the people in the margins.
“This mentality – the infection does not affect “normal” people, only those in the margins - is very strong and very wrong. Out of nearly 2,000 HIV carriers in Lithuania, there are many people who are coming from very respectable regular families and who themselves are neither a sexual minority, nor drug addicts,” the journalist says.
Lithuanians are shy to speak about sex
“Even if we were to sum up all those people that we often consider to be society’s outcasts - drug users, sex workers, homosexuals, ex-convicts, homeless – we’d have an army of 50-60,000 people, an entire sizeable Lithuanian town. Do we have a right to ignore them? No,” the human rights and HIV activist says with conviction.
According to her, the public has turned back to a considerable part of its society.
Out of nearly 2,000 HIV carriers in Lithuania, there are many people who comr from very respectable families and who are neither a sexual minority, nor drug addicts.
“Particularly to drugs users, as there is a strong notion that all attempts to bring the drug addict back to a normal life will be in vain. In Lithuania, a drug user caught even with a few pills will go behind bars indefinitely. Not to a doctor treating addictions, which is what the West is mulling to do with drug users in the near future,” Ausėnaitė notes.
Among the most deterrent reasons why many avoid the HIV subject, she says, is its connotations of sex, still a very inconvenient topic for many in the conservative Lithuania.
The NGO head remembers her interview with prominent Lithuanian psychotherapist and sexologist Viktoras Sapurovas.
“He acknowledged to me that his striving to speak about sex education to fifth graders back in the 1990s had led to pupils’ parents’ accusations of sexual harassment. To avoid the charges, he gave up these lessons, but he is still convinced that speaking about sexuality and physiological differences in early age helps bypass many problems during the teenage years,” the journalist recalls.
She adds: “Besides, keeping your mouth shut when it comes to sex enhances the separation of sex workers, who make up a significant part of the marginal group.”
Don’t hurt, help
Ausėnaitė points out that there are many sexual health topics local journalists tend to skip. “Well, maybe only with the exception of heterosexual prostitution. It is enough to write the word in a headline and the story’s success is guaranteed,” she says.
However, she points out, there are some specific sex topics, like inmates’ sexual relationships, that no one dares to take on, though such “unpopular themes”, she notes, bring rewards to Western journalists in different international writing competitions.
“In Latvia, for example, there are over 40,000 hepatitis C-infected inmates who will sooner or later be free and engage in heterosexual relations. If they do not protect their partners - which is hard to believe they will - their partners will have the infection transmitted to them. However, I’ve never seen the problem addressed in the Lithuanian media,” says the IDS head.
Still, limited HIV awareness, the marginality of the issue and the rigid state HIV policies, Ausėnaitė says, have contributed significantly to the fact that in Lithuania, the human immunodeficiency virus is being detected in most patients’ bodies at a late stage, when the virus is about to shape up into AIDS which is still lethal.
The HIV activist agrees that perhaps few journalists like to listen to a peer’s expressions of advice on how to write a story. Even on HIV and HIV patients.
“The bottom line is: write whatever you see has to be written, but remember not to hurt, but help the person you write about. This especially applies to journalists writing stories on HIV,” says Ausėnaitė.
