As a licensed counselor, a gay man, and a man who has lived with first
AIDS and then just an HIV infection for over 30 years, I have long been interested in how we, as a community deal with disease, particularly infectious disease. I have also long been interested in the judicial system. In the early 1970s, I worked both in a Youth Correction Center and as a consultant for prison reform. I was very much aware that the approach to the large number of people who were arrested, charged, convicted and later incarcerated was labeling people as criminals. Sometimes, even still today, the community distinguished between so called white collar crimes and
other crimes. What was consistent was that the entire community seemed to be labeled as either victims or perpetrators. Either directly or indirectly, those of us who were not yet incarcerated and were affected by the "criminal activity" were labeled as victims. Those who were accused, charged, and convicted of criminal activity were labeled as perpetrators. Anyone who worked in any capacity in jails or prisons quickly realized that there was a culture of fear and violence. The approach to this was to use more punishment, more fear, and more labeling.
When the AIDS/HIV epidemic arrived for its prolonged visit, the initial approach was to label everyone who contracted the disease through sexual activity as the deserved victims and then as perpetrators. Those who got the disease through routes other than sexual transmission were victims. One of the early recommendations was to quarantine all the perpetrators which included all the non-victims with the illness. The prevailing myth was this was the gay plagues which only added another level of justification for the system to labeling.
At some point a few people in the community decided to make some changes to the approach. These changes included:
1. Label people with AIDS/HIV as people living with AIDS instead of either people dying with AIDS or bad, evil people who were getting what they deserved for disobeying God and having gay sex.
2. Forming task forces and support services including a buddy system
which included assigning someone to those living with the illness who needed help of any sort.
3. Pushing or lobbying for more money for research and treatment.
These simple changes signaled the initial movement towards slowing down the epidemic. Although it is still a growing disease in some parts of the United States, it is no longer, for the most part, the frightening disease affecting bad or sinful people. It is very simply an infectious disease which we know how to prevent and how to treat.
There may be those in some religious circles who continue to blame sin for people contracting the illness, but, for the most part, it is accepted as an illness which needs to be treated as any other illness.
Dr. Gary Slutkin who for many years worked for the World Health Organization and other organizations to help combat tuberculosis, cholera, and AIDS returned to work in his home city of Chicago in the late 1990s and noticed the high rate of violence including killings. He began to apply his knowledge of infectious disease to the pattern of the spread of violence. He proposed that violence could be treated as any other infectious disease. The reason why patterns of violence tended to occur in clusters if one marked incidences on a map was that like any other infectious disease, once a certain approach to issues is used in a community that approach or way of thinking spreads to others. He suggested that first the community needed to quit using such loaded terms as victims and perpetrators. He and some others who worked with him began to talk about violence interrupters or mediators. They then tried this approach in a neighborhood in Chicago - Garfield Park. During the first year of the program there was a 67%
reduction in the amount of violence (studies vary in terms of the percentage but none of the study results was less than 28% reduction). The approach has since been successful in over 20 cities in the United States and in many other countries. For more about this approach, one can listen to Dr. Slutkin on Ted Talks on Ted.com.
Sadly, overall as a society, we in the United States continue to think in terms of victims and perpetrators. Whether we are approaching domestic violence, so called domestic terrorist activity, or international terrorism or violence we respond to violence with violence. We add to the culture of violence which tends to engender more violence which ... Even former heads of intelligence in Israel have stated in the film, "The Gatekepers," that once a conflict starts the goal is revenge and not peace or justice.
It is always interesting to me that as many so-called Christian Churches in the United States approach the anniversary of September 11 the thinking continues to be in terms of victims and perpetrators. This is also true regarding how we, as a whole, view other incidences of mass killings or even the isolated killings in a community. Although, Christian churches claim to honor that Jesus fellow as the head of the church, those same churches have a very difficult time letting go of the labels of victims and perpetrators.
Just as the disciples tried to remind Jesus that someone was a prostitute or some other bad person, we continue to be most comfortable with labels indicating which are the good and which are the bad people. We may know that Jesus said we must forgive seventy times seven times, but we convince ourselves that that does not apply to most situations. We may know something about systems but we do not apply that knowledge to the fact that meanness begets meanness, being judgmental begets being judgmental,
violence begets violence. Jesus, the Buddha and Mohammed claimed that love begets love begets love begets love ....
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