Copping it to the cops

The local beat cop is the biggest stumbling block to HIV/AIDS intervention, it is time to correct his misapprehensions and lack of knowledge and use him as a prime facilitator

Safi Ahsan Rizvi Saharanpur

With nearly 40 million people reported as being infected and the virus showing no signs of containment, the world is heading for a disaster distinct from all others — we knew it was coming. While the global war on AIDS has come a long way — the thinking, the approach, the medium of information dissemination are all in place — the epidemic is galloping. The worker, together with her intervention programme at the grassroots, is fighting a hard battle in the face of intolerance, ignorance and overwhelming indifference. In what is known as the first phase, HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programmes have managed to raise the level of awareness in most regions; in the second phase, they have added support functions. But they have left a gap with regard to addressing the problems posed by disabling and non-facilitating environments in which these strategies have to be implemented.

Most of the highly-vulnerable target groups have been stigmatised by their social environment/s and, most crucially, are even treated as some sort of criminal violators. Typical of the Asia-Pacific region are the economically-developing nations, where civil society is yet to develop the power of its counterpart in the developed world. Some of these nations still need police and armed forces to conduct free elections. For lack of alternatives, the law enforcement officer (LEO) is the only visible arm of the State that works, is effective, and is, therefore, respected and even held in awe, especially in the vast rural countryside, which is home to 80 per cent of the population of many nations.

Currently, the typical Asia-Pacific LEO will reflexively propel the CSW (commercial sex worker), the IDU (injecting drug user) and MSM (men having sex with men) to jail at the very first instance; he will also include the local civil society in further stigmatising these vulnerable communities. This is distressing, given the fact that the ubiquitous local flatfoot is of prime importance as facilitator and enabler of all HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programmes.

In October 2004, I conducted a survey of 800 police officers of all ranks in district Saharanpur, northwest Uttar Pradesh, on their perceptions of the six most vulnerable HIV communities. The survey threw up startling results. The prevalent worldview of these communities is almost entirely lost on the beat cop who, for lack of personal knowledge and appreciation of the issues, is unwittingly becoming the biggest roadblock to an enabling environment for HIV/AIDS intervention strategies in the country.

The policeman looks down on all sex workers as irredeemable "whores" who have destroyed the fabric of decent society with their trade and must be stopped at all cost. The law enforcer is least informed of the fact that if the sex trade goes underground, the probability of prevention strategies reaching these women will touch zero. Also, the hardnosed attitude of the LEO increases the difficulty of the infection prevention programme from reaching the minds of these socially-discarded few, one of the most marginalised vulnerable groups.