Charged with First Degree Murder

I was watching the news last night with my mother and was quite distressed at what I saw. A man living in Hamilton (Ontario, Canada) has been charged with first degree murder.

You see, this man is HIV positive, and he knowingly had unprotected sex with 13 different women. Of these 13 women, 7 of them have now tested positive for HIV. 2 of those 7 women have died.

I’ve seen some arguements on the internet and opinions are mixed. Some people say that it was the responsibility of these women to find out who they are sleeping with. Others say that such logic would imply that it is up to a woman to know that the person she’s dating is a rapist, or if someone who happens to be in a bank and gets shot by the robber is actually at fault for being shot.

While I do believe that you should be careful whenever you engage in any sort of sexual activity with another person, it’s also difficult in that this person may be someone you’ve known for a while and has flat out denied/lied to your face about having such a disease.

I know that Lupus is nothing like the HIV virus in that I cannot spread this disease to anyone else through sexual contact. That being said, I know all of the problems and pain I’ve gone through because of Lupus. I wouldn’t wish Lupus upon anyone! If Lupus were somehow contagious, I would do everything and anything possible to prevent myself from spreading it to anyone else. Anyone who thinks otherwise is completely selfish. Bottom line.

I was watching a documentary once about the horrible epidemic of AIDS in Africa. This is a story close to my heart since both of my parents are Nigerian. While I was watching this documentary, I learned about one of the many reasons this disease is so rampant in Africa.

In some cases, there is some sort of belief that if a man has AIDS, if he finds a young virgin and rapes her (or otherwise has sexual intercourse with her) that he will be cured of AIDS as it’ll be passed on to this young female virgin. What makes it worse, you ask? Well, the mentality is also “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”. It’s so unfortunate that people are actually being raped because of the false belief that having intercourse with a virgin will cure you of the HIV virus and or AIDS. The particular case I mention above, the man involved was born in Uganda. I don’t know if his act has anything to do with this belief, but either way it is simply horrible that many people’s lives have been forever changed and possibly shortened because of this disease.

While I was watching this story on the news, both of the this Ugandan born man’s lawyers were stating that these two women had cancer and they died of cancer. Hmm, what a coincidence that both of these woman should both die of cancer and both had relations with the accussed?

I just thought I’d write about this as it disturbed me so.