This “HIV training”, however, when shaped by common sense, most of the time results in mistaken constructions of stigmatization and blaming of people living with HIV/AIDS, causing a marked feeling of judgment and discrimination in them, which we call serophobia.
Any citizen, therefore, who is born in Brazil and grows up on autopilot, has a high chance of being serophobic.
Examples of these mistaken constructions that commonly circulate are ideas such as “To end the HIV epidemic, it’s easy, just use a condom” or “You got HIV because you did something wrong”.
Constructions like these not only do not help control new infections, but they also place the enormous weight of blame for the epidemic on the shoulders of people living with this virus. After all, it can be concluded that “they took it because they wanted to”.
The dynamics of the HIV/AIDS epidemic are much more complex than that. It is influenced by numerous factors that include individual and biological ones, such as the number of sexual partners an individual has, the type of sex practiced and the use of prevention methods; but also due to social determinants, such as barriers to access to education, health, security and citizenship.
To put it bluntly, in addition to sex without a condom, LGBTphobia, poverty, lack of education, machismo, substance abuse, the absence of a reception network and the non-implementation of public prevention policies also act as fuels for the spread of HIV.
