The women of France's Femmes Positives want the right to put their infectors behind bars. Are these fired-up females traitors to people with HIV—or just protecting their sisters?
Last
November, a distraught 24-year-old woman named Aurore forever
transformed France’s bitter debate over criminalizing HIV transmission.
In June 2004, Aurore’s ex-boyfriend, a 31-year-old bus driver named
Christophe Morat, had been sentenced to six years in prison for
infecting her and another woman with HIV. His conviction was an
unlikely victory for Aurore: France has no HIV- criminalization law,
and Morat, prosecuted under a non-HIV-specific statute, was only the
second person in that country to go to jail for passing on the virus.
Yet
Aurore, who didn’t find out Morat had HIV until after their six-month relationship ended, was deeply troubled. Morat had appealed his
conviction, and many expected him to win: AIDES, France’s largest, most
powerful AIDS service organization, had hired a high-profile lawyer to
defend him. AIDES warned that Morat’s conviction could jeopardize sane
public-health policy, especially the time-honored notion that
preventing HIV transmission is the “shared responsibility” of both
sexual partners.
Aurore would never know the outcome of the
case. In the early morning of November 1, the day before Morat’s appeal
would be decided, she got behind the wheel of a black Volkswagen. Then,
speeding down an empty rural road in France’s Alsace region, she aimed
her car at a solitary tree. Her body was found beside her crushed
vehicle. Morat’s hearing was postponed so Aurore’s family could bury
her and grieve. “When Aurore killed herself, I felt guilty,” says
Barbara Wagner, 36, president of Femmes Positives, a controversial
organization for women infected by their primary partners. “Her lawyer
didn’t see her despair. I thought I should have tried harder to reach
her, but I didn’t know how far to go.” Two months later, Morat’s appeal
was denied.
Aband of some 70 novice activists, Femmes Positives
champions women who allege that they were infected by men who knowingly
withheld or lied about their HIV status. With no office and virtually
no funding, the 2-year-old organization, based in Marseille, has
rattled France’s Paris-centered, gay-dominated AIDS community: The
members want a law criminalizing HIV transmission in cases like
Aurore’s—and their own. The women of Femmes Positives say they trusted
the men who infected them and scoff at the notion that they shirked
their responsibility to protect themselves. “We are victims of people
who used HIV as a weapon,” says the thin, pensive, dark-haired Wagner,
never far from a Marlboro Red. “As long as there is no law, they will
keep on.”
By branding themselves victims, the members of
Femmes Positives are anathema to other French AIDS organizations,
founded, like their U.S. counterparts, on PWA empowerment. But Femmes
Positives refuses to wait for anyone’s approval to pursue its heretical
agenda. The group is already consulting with Jean Roatta, a member of
France’s ruling UMP party—center right and tough on crime—to craft an
HIV-transmission law. What’s more, another UMP politician unconnected
with Femmes Positives has requested that France’s National Assembly
debate HIV criminalization. Femmes Positives’ rightist collaboration
enrages and terrifies many AIDS activists, who believe that if UMP—or,
worse, France’s far-right Front National party—takes charge of creating
an HIV-specific transmission law, irrationally stiff penalties could
result, as could the targeting of immigrants, one of France’s most
at-risk populations.
The U.S. may never face a battle like
France’s: 24 U.S. states generally or specifically criminalize HIV
transmission. Some 142 people in the U.S. have been convicted for
HIV-related offenses. But the concept that everyone is responsible for
protecting himself or herself from HIV during consensual sexual acts— so-called “shared responsibility”—is as entrenched here as it is
in Europe. What’s more, the dispute between Femmes Positives and
France’s AIDS community could have global implications: Worldwide, more
than four-fifths of new HIV infections in women result from sex with
husbands or primary partners. What would happen if such women—not gay
men, the West’s first hard-hit population—got to make the rules about
HIV prevention? Didier Lestrade, 47, the legendary founder of ACT UP
Paris and a defender of Femmes Positives, says gay men have subscribed
to “shared responsibility”—in French, responsabilité partagée—for too
long. “It took two straight women,” he says, referring to Aurore and
Isabelle, the other woman who pressed charges against Morat, “to
make the shit hit the fan.”
Femmes
Positives began, in 2003, with limited ambitions. “We just wanted to
talk about the problems of living with HIV as women,” says cofounder
Cristal (not her real name), a cheerful 42-year-old who beat an
HIV-related cancer in 1992. Cristal says she was infected by a
boyfriend who hadn’t revealed his status. The other cofounder, who
declined to speak to POZ, is a mother of four who reportedly was
infected by her unfaithful husband.
Word quickly spread about
Femmes Positives, and its mission and membership expanded. Some members
are supportive HIV positive straight and gay men (anyone can join by
paying a 15 euro annual fee). But the core demographic are white,
middle- and low-income women in their twenties, thirties and forties,
many of them single mothers. Along with the typical burdens of HIV—med
side effects, loss of sexuality, discrimination—the women of Femmes
Positives say their confidence in relationships has been destroyed and
their financial security jeopardized. Their children, they contend, are
burdened with fear, knowing that their mothers have a potentially fatal
disease. Many members admit to grappling with suicide, but struggle on
for their kids. “Rationally, you know there are meds,” says Wagner, who
lives off public assistance and has a 14-year-old son, “but there’s so
much pressure and anguish. Suicide seems easier than living in
suffering.” The young Aurore’s death has made her a Femmes Positives
martyr. “Her suicide,” says Wagner, “was symbolic.”
The women
of Femmes Positives contend that they are accidental activists, pushed
into fighting for their rights as victims because the AIDS
establishment—from street activists like ACT UP to crisis hotlines to
traditional ASOs—adhere slavishly to responsabilité partagée. That
doctrine infuriates Marie-Christine Stipo, 36, a self-possessed single
mother—and the only member of Femmes Positives besides Wagner who has
allowed the press to show her face and use her full name. She says her
ex-boyfriend lied about his status the first time they slept together.
“I’m tired of being told I should have made him wear a condom,” she
explains. “He didn’t give me a choice of how to deal with the fact that
he had HIV.” Stipo calls her ex an “assassin” and says she “felt
raped.” Indeed, Lestrade believes that ASOs have treated women such as
Marie-Christine like “rape victims who are told, ‘You asked for it.’”
Femmes
Positives’ sole pamphlet says the group seeks the “clear exposition…of
the rights and status of victims of [people who have hidden their HIV
status]” and a “judicial pronouncement…that will end this kind of
‘crime.’” Five of its members—including Stipo and Wagner—are pressing
charges under non-HIV statutes against their infectors. But the women
of Femmes Positives, who wear their victim status like red ribbons, are
dauntingly contradictory. There is much ambivalence within the group
about how far a transmission law should go. Stipo, who has an
11-year-old daughter, originally thought a long sentence would show her
ex-boyfriend “he had done something wrong,” but now thinks a few months
would suffice. Wagner acknowledges that the six years Aurore’s
infector, Christophe Morat, received is “a lot.” Cristal goes so far as
to say she is against criminalizing altogether—but that Wagner’s
pro-criminalization stance “represents who we are.” Nearly every time
criminalization comes up, Femmes Positives advances the possibility of
rehabilitative work programs or mandatory counseling instead of prison.
The group even acknowledges that Morat was driven to put women at risk
by the fear of rejection. One member, Roger, 36, says, “Morat was in
denial—that could happen to anyone.”
While Femmes Positives
has yet to crystallize the details, members say that, fundamentally, a
law punishing infectors would provide a crucial symbolic acknowledgment
that they have been wronged. The group also knows that the
criminalization question is its trump card. “It’s the only way to get
media attention and raise people’s consciousness,” says Cristal. And
media attention, unquestionably, is the source of Femmes Positives
influence. “Gay AIDS organizations have had a lobby for 20 years,”
Wagner says. “Without the media attention we’ve gotten, they would have
crushed us.” She adds that Femmes Positives is not homophobic, and
Lestrade concurs. Says Wagner, “It’s not homophobic to say that women
have been neglected.”
Wagner’s
own story reaches back over a decade. She recounts it—smoking, of
course—on her cramped Marseille apartment’s futon. Above her hangs a
bloodred flag bearing Che Guevara’s image and the phrase Hasta la
victoria siempre— always toward victory. (“Obviously, I’m a leftist,”
she says.) Wagner, who has been on meds since the mid-’90s but recently
went on a drug holiday due to side effects, lives with her 14-year-old
son, Romain. He plays Grand Theft Auto with the sound off, as his
mother explains how she met her infector, a charming, successful
photojournalist, on a 1992 trip to Nice. The two fell in love, and six
months later, Wagner and 1-year-old Romain moved to Paris to live with
him.
Wagner says she and her ex never discussed HIV in the
context of their relationship. “At the time,” she says, “heterosexuals
weren’t informed that they were at risk.” Then, in 1993, after a
gynecologist urged her to get tested, Wagner was diagnosed. She says
that her partner contracted the virus while addicted to heroin and was
in denial that he could give her HIV: “He told me, ‘I thought our love
was stronger than the virus.’” He tried to dismiss her fear of dying,
she says, but it was the pre-HAART era. She dreaded leaving Romain
motherless. “The sky fell. I thought, ‘I have to say good-bye to my
life,’” Wagner says. She also discovered that her boyfriend’s family
had long known that he was positive. “His mother told me, ‘We didn’t
think you were strong enough to handle it.’” Afraid to tell anyone else
she was positive for fear of losing custody of her son and feeling
utterly isolated, Wagner attempted suicide. “I took pills and drank
Pastis 51 all day,” she says, pantomiming raising a bottle to her lips.
Wagner’s life improved, briefly, with the arrival of
combination therapy in 1996. Although she and her estranged boyfriend
continued to live together, Wagner’s doctor insisted she pull herself
together emotionally. “Otherwise, don’t bother taking the meds,” he
said. Wagner also got a taste of PWA empowerment—and the female
disempowerment that drives her today. She dabbled in activism,
participating in an ACT UP action against Pfizer. As a woman infected
by her boyfriend, she says she found little sympathy from her fellow
activists. “They only cared about treatment access,” Wagner says. ASOs
were understanding, but urged her to put the past behind her.
Wagner
eventually left her boyfriend and moved back to Marseille. Some time
later, her ex confessed that he’d been having an affair—and unprotected
sex—with a 40-year-old mother. “That,” says Wagner “woke me up. I
wanted to stop him.” She discovered Femmes Positives in 2003, and the
group put her in touch with a sympathetic attorney. But Wagner
isn’t optimistic about her case against her ex-boyfriend. The
poisoning law under which she’s pursuing him has a three-year statute
of limitations and has proved futile in other HIV-related suits. If a prosecutor throws out her case, she’ll try the civil courts. “I know I
probably won’t win,” she says, “but I’m fighting to protect other
women.”
That sense of sisterhood is also what inspired her to
become president of Femmes Positives. She spearheaded the group’s
involvement in the Morat trial. Femmes Positives joined Aurore and
Isabelle’s case as a civil, or supporting, party. Wagner was present
when Morat’s appeal was denied, and she was quoted in major newspapers,
praising Morat’s conviction and lambasting ASOs for responsabilité
partagée. Sympathetic profiles of Femmes Positives followed,
culminating in a segment on Envoyé Spécial, France’s most respected
television newsmagazine. Wagner became, once and for all, a national
figure on France’s AIDS scene.
Wagner and Femmes Positives can
already claim one victory. The day the Envoyé Spécial segment aired,
the president of AIDES, Christian Saout, made a remarkable admission in
an editorial in the newspaper Le Monde. The head of one of Europe’s
foremost ASOs admitted that responsabilité partagée, the HIV- prevention
tenet that the entire French AIDS community had relied upon for two
decades to stem the tide of the epidemic, was a “true failure.” He
explained that the doctrine was a product of ’80s gay culture but no
longer sufficed against an increasingly heterosexual epidemic, where
the power dynamic between men and women put women at a disadvantage. It
was time, he said, for a new principle that would combine both
“informed consent” and responsabilité partagée. The editorial refers to
Femmes Positives only obliquely—and never to Aurore. Although Saout, an
Adidas-wearing former judge, told POZ that AIDES may some day reconcile
with Femmes Positives, he’s embittered by their “troublemaking” at
Morat’s hearing. “That wasn’t very chic,” he says.
Not
all HIV positive Frenchwomen agree with Femmes Positives’ crusade.
Catherine Kapusta, who organized France’s first major summit on HIV and
women in 2004, says the group’s emphasis on victimization is
antifeminist. Morat’s conviction, she adds, will exacerbate “the fear
of people with HIV and of getting infected.” ACT UP Paris’ Marjolaine
Degremont says, “Femmes Positives makes me very scared.” She believes
that prosecuting people with HIV creates “good people with HIV, who are
victims of bad people with HIV.” French AIDS activists of all stripes
say that turning over public-health policy to government prosecutors
would be disastrous: People will stop getting tested because they can’t
be prosecuted if they don’t know their status. People with HIV will
shoulder all the responsibility for not transmitting the virus, thereby
encouraging HIV negative people to abandon safe-sex practices. In
addition, conditions for HIV positive prisoners, who already experience
brutal treatment and inadequate care, might worsen.
Involving
a UMP deputy, critics add, could make criminalizing HIV especially
problematic. UMP came to power on a law-and-order platform; if it
authors an HIV transmission law, many fear its penalties could be
stricter than the six years Morat got. Olivier Jablonski of the
prevention website Warning says that if France’s extreme-right Front
National party gets involved, it could “lead to a catastrophic
outcome.” Front National has advocated for quarantining people with HIV
and routinely scapegoats immigrants; HIV criminalization could give the
party an incendiary rallying cry.
Survivreausida (“Surviving
AIDS”), a website for HIV positive immigrants (mostly African) and
people from France’s ghettoized banlieue, or suburbs, has voiced the
strongest opposition to HIV criminalization and Femmes Positives,
calling them “reactionary,” “repressive” and “venomous.” The site,
which has published numerous testimonies of positive women who are
anti-criminalization, points out that European countries with HIV
transmission laws use them disproportionately against immigrants.
Survivreausida
has also published an “open letter” from Youcef Ameur, a recent
ex-boyfriend of Wagner’s who was expelled from Femmes Positives last
March. Ameur claims that his former colleagues “don’t seek justice but
extol punishment and vengeance.” It was Ameur who alerted the
press and other AIDS groups that Femmes Positives had met with Roatta’s
staff. During that meeting, one Roatta staff member compared men who
consciously transmit the virus to terrorists. “I looked at Barbara and
the others,” Ameur says. “They just nodded.” Ameur, who is of Algerian
descent, also claims that Femmes Positives has disregarded immigrant
women, the majority of France’s female HIV cases. (France started
mandatory HIV case reporting in 2003, so statistics are trickling in.
Preliminary numbers show that women accounted for almost half of new
infections in 2004. 120,000 to 150,000 of France’s 60 million people
have HIV.)
Saout, who stops short of categorically
opposing criminalization, says
IS IT JUST A FRENCH THING?
Shirlene Cooper, 42 community organizer, New York City AIDS Housing Network "If you know you have HIV and you pass it on to me, that is a crime, sure as putting your hand on a gun and pulling the
trigger. I would definitely press charges. If you have HIV, you should
do your best to protect others. I didn’t get HIV by myself."
Annette Lizzul, 43 AIDS activist "I probably wouldn’t have pressed charges against my husband
when I was diagnosed—I was young and in love. Now, I’d go after him
with a vengeance. But it’s a catch-22. I hate the idea of criminalizing
HIV. What if I gave it to someone unknowingly? But there’s also gotta
be protection. A law would make men think twice. "
Susan Rodriguez, 45 president of SMART University, an ASO for women "I
don’t know all of the details about [these particular women], but it
definitely shows that women need more control in HIV prevention— we need
to put more money into microbicide research and make microbicides."
that AIDES remains at odds with Femmes
Positives’ raison d’être. “We are not a victim’s organization,” he
says. “We combat AIDS.” He points out that AIDES provides extensive
support services for women, many of whom were infected by their primary
partners—and didn’t press charges.
Femmes Positives answers
that a law criminalizing HIV will deter infectors. Members also say
that it won’t discourage testing—because few people get tested anyway.
As for working with UMP, Wagner says Femmes Positives has little
choice: One left-wing politician told the group that “the issue was too
hot, you can’t put positive people in prison.” She believes that media
pressure will force the left to get involved, adding that “we’re
careful that any [criminalization] law will not be repressive.” Wagner
claims that Femmes Positives is “open” organization and all women,
including immigrants, are welcome. She won’t apologize for concurring
with the UMP staffer who compared infectors to terrorists. “In the pure
sense of the term, that’s right,” says Wagner, “it’s terrorizing.” As
for acting out of vengeance, Stipo says, “If I had wanted revenge, I
would have shot my ex in the head.”
Lestrade
discounts activists’ fears of right-wing repression. The true conflict
between Femmes Positives and other AIDS organizations isn’t right
versus left, he says, but “gay versus straight.” According to Lestrade,
these working-class mothers and single women have unwittingly exposed
an unpleasant truth to mainstream French society: The gay community
doesn’t want to deal honestly with the dangers and ethics of HIV
transmission—look no further, he says, than France’s unchecked
barebacking crisis. “Gays are afraid that [people with HIV acting [irresponsibly] will give them a bad reputation. People will have the
right to wonder, ‘You have everything, you have free treatment, and
this is how you behave?’” (In France, meds are free.) As a result, the
gay community could face not only embarrassment—but become a target
itself. “We believed justice would never come,” Lestrade says
ominously. “Now, it just might.” Lestrade, the website Warning and
others point out that gay men have also suffered from the notion of
responsabilité partagée. André Sarcq, a gay man who says another man
knowingly infected him, published an editorial in Le Monde. “[I] have
been destroyed, and it’s been decided that counts for nothing,” he
wrote.
Despite all the heated rhetoric, a major Paris powwow
on criminalization this spring didn’t become the ugly slugfest most
expected. Participants say a true exchange of ideas emerged. An
unusually upbeat Wagner, the event’s star speaker, says that “it was
super. We finally were able to clearly express ourselves to 150
people—and everyone stayed to the very end.” “People” included France’s
AIDS elite: Saout, ACT UP, Survivreausida, Warning, LeStrade and many
others.
But the current calm is unlikely to last: Numerous
high-stakes battles loom—and not just in the French National Assembly.
Unlike AIDES, France’s National Council on AIDS, which advises the
government on HIV policy, has yet to abandon responsabilité partagée.
Christophe Morat has appealed his conviction to a higher court, and
observers believe that he has an excellent chance of having his sentence
overturned. Meanwhile, two more women are pressing charges against him.
And this time, both women have asked Wagner and Femmes Positives for
help.
Whether Wagner can continue in her new role as women’s-
rights crusader is also uncertain. When asked where she sees herself in
10 years, she replies, “I don’t. I’m ashamed to say that because I have
a child. I can’t believe I’m still here, fighting.” And even if
Wagner holds on and Femmes Positives gets the legal recognition it so
badly craves, there remains a deeply personal wound that no law can
ever heal. Wagner says she is in regular contact with Isabelle, the
other woman besides Aurore who initially brought charges against Morat.
“She’s not doing well,” Wagner says. “Christophe didn’t look her in the
eye and say he was sorry. How will she feel when he gets out? She has
to move on.” The lack of an apology from her own infector haunts
Wagner, too. “If he had said he was sorry,” she says. “I never would
have joined Femmes Positives.”
