|
NEGATIVE If you checked your on-campus mail this week you were fortunate enough to receive an invite to the social work department’s “AIDS/HIV Testing Fair” Friday. If you go between 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday to Frog Fountain you can listen to music, get free pizza and a T-shirt and you can participate in a raffle. Oh, by the way, you have to get tested for HIV at a central campus location and in front of your fellow students in order to participate in the festivities. Give the social work department bonus points for letting students test in such an inconspicuous forum. Testing for HIV is something important and it’s great that this service will be provided on campus, even if it is just for one day. However, transforming a service that should be kept discreet and confidential into a “fair” located in the center of campus and right smack in the middle of class and lunch times cannot be the best approach. It’s hard to imagine how the administration ever approved of this festive “fair” to begin with. This is true without even mentioning the fact that the T-shirts to be handed out announce to the world that the person wearing it has, in fact, been tested for HIV. Why not go the whole nine yards and send out shirts stating whether you tested positive or negative for HIV. We can do the same with other venereal diseases too. Surely, everyone wants an “I tested positive for gonorrhea” shirt, right? While this approach may be a positive step in removing the stigma from this disease, a fair to raise information about testing followed by a day of testing in the Brown-Lupton Health Center may have been a better option. If you don’t mind letting a judgmental world assume you’ve had unprotected sex, then enjoy the pizza and music. But most people aren’t that secure and, hopefully, the next time an event like this occurs it will allow for students to test secretly and keep their private lives just that. |
|
|
TCU Daily Skiff © 2002 |
||