The Martlet

An HIV-positive Victoria man is heading to jail for having unprotected sex with women without telling them he has the virus that causes AIDS.

Zimbabwe-native Charles Kokanai Mzite, 36, was convicted on March 2 of four acts of aggravated sexual assault. The women who testified against him each said that if they had known his HIV status they would have ended the relationship. One of the women, a single mother, now carries the virus herself.

As you can imagine, this made for sensational headlines in local papers since the trial began in the B.C. Supreme Court last November. Undeniably, it’s a terrible thing that happened to the women, especially for the one who now must live with a fatal virus.

Evidence suggested that Mzite knew he had the virus since 1995, but he didn’t take precautions to keep from spreading the virus. That is his crime: a lack or precaution — not that he had HIV.

I don’t think the coverage of the case made that clear. People with HIV can have safe, healthy sex lives. They are not criminals, though people like Mzite do much to perpetuate the stigma against them.

Antiretroviral therapy is such that HIV-positive individuals without sexually transmitted infections are sexually non-infectious, according to the Swiss Federal Commission for HIV/AIDS. And condoms are a very effective barrier against sexual transmission of the virus.

But to take these precautions, you need to be able to tell your partner you have the virus. And as the women in court made clear, that confession would have meant the end of the relationship.

Today, an HIV-positive immigrant like Mzite would have been denied entry into the country. He would not have been allowed to be tested for the virus anonymously like he did in 2001, which allowed him to tell his partner his result was negative without the clinic reporting him to a medical health officer and alerting his partners.

Taking away these individual freedoms isn’t addressing the root of why people might hide their HIV-status and continue high-risk behaviour. It’s not easy to tell somebody you have HIV, and it’s not easy to ask.

On the day Mzite was convicted, the Times Colonist ran a file photo of him smiling with members of Jambanja, the popular marimba band that he used to perform with in downtown Victoria and on festival circuits. A friend of mine, one of Mzite’s former band mates, was also in the photo. Like most people in Victoria, I am just one degree of separation away from Mzite.

The women that slept with the charismatic musician could have just as easily been me, so I take it to heart when a letter writer to the Times Colonist (predictably) blamed the women for consenting to unprotected sex, and commenters on the story that appeared on the Province website wrote, “Woman are to blame for letting these idiots bareback them! “ and “Woman don’t be so desperate. Yuck!”

These were words written by women — or at least under feminine names. It’s common to blame the victim in random assaults to convince yourself that it couldn’t happen to you. But in fact, it likely could have been, or anybody else who has ever had unprotected sex.

According to the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, over 1,300 B.C. residents tested positive for HIV between 1985 and 2008, and some 400 new cases are diagnosed each year. Many people who carry the virus don’t even know they’re infected.

To change these statistics and reduce the risk of the Mzite case repeating itself, we need to address the social stigma towards HIV-positive people in particular, and sex in general.

I strongly believe that there is nothing inherently demeaning about sex or promiscuity. However, contracting HIV is a real risk that comes with having unprotected sex both with people who know their viral status and those who don’t.

Feeling empowered to use protection during sex mitigates most of that risk. And when people living with HIV use antiretroviral medication in conjunction with protection, there is no reason why they shouldn’t enjoy a healthy sex life.