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Search Results: stigma

  • AUSTRALIA

    Don't forget it's 'World' AIDS Day

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 01 December 2014
    7 Comments

    World AIDS Day encourages us also to think of Africa, the continent most afflicted by AIDS. Cultural and economic factors are also significant, including the need for men to live far away from home in order to find work, and women driven to sex work. It is an issue of fairness, making us ask people in wealthier nations owe to those in poorer nations.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    West Africa needs more international help to defeat Ebola

    • Robert Vitillo
    • 10 November 2014

    There is a general sense of psychological trauma and anger among the people, and a fear of social unrest and a return to civil war. In the communities in which quarantine has been imposed, people do not have access to food, clean water, and other necessities. The countries are depending on increased international assistance will prevent further spread of the virus and a reduction of irrational fear, stigma, and discrimination in local communities.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A hostile government could be the ABC's best friend

    • Michael Mullins
    • 06 October 2014
    14 Comments

    ABC management is compliant with the Government in foreshadowing cuts to programs it considers expensive and expendable, thereby shielding the minister from public criticism and from having to justify the blood-letting. Perhaps it need not bother doing the Government’s dirty work, as Essential polling has revealed that a majority of Australians is worried about cuts to the public broadcaster. If the government is more driven by polls than ideology, it will go easy on the ABC.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Anti-Islam is the new Anti-Catholicism

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 25 September 2014
    40 Comments

    The justified insistence that Muslims should not constantly be called to account for the vicious behaviour of Islamic State is a reminder of the attitude towards Catholics in an earlier generation. They combined suspicion of anything Irish in the aftermath of the 1915 Uprising and more traditional judgments of Catholics on the basis of their beliefs and practices.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Suicide taboos and healing memories

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 10 September 2014
    19 Comments

    Suicide excludes people from any participation in this decisive act of people's lives, and also prevents them from understanding it. Suicide is always shrouded in silence, and arouses dread at entering the silence. The wrenching cry at the heart of of memories wrestles with the silence, 'Why did you do it?'.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    How to measure HIV stigma

    • Daniel Reeders
    • 02 September 2014
    6 Comments

    Global targets can be used to benchmark countries – but measuring a reduction in stigma is harder than it sounds. As one of my colleagues asked, 'what's the international standard unit for one stigma?'

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Scott Morrison's conflict of interest

    • Michael Mullins
    • 04 August 2014
    13 Comments

    The majority of Australians voted for a government strong on border protection. Immigration Minister Scott Morrison is delivering in spades, so it seems they're prepared to turn a blind eye to disputed claims of child neglect, even if he is their legal guardian. Their only hope is that accounts of their suffering will gain the kind of exposure and momentum that led to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The enemy is AIDS, not those who live with it

    • Michael Mullins
    • 28 July 2014
    23 Comments

    Rates of HIV infection are rising, while stigma is in decline. Some believe the only way to contain the virus is to maintain the stigma against those living with it. But the majority view is that those suffering should be empowered. If the law and the media support them, there is hope that the community will move rationally towards an end to the crisis. 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Elegy for the 298 of MH17

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 21 July 2014
    17 Comments

    The deepest questions raised by the deaths of those on the plane shot down over the Ukraine are the unavoidable questions that face us all: questions about the patent precariousness and vulnerability of our lives, about what matters to us when our grasp on the future is so tenuous, about the mysterious conjunction of love, loss, pain and gift, and about the capacity of the human heart for evil and the terrible consequences that follow.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Human relationships and efficiency don't mix

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 03 July 2014
    5 Comments

    The Victorian Government has started to recommission its community sector programs. To simplify administration of community mental health services, it has awarded tenders to large organisations and withdrawn funding from small specialised innovative programs that were effective because of the quality of the relationships they had built up. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    My intersex wake-up call

    • Barry Gittins
    • 16 June 2014
    10 Comments

    Friends of mine had their first child recently and my first, 'obvious' question — 'Is it a boy or a girl?' — was answered by a jubilant father: 'It's a girl!' Life is complex, however, and our all-too-human desires for normalcy and 'simplicity' (embodied in my automatic query) are sometimes revealed to gleam in the light of unintended prejudice. The reality for some Australians is that my question isn't always as easily answered.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Love creates space for restorative justice

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 22 May 2014
    12 Comments

    For the good of victims and the community prisoners need to find the space in which they can feel remorse for the harm they have done, reflect on and change the patterns of life that contributed to the crime, and come to act accountably. To include love in penal justice may seem impossible. But recently in court a man was sentenced to jail for dangerous driving that led to the death of a young woman. Her father then embraced the driver.

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