I Love a Man in a Uniform
A coalition of 400 AIDS and human rights groups are drawing attention to the ways officials around the world have fanned rather than contained the spread of AIDS. For example:
HIV and AIDS services geared toward men who have sex with men and toward sex workers are also hampered by punitive laws and abusive government practices. Officials charged with enforcing prostitution laws routinely extort bribes, confessions, testimony, and sexual "favors" from sex workers.
There's a drug angle, too:
effective measures to reduce HIV infection, such as needle-exchange programs and medication-assisted treatment with methadone, are banned by law in many countries or undermined by abusive police practices. Police abuse, sometimes amounting to torture, keeps people who use drugs away from basic HIV-prevention services, even where government policy supports these services. Police also routinely extort money and confessions from people who use drugs, sometimes using the mere possession of syringes as an excuse to harass or arrest drug users or outreach workers providing services to them.
Similarly, cops in some countries "confiscate condoms from AIDS outreach workers, and use them as evidence of sex work or sodomy." Presumably they don't use them when coercing coitus from actual prostitutes.
