Earlier this week, news broke across the country about a woman named Cicely Bolden who was vicious stabbed to death by her lover immediately after she told him she was HIV positive. Ms. Bolden, who lived in Dallas, TX, was 28 years old when her boyfriend Larry Dunn Jr., killed her. When apprehended by the police, Dunn revealed his motive as: “She killed me, so I killed her.”
This brazen and especially brutal act of violence illuminates the ways in which people living with HIV and AIDS are particularly vulnerable to harm and discrimination, and how disclosing can eradicate one’s physical safety, even among friends, family, and sexual partners. As data has shown—and as social advocates have known for years now—HIV+ women experience disproportionately high rates of intimate partner violence and death, which complicates some health advocates assertion that disclosure needs to be made regardless of any physical or emotional threats to their safety.
Perhaps most chilling about this case are people’s comments on the news story itself, as a surprising amount of commentators actually, and sickeningly, praise Dunn for killing Ms. Bolden, asserting that she got “what she deserved” for not telling Dunn about her HIV status before the two had sex. While a number of these comments and commentators may be trolls looking for a fight on the internet, we absolutely cannot dismiss the glorification and perverse justification of violence that saturate these online dialogues. Concurrently, we must also examine the ramifications of the data that show how women of color are disproportionately affected both by HIV/AIDS as well as intimate partner violence, and ways to stage interventions, both at the policy and community levels, to stem the violence, stigma, and misinformation surrounding HIV and transmission.
The Positive Women’s Network, which released a powerful and eloquent statement on the murder of Ms. Bolden, called for a number of interventions to address the violence against women and girls living with HIV, which are available to view here. In addition to those interventions, communities and leaders must continue to fight for the decriminalization of HIV/AIDS transmission. It is absolutely flummoxing and infuriating that people living with a chronic illness are still subjected to legal and biological witch hunts in 37 states that makes consensual, protected sexual contact criminal.
Communities and leaders must continue to fight the good fight and by examining what sort of precarious precedent is being set within these criminal laws that counterintuitively promote a dichotomy of silence = safety.
Texas, however surprisingly or not, does not criminalize the transmission of HIV. And there’s a reason for that—because the crime here was not Ms. Bolden’s status, it was her death at the hands of another because of her HIV status.
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