Janet Haven: Ukraine and HIV in images

Speaking of the EU's troubled boarders, one of Hungary's (many) neighbors is Ukraine. One of Ukraine's more unfortunate distinctions is the rate at which HIV is being spread efficiently across its populace. Currently Ukraine has an exploding HIV-positive population, rivaled in Europe only by the Russian Federation. Human Rights Watch released a report at the beginning of this month called "Rhetoric and Risk: Human Rights Abuses Impeding Ukraine’s Fight Against HIV/AIDS". The report argues that while Ukraine has passed some of the most progressive (and controversial) HIV policies around (supporting anti-retroviral treatments, needle exchange programs, and drug replacement therapies), in practice, abuse of drug addicts and sex workers by police -- usually their first line of contact with the government -- essentially renders those protections null and void:

It is a tragic and deadly irony that for most Ukrainians, these protections exist only on paper and are systematically undermined by chronic human rights abuse within the criminal justice and health systems.

Now, I know very little about the HIV and Ukraine; it's an issue that I'm aware of, but don't really follow. I'm writing about it now not because I came across the Human Rights Watch report in the normal range of my online reading, but rather because I came across something far more arresting: the photography of Brent Stirton. Stirton is a South African photographer whose work shows up on the BBC, in international competitions, and so forth. His website is a collection of photojournalist projects he's undertaken around the world. A recent addition is called "Ukraine: Sex, Drugs, Poverty, & HIV" (to find this and other photo essays, go to Stirton's site, then choose "Projects". Note, however, that a number of the images are gruesome, and nearly all of them are disturbing). The Ukranian collection includes both photographs and a short narrative explaining who each person pictured is. Stirton favors people; most of his photos are essentially portraits meant to establish not just a set of circumstances but an impression of the person existing in those circumstances. And the stories that unfold are in his sets of pictures are terrifying, largely because they are told not just visually, but extremely personally. Perhaps most arresting to me is the subset of images that tell a story of an older Ukrainan woman living with her two grown sons, both of whom are HIV-positive, and are dealing heroin out of her apartment. She is dependent on them, being elderly, and so cannot either throw them out or curtail their activities. The juxtaposition of the familiar Eastern European babushka in the flowered dress with youthful, damaged sons is deeply troubling, and illustrates powerfully why the cycle of drug addiction and HIV effects a populace across generations and far beyond the addict themselves.

The reason, more generally, why I find this interesting is from an information perspective. Because OSI and other international organizations support moniitoring and investigative work of the sort that Human Rights Watch does regularly, there is a tremendous amount of information -- and high-quality information at that -- generated. The vast majority of it ends up in reports, like the one I've linked to above; those reports are picked up by and quoted by more socially concious news agencies (the BBC, Radio Free Europe, and so on tend to quote HRW reports frequently). They're printed up, filed in offices of intenational development workers, and that's generally it. The information that has been so carefully dug up for these reports is simply not very persistant -- it hits once, and sinks. Aligning the careful reporting that HRW and other monitoring organizations do with other media, easily distributed over the internet, seems like an excellent way to give that information a longer life and wider distribution. Images and visual representations of information are powerful, and cause people to "get" an issue in a way that they never will from skimming (or not, as the case may be) a lengthy report. HRW has done this in other reports -- tying some of their work on Darfur to images drawn by childen in refugee camps, or creating maps to accompany their report on civilian casualties in Iraq ("Off Target"). Clearly, these kinds of combinations make human rights reporting and research much more accessible to the layman, and subsequently more persistant as an issue of concern.