Explicitly racialised and extraordinarily over-represented: Black immigrant men in 25 years of news reports on HIV non-disclosure criminal cases in Canada

Abstract

This paper explores newspaper coverage of HIV non-disclosure criminal cases in Canada in which defendants are Black immigrant men living with HIV. We base our analysis on a corpus of 1680 English-language Canadian newspaper articles written between 1989 and 2015. For the first time ever, we present quantitative evidence of the dramatic overrepresentation of Black men in such coverage. We also provide an analysis of the racialised regime of representation found in this material. We emphasise how ‘writing in criminal justice time’ operates as a first-order objectification within which are embedded strategies that link constructions of moral blameworthiness with representations of racialised difference. The result is a type of popular racial profiling in which HIV non-disclosure is treated as a crime of Black men who are represented as dangerous, hypersexual foreigners who threaten the health and safety of the public and, more broadly, the imagined Canadian nation.

Keywords:

• HIV
• criminal law
• racialisation
• representation
• news media

Acknowledgements

This paper builds on a research report conducted as part of the study “What is the significance of immigration status and racialization in relation to the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure in Canada.” We thank everyone who provided guidance and advice during our research. We thank the reviewers for their careful feedback and suggestions. We also thank Melanie Rock who provided extensive comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In Canada, HIV criminalisation is tied to the failure to disclose one’s HIV-positive status before engaging in activities that pose a ‘realistic possibility’ of HIV transmission. For details see the Supreme Court of Canada decision R. v. Mabior (2012).

2 Whether to include, in scholarly writing, the names of people who have faced HIV-related criminal charges is a matter of debate, including among the authors of this paper. Stigmatising news coverage names defendants. In order to ensure that our critique is linked to the specifics of such coverage, we have named defendants in our analysis.

3 Police press releases are central to how HIV non-disclosure is policed and often used by journalists covering cases, particularly early in the trajectory of criminal justice time reporting. See Hastings (2020).

4 While photographs of defendants are central to racialised forms of representation, we cannot include a discussion of their use in our corpus because Factiva does not reproduce the photographs included in news stories.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the CIHR Social Research Centre in HIV Prevention.