If it is a goal of AIDS education efforts to give the public a realistic sense of the seriousness of AIDS and what is involved in its prevention, publicity surrounding AIDS has achieved this in the great majority of the population. However, AIDS publicity has aroused considerable, unwarranted anxiety in a large population, and has either spawned or reinforced socially divisive and hostile attitudes. Such attitudes have been adopted by a small group of people at Richland Gardens in Kowloon Bay. The Hong Kong Coalition of AIDS Service Organizations is protesting government inaction in protecting the rights of healthcare workers and clients at the new Kowloon Bay Primary Health Centre and in enforcing the Disability Discrimination Ordinance. The Disability Discrimination Ordinance clearly protects individuals from harassment and vilification.
Harassment involves subjecting a person to psychological, emotional and physical discomfort.
Harassment is essentially about power and punishment. It seeks to subject a person who is identified as worthy of punishment to treatment which in other cases would be deemed inappropriate or wrong, and it is assumed that the victim is powerless to stop such victimization. At this point in time harassment is being inflicted on individuals who attend the Kowloon Bay Primary Health Centre. Anyone, clients or healthcare workers, entering or leaving the building is a target for harassment. Vilification involves making statements either verbally or in this case through banners about a group of people on the basis of their characteristics or of stereotypical assumptions about them which bring members of the group into hatred, ridicule or contempt.