A scan of Canadian reported cases of the criminalization of HIV/AIDS non-disclosure: 1989 to 2024.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We explored the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure in Canada to determine how the criminal justice system responded to non-disclosure in light of medical advancements related to transmission. The study included a review of literature, government reports, laws, and policies to reveal numerous prosecutions between 1989 to 2024. We performed a review of 162 reported cases to assess the types of offences and outcomes, prosecution distribution across the country, and accused and complainant characteristics. The literature points out that Canadian courts often overlook medical advancements, disproportionately criminalizing HIV non-disclosure compared to other sexually transmitted infections. Our findings confirmed that, and revealed that over time, public nuisance, sexual, and criminal negligence offences were applied. Accused were predominantly male, Caucasian, and most cases were prosecuted in Ontario and Québec, and accused and complainants were most often known to each other as casual, dating, or in long-term relationships. We argue for the reassessment of the criminalization of HIV non-disclosure, considering Directive 5.12 and Standing Committee’s Report (2019) both of which are a move in the right direction; however, charges continue post 2018, as do the stigmatizing effects of prosecution, and the need for more education and public health interventions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".