‘The mercurial piece of the puzzle’: Understanding stigma and HIV/AIDS in South Africa

Although stigma and its relationship to health and disease is not a new phenomenon, it has not been a major feature in the public discourse until the emergence of HIV. The range of negative responses associated with the epidemic placed stigma on the public agenda and drew attention to its complexity as a phenomenon and concept worthy of further investigation. Despite the consensus that stigma is one of the major contributors to the rapid spread of HIV and the frequent use of the term in the media and among people in the street, the exact meaning of ‘stigma’ remains ambiguous. The aim of this paper is to briefly re-visit some of the scholarly deliberations and further interrogate their relevance in explaining HIV-related stigma evidenced in South Africa. In conclusion a model is presented. Its usefulness – or explanatory potential – is that it attempts to provide a comprehensive framework that offers insights into the individual as well as the social/structural components of HIV-related stigma in a particular context. As such, it has the potential to provide more nuanced understandings as well as to alert us to knowledge-gaps in the process.