#riprensa

thousands of gays were subjected to electric shock therapy, hormone treatment and chemical castration through the south african 1970s and 80s, when national service was compulsory for white males and homosexuality was a crime.

do you know what happened to homosexuals in the 70s and 80s, back in apartheid run south africa? do you know the discriminations and attacks they suffered, the pain and humiliations they were inflicted?

the military and government thought electroshock therapy would be a good way to turn them right again. barbiturates. alienation. violence. chemical castration. gender reassignment surgery, even.

thousands of lives were destroyed, thousands of lives stopped existing forever. 

what separates humans from objects? what’s there to stop us from becoming soulless nothings, just means for some to further empower and enrich themselves?

nothing apparently. 

or so appears to be when it comes to laogais, china’s concentration and work camps, where detainees have their organs harvested and are constrained into forced labor through abuse and blackmail.

help us raise awareness, help us spread the message. we’re always looking for voices to join us.

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“kill the indian in him, and save the man.”

– u.s. cavalry captain richard henry pratt, opener of the first boarding school in carlisle, pennsylvania. 

those words have come to symbolize the brutality of the boarding school system and that was the mindset under which the – u.s. government forced tens of thousands of native american children to attend “assimilation” boarding schools in the late 19th century.

in the late 1970s and early 1980s, some 4,800 hemophiliacs were infected with hepatitis c after through their nhs treatment. at least 1,200 of those were also infected with hiv, the virus that leads to aids.

with her identity hidden, one woman said she became infected with hiv through her husband who was a hemophiliac, and who had been given contaminated blood. she said when they found out they were left stunned and devastated.

"this was the mid-1980s and the climate of fear, discrimination and stigma associated with hiv and aids was horrendous," she said. "we coped the best we could. we were silenced, and we kept quiet."

downton abbey actor david robb and actress isla blair were invited to give readings to the inquiry on its first day.

in a video played at the inquiry in london on monday, a man described how he felt ‘everything ended’ for him at the age of 43 when he discovered he was infected with hepatitis c as a child.

at the age of eight, he had been injected with blood products for a swollen knee that was misdiagnosed as haemophilia.

he added: “when they told me what they had done to me, I stood at a motorway bridge to jump off it – basically, that has been my life ever since.