HIV is Not a Crime

HIV is a disease that we have turned into a crime, argues Ryan Peck. The Centre for Research on Health Equity and Social Inclusion, Community Legal Services at Western Law, and HIV & AIDS Legal Clinic Ontario hosted this lunchtime talk with Ryan Peck to discuss practices, policies, and reform efforts pertaining to the criminal prosecution of HIV non-disclosure. (Recorded Monday, February 13, 2017 at Innovation Works)

Ryan Peck graduated from the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law in 2000. Since 2007, he has been executive director of the HIV & AIDS Legal Clinic Ontario (HALCO), where he was previously both an articling student and a staff lawyer. Ryan has worked as a staff lawyer at the Advocacy Centre for the Elderly, and in the Tenant Duty Counsel Program at the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario. He has also served as criminal duty counsel at Toronto’s Old City Hall. Ryan is a member of the Ontario Advisory Committee on HIV/AIDS (which provides HIV-related advice to the Minister of Health and Long-Term Care), chair of the Ontario Working Group on Criminal Law and HIV Exposure, and member of the executive committee of the board of directors of the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network. He is also the recipient of the 2016 Legal Aid Ontario Sidney B. Linden award.

Human Rights in Education

If a student cannot be denied the right to participate in a classroom on the basis of their gender, race, or culture, Jacqueline argues that our approach to segregating students with disabilities is a violation of their basic human rights. Join us for a conversation about education, equity, and why we need to rethink some of our assumptions about the way classrooms are organized in Ontario.

Jacqueline Specht is the director of the Canadian Research Centre on Inclusive Education and a Professor of Applied Psychology at Western Education.

Are We Actually Moving the Needle on Poverty?

A community conversation: As tax payers and charity givers, we spend millions of dollars to address poverty… but does it all really make make much of a difference? And how do we measure the impact?

Abe Oudshoorn is currently Assistant Professor and the Year 3 & 4 Lead at The Arthur Labatt Family School of Nursing, Western University. He is cross appointed with Lawson Health Research Institute and the Department of Psychiatry, Western University. His teaching interests involve community health, mental health, global health, research methods/statistics, and advanced Nursing theory. And his research interests include women’s homelessness, program evaluation, health promotion, critical ethnography, qualitative methods, participatory action research, poverty and health, critical theory, mental health, and others.

Links and Notes

 

Trauma-Informed Thinking for Everyone

…the most common health problems, and the hardest to treat, lie at the blurry line between body and mind, where emotional scars from troubled pasts may surface as physical illness, pain and depression. (Hospital heals scars of war, inside and out)

We cannot see each other’s past experiences, but we are constantly learning more about the ways that past experiences influence our minds and bodies. In working with individuals arriving in London from Syria, psychiatrist Javeed Sukhera has recently had countless conversations with people who have endured refugee camps, witnessed violence and murder, lost their families, experienced torture, or faced sexual assault. He argues that to effectively help one another, we need to be acutely aware of how trauma and violence affects human psychology and physiology.

Javeed joins us to talk about why having a ‘trauma-informed’ perspective is essential not only for professional healthcare and social service workers, but also for the rest of us in society, too.

Javeed Sukhera is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Paediatrics at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at Western University. He is also the Senior Designate Physician Lead for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at London Health Sciences Centre.

Notes

What is the Cost of Poverty in London?

Imagine if we actually knew how much poverty cost us in economic terms. What if we could take everything into account — from the cost of shelters, to the strain on the health care system, to the lost economic productivity due to people not working — and then calculated a number? Gerda Zonruiter suggests that developing a common metric for measuring the economic impact of poverty helps communities make better and more strategic decisions.

Gerda Zonruiter is a researcher and evaluation consultant assisting human and social services organizations make evidence-based decisions. Prior to working independently, she spent 15 years working as a social policy researcher for the City of London.