They don’t talk about it.

There is a man in Ames who is HIV positive and has raped several women, but no one will talk about it, said a woman attending the Women and AIDS discussion in the Sloss House earlier this week.

He raped a friend of hers who has not yet been tested for HIV because it occurred less than six months ago, she said.

“He’s still in Ames,” she said. “This is just not one encounter. This is something he does on a regular basis.”

She said she knows the man and he has “such control” over the women he assaults by threats that none of them will turn him in.

If one person comes forward, others might too, and he and others like him can get the legal consequences they deserve, said Pam Carnine, director of Story County AIDS Coalition. It is illegal to knowingly pass on HIV or AIDS, she said.

“Date rape is rampant on this campus. Women are being drugged in bars,” Carnine said. She said she has talked to many women on campus who don’t report sexual assaults because they say they feel responsible and could have done things differently.

“This is rape; it’s a crime,” Carnine said. “The answer is to start talking and expose this guy.”

Carnine said the last thing most women who are assaulted want is to have to repeat their story 100 times and to face the trauma of having people doubt them.

Vikki Carnine-Irwin, a graduate assistant at the Women’s Center, said the method of writing on washroom walls is a silent way to which some women revert. However, she said she thinks it is easier for women to fight back against assaulters if they know they have support from friends and family or organizations such as ACCESS or the Women’s Center.

A dozen people attended the video presentation and discussion held by the Margaret Sloss Women’s Center in honor of AIDS Day, three of whom were men.

Although HIV and AIDS statistics have been dropping in general in the United States, Carnine-Irwin said women are the exception. AIDS is the sixth-leading cause of death for women, the third-leading cause for women between 25 and 44 years old, and the leading cause for African American and Latino women, she said.

Carnine said since she has been working with the AIDS Coalition, she has seen an increase in the number of women and mothers with HIV or AIDS.

She said about a third of the people she works with are women.

Women are more susceptible to AIDS or HIV because of biological and social differences, stated information from the Women’s Center.

“[Women] were an irrelevant group,” Carnine said. Although the first known case of a woman dying of AIDS occurred in 1981, she said, it was not until 1995 that a program of research for women was started.

Before then, she said, HIV and AIDS drug research was focused on keeping people feeling good and was primarily performed on men, who metabolize things differently than women or children.

Carnine told the woman whose friend was raped to let her know that if she does test positive, “testing HIV positive is no longer a death sentence. It will change her life forever, but it doesn’t have to destroy it.”

Carnine showed a video with people from Iowa who live high-risk lifestyles that make them more susceptible to AIDS and HIV.

The video related how childhood experiences of abuse or sexual assault made it hard for the people interviewed to set boundaries in their lifestyles and gave them the message that “the only way they can be loved is to be sexual,” Carnine said.

One girl interviewed in the video, Tasha, 14, sat cross-legged in the middle of a room, sharing how her dad was an alcoholic and abused her. She became involved in drugs and had sex with multiple partners.

Carnine said Tasha, a runaway, recently resurfaced and is living with a friend. So far, she has tested negative for HIV, but “we’re very, very scared for her,” Carnine said, because of her high-risk lifestyle.

Tasha said she first learned about AIDS when she was very little from an aunt who tested positive for HIV.

“You just think ‘it’s not going to happen to me’ because you have to,” she said. “You don’t stop and think about protection, but I know the risk.”

Carnine said most people are educated about the virus but still haven’t changed their attitudes or behavior.

Carnine-Irwin said many women find it difficult to ask their partners to use condoms because their focus is more on the embarrassment of the moment rather than the potential consequences of not having protection.