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Posted by: Calum 18th March 2019, 06:34 AM

Don't know if anyone's watched this, but it was released on iPlayer on Friday and I've just finished watching it. Bit of an eye-opener and worth the watch.

It gives the accounts of five men who were abused by Daryll Rowe between 2015-2017 in Edinburgh, Newcastle and Brighton after hooking up from Grindr and POF. On each occasion he'd either manipulated them into having unprotected sex or snipped condoms to infect them with a positive viral load.

He says that he 'believed' drinking his own urine was preventing him from passing on HIV to anybody else and that because he hadn't heard anything he assumed that he hadn't passed it on, however would send messages on WhatsApp etc saying that he took the condom off, that he'd infected them with HIV and so on.

24 men came forward when he was tried in court (although the number of victims is suspected to be higher), and he's been sentenced to life.

I do feel a little disturbed after watching it, and will probably err much more on the side of caution with regards to Grindr, or any dating app for that matter. (Edinburgh's not far from me at all, and for it to have happened to more than one man, and so recently, is scary.) I just cannot fathom how somebody could purposely inflict something like it, that type of behaviour and carry out a revenge campaign so hateful on anybody. The one thing that got to me too while watching was just how little his foster mum seems to understand about what he's done. The impact that this will have had on these people, their families, their trust in people, and so much more. I understand you can be blissfully unaware at the time, but the way she spoke of and to him was... strange.