A year after the earthquake that killed over 230,000 people, women and girls living in Haiti’s makeshift camps are facing an increasing risk of rape and sexual violence. The January 2010 devastating earthquake was the beginning of a nightmare.
For Guerline, her travails only began with the death of her husband and home in the quake. In March 2010, her 13-year-old daughter was raped by four men. She was threatened with dire consequences if she spilled the beans to the police. Scared even to take her daughter to a hospital, Guerline sent the child to relatives in another town.
Guerline herself was raped the night her daughter was attacked. She is in no position to identify the assailants who were hooded. All she can is mutely look at police vans driving past the camp where she and her three children have been living under some sheets in Place Mausolée, near the former Court of Justice, in capital Port-au-Prince.
The story of Guerline and countless others like her have been revealed in a damning Amnesty International report Aftershocks: Women speak out against sexual violence in Haiti’s camps. [The 849KB PDF file can be downloaded here]
More than a million people still live in appalling conditions in tent cities in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere. Women are at serious risk of sexual attacks in these camps. Amnesty recorded over 250 cases of rape in these camps in the first 150 days itself of the earthquake. Those responsible are predominately armed men who roam the camps after dark. Needless to say, they are usually not apprehended.
The spectre of looms large. Dina, a rape survivor, told Amnesty, “In our camp we cannot live in peace; at night we cannot go out. There is gunfire all the time and things are set alight… Where I live, I am afraid. We don’t have a good life; it is not a good area… We are afraid. We can be raped at any moment… We are forced to live in misery.”
Perpetrators are usually members of youth gangs who operate after dark. One of the main factors of these criminals getting away scot-free is the total lack of security in and around the camps. Protection measures have not been fully integrated into the humanitarian response, according to the report.
The report identified the following factors which the sexual violence continues with impunity::
- the lack of security and policing inside the camps and the inadequate response by police officers to victims of rape;
- the lack of lighting at night;
- insecure and inadequate shelters – tents, tarps and sometimes just blankets and sheets – available to displaced people;
- inadequate toilets/latrines and washing facilities in and around the camps;
- the breakdown of law and order, with armed gangs carrying out attacks in the camps with total impunity;
- overcrowding in the camps;
- the lack of access to any means of earning a living or generating income;
- the unequal distribution of humanitarian and emergency aid between and within camps;
- the lack of protective measures for survivors of sexual violence, putting them at risk of revictimisation;
- the lack of information about the concrete steps a survivor of sexual violence needs to follow to report the crime to the police and the judiciary.
It were these very conditions that were the cause of compounding the trauma of Suzie, whose parents, brother and husband were killed in the earthquake. She and her two young sons moved to a a makeshift shelter in Champ-de-Mars soon after. Suzie and her friend, who she joined at the camp, were both raped in front of their children by a gang of men who forced their way into their shelter in May.
Initially, Suzie could not even speak about it. Subsequently, she mustered courage and spoke of her ordeal to FAVILEK, a women's grassroots organisation. She has, however, not reported the rape to the authorities since she and her friend had been blindfolded at the time of the assault.
Such kind of sexual violence in Haiti is not new. Claire, a founding member of FAVILEK, is in daily contact with rape survivors since the organisation was created in 1994. Claire was first raped in 1988 when she was just 17 and became pregnant as a result. Following the 1991 coup, she was raped by soldiers who forced their way into her home. The rapes were part of a military and paramilitary campaign to terrorise the population and to punish those who had supported the democratically elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Claire and hundreds of other women raped between 1991 and 1994 established FAVILEK after Aristide returned to power. But being a member of FAVILEK did not help matters for Claire. She was raped a third time, just two days after the earthquake at a refugee camp.
But Claire, as the women who she counsels, does not want to give up. Claire believes that justice will one day prevail.
