KOFAVIV

Haiti Moves to Tighten Laws on Sexual Violence

Haiti is poised to enact major reforms to its penal code to make it easier for victims of rape to prosecute their attackers.

Eramithe Delva, founder of KOFAVIV, a Haitian women's organisation founded by and for rape survivors. Credit:  Courtsey of KOFAVIV

Q&A: Group Founded by Rape Survivors Lifts Up Haitian Women

In Haitian refugee camps, women are still crammed under plastic or cloth tarps that provide no security and quickly become overheated by the sun. Sexual abuse, harassment, assault and rape run rampant, even as political responses to these dangers have stalled. But KOFAVIV, a women's organisation founded by and for rape survivors, offers a glimmer of hope.

Report Exposes “Survival Sex Trade” in Post-Earthquake Haiti

Eighteen-year-old "Kettlyne", a Haitian orphan living in the rubble-strewn Croix Deprez camp – one of the many remaining tent-cities that houses refugees from the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake – is unable to feed her three-year-old daughter.

Women Turn Spotlight on Haiti’s Silent Rape Epidemic

Some 14 months after Haiti's earthquake, activists say there is an ongoing epidemic of rape and gender-based violence (GBV) in the country's more than 1,000 squalid displaced persons camps, where nearly a million people are still awaiting permanent housing.

A UN peacekeeper holds a child as her mother is helped down from a relocation truck in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Credit: UN Photo/Logan Abassi

Cracking the Donor Discourse on Haiti

In her remarks last week to the president of the U.N. Security Council on the first anniversary of Haiti's earthquake, U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice called for a free and fair election that reflected the views of Haitian voters, applauded the work of the U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), and declared that the "prospects for rebuilding Haiti depend upon maintaining a secure environment and creating jobs for Haitians".

HAITI: Women Wonder if They’ll Ever Feel Safe Again

Up a rubble-strewn street, turn right past a crumbled house, and 60 men and women are in the yard and parlor of the offices of the Commission of Women Victim-to-Victim (Komisyon Fanm Viktim pou Viktim, KOFAVIV) association.

Zanmi Agrikol farm/Friends of Agriculture, in Bas-Plateau Central. Credit: Wadner Pierre/IPS

Haitian Women Struggle to Keep Hope Alive

"I'm going to do everything possible to raise my daughter. My daughter is my future. And I can see my future in her," says Mirlene Saint Juste, a rice merchant in the Opoto market of Gonaives in northern Haiti.

HAITI: U.N. Clash with Frustrated Students Spills into Camps

United Nations peacekeeping troops responded to a rock-throwing demonstration by university students Monday evening with a barrage of tear gas and rubber bullets in the area around Haiti's National Palace, sending masses of displaced Haitians running out of tent camps into the streets, according to witnesses.



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