Women protest insecurity and living conditions at a tent camp in central Port-au-Prince, January 2011. Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Mar 7 2013 (IPS)

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

The amendments to the penal code would precisely define sexual assault in accordance with international law, legalise certain types of post-rape abortions, and criminalise marital rape.

The changes also mandate state-funded legal aid to victims who cannot pay for counsel. Discrimination on the basis of “sexual orientation” would be banned in limited circumstances, in a first for Haitian law.When someone beats you, rapes you, and it's all over - you just keep it inside you? That would make me crazy.

“I think it’s an exciting time,” Rashida Manjoo, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, said in February at a conference on the reforms. “It’s a small start with the penal code, but it’s a good start.”

Lawyers and activists at the conference pored over a three-page draft of the reforms. They’re optimistic that Haiti’s parliament will approve them within the year. Haiti’s prime minister and the ministry of justice have indicated they support the amendments.

But Manjoo warned that the law won’t be fully implemented or enforced without adequate funding from donors and participation by the public.

In the three years since the 2010 earthquake, the issue of sexual violence has gained an increasingly high profile. Foreign media reports referred to a “rape epidemic” in the tent camps scattered throughout Port-au-Prince.

A January 2012 study by a coalition of legal and women’s groups found that at least one member of 14 percent of all households displaced by the quake had been sexually assaulted.

Some experts, notably anthropologist and author Timothy Schwartz, cite a lack of independent data and question whether the prevalence of rape has been exaggerated by some of the advocacy organisations mentioned in this report.

But even Schwartz applauds the effort to reform the penal code by these same groups. He said it represents a welcome departure from the usual approach to structural problems in Haiti, where non-governmental organisations stage piecemeal interventions instead of bolstering the state.

Improvements at the grassroots

In the meantime, Haitian citizens, the police, and lawyers have attempted to address the violence at the grassroots.

In some tent camps, internally displaced Haitians formed brigades to safeguard against criminal threats, including rapists. A report by Poto Fanm+Fi found that these brigades, because of their strong community bonds, were usually more effective than patrols by United Nations peacekeeping troops at stopping sexual violence.

At police stations throughout the capital city, there are now officers trained to receive and assist female victims, Marie Gauthier, the Haitian National Police’s Coordinator for Women’s Affairs, told IPS.

“Carrefour, Fort National, Kenscoff, Port-au-Prince, Cite Soleil, Delmas, Croix de Bouquet. . .” Gauthier listed off the different stations in city districts. Still, “now we need vehicles,” she said, “to go quickly and arrest the perpetrator.”

Survivors of sexual violence often turn to KOFAVIV, a Haitian women’s group, for moral and humanitarian support. The quake destroyed the group’s headquarters, displacing its founders into a tent camp.

But the group secured funding from international donors, including the U.S. government, allowing it to move from the camp into a two-storey office and expand its programmes. Women come from every corner of Port-au-Prince for bi-weekly gatherings where survivors can bond and share information with one another.

In the courts, significantly more rape cases are going to trial, according to lawyers for Bureaus des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), a prominent Haitian law firm. Nearly a third of criminal trials during last summer’s court session in Port-au-Prince were for rape charges.

Thirteen convicted rapists were sentenced – a majority of those to maximum jail time. More prosecutions followed in the fall.

“It’s extremely significant, considering that a mere 10 years ago, barely any cases were being prosecuted,” Nicole Phillips, an attorney with the BAI, told IPS. She called the prosecutions and reforms to the penal code “a massive step forward.”

In the past, judges would demand victims present medical certificates obtained within 48 to 72 hours demonstrating they were raped. But it was difficult or impossible to get them, due to stigma, trauma, and prohibitive costs.

“The trials are getting more sophisticated,” Phillips said. The courts now rely more on expert witness testimony from medical professionals. She praised judges and the police in Port-au-Prince for taking rape accusations more seriously.

More work to be done

But Haiti’s progress in combating violence against women faced a high-profile test at the beginning of the year, and arguably failed.

When Marie-Danielle Bernadin first told her close friends she was sexually assaulted by her boss, the president of Haiti’s electoral council, their advice was simple: Leave Haiti.

“Where are you going to find justice here? Don’t file a complaint,” she remembers them saying. “Just go.”

After all, “normally one wouldn’t waste time” pressing charges against a high-ranking official, she said.

“But for me, I can’t keep something like this inside,” she told IPS in an exclusive interview. “When someone beats you, rapes you, and it’s all over – you just keep it inside you? That would make me crazy.”

Bernadin went to the police in November, shortly after the incident. She alleged that the official, Josue Pierre-Louis, had violently raped her after she confronted him about pictures of naked women on his cell phone.

She had been his assistant for two months. Pierre-Louis strenuously denied the charges and accused her of “espionage”, but the case went to trial.

At a pretrial hearing in January, supporters of Pierre-Louis – one of the most powerful men in the country – muscled their way into the hallway outside the courtroom, brandishing signs and chanting in his support. It took 15 minutes for police to arrive before they removed the protesters.

Five days later, Bernadin asked her lawyers to withdraw the charges. She issued a written statement to the press, saying: “I’ve decided to abandon the charges… but I reaffirm that I was beaten and raped by Josue Pierre-Louis.”

She described the previous months as some of the most difficult in her life. Supporters of Pierre-Louis attempted to shut her up using various methods, she said: her father was offered a job overseas, violent threats were phoned in to her family members in New Jersey, and a fake image of her was circulated online.

Her lawyers asked reporters not to take her photo, but they tried anyway every time she left the courthouse. She tried in vain to cover her head with a lawyer’s vest. The reporters ripped it before she could get to the car.

In her written statement, Bernadin denounced the threats made against her, judicial corruption, and described the tumult at the courthouse as “a horrible scene”.

Prior to the experience, she didn’t know that groups supporting victims of sexual violence existed in Haiti. She told IPS the justice system should prosecute Pierre-Louis of its own volition and “shine a light on the issue.”

“This way, if someone is raped, she could feel proud,” she said. “She could feel courageous enough to press charges. And rapists would be more afraid to commit these acts.”

By - - and Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 10 2012 (IPS)

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.

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

The lack of sanitation infrastructure forces women to walk long ways to reach bathrooms and showers, even when it’s “pitch dark after sunset”, she explained, since some camps have no lighting at night.

“Women are scared to walk by themselves at night because of that; they are scared that people will walk into their tent and rob or hurt them,” she added.

Other problems relate to children, education and income. Mothers “have the choice of staying in or around their tents to stay with their children, or leave them behind with a friend or a neighbour to be able to try and make a little bit of money”.

IPS spoke with Delva about how a women’s organisation founded “by and for rape survivors” is trying to make a difference while political decision makers remain, for the most part, idle.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: In a recent report, you shed light on survival sex, a problem for displaced women and girls that has gone neglected. What has changed since that report? A: “Survival sex” occurs when women and teenage girls have no other options but to sell their bodies to make a little bit of money to provide for themselves and their families. Although they are similar, we consider “survival sex” to be different than prostitution or sex work, because the person engaging in the sexual exchange did not choose to do it willingly.

Most, if not all, of the women and girls engaged in survival sex have told our outreach workers that they don’t like doing it, and that they would stop if they found another way to provide for themselves and family members.

Since the report, nothing has really changed. Reports aren’t going to change anything by themselves; it is through direct work and activities within the affected communities that we can start seeing changes.

Our network of outreach workers lives in the camps and in the poor communities, so this is part of their daily lives, and they will tell you that not much has changed. KOFAVIV has provided shelter for young women and young mothers who are (or have been) engaged in survival sex, but a lot more needs to be done to change that.

Q: What are main causes of this problem and what must be done to tackle them? A: There are many different causes. We consider poverty, the lack of access to economic opportunities and all the accompanying complexities to be the main ones.

It will be very difficult to solve this problem because it exists on so many levels, but we think that there needs to be an infrastructure created to support and provide relief for the young women engaged in survival sex.

First of all, they need to be able to finish their studies. A lot of the young women and girls who come to the KOFAVIV Centre have told us that they are engaging in these activities to be able to pay for their school fees.

They need to be taken out of the camps and placed in secure housing. There need to be programs and activities where they can receive counselling and medical services, where they can participate in trainings and classes to learn skills that they could apply to income generating activities.

Q: Fighting sexual violence is high on the political agenda in Haiti, at least rhetorically. What kind of governmental support have you observed reaching out to women in camps, including survival sex? A: There have been talks of combating sexual violence but I have not seen any concrete plans or activities being implemented by the government. As a grassroots organisation working directly in the affected areas, we have not seen much change. Most people displaced by the earthquake are still living in horrible conditions.

Q: Where you have seen major progress being made? A: In terms of our organisation, KOFAVIV has been able to make a lot of progress and to make a difference for survivors of sexual violence.

We provide legal services and accompaniment to victims of gender-based-violence (GBV), with the support of the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI). Through this partnership, our legal unit of outreach workers accompany the survivors to report her attack, to file a complaint and to go to trial to pursue her aggressor.

From 2004 (KOFAVIV’s inception) to 2010, we barely had ten cases make it to the justice system. Since the earthquake, from 2010 to 2012, we have had about 200 cases that have made it through the justice system, five of which are awaiting a ruling.

It might not seem like a lot compared to the number of women and girls that have come forward, but to us that is a great accomplishment.

Because of our presence in the camps and throughout the communities, rape survivors know about us and the type of work that we do; they are coming forward and talking about their attacks.

Survivors of sexual violence (rape, sexual assault, conjugal violence, etc.) are sometimes humiliated and shamed by their communities so they often kept their abuse a secret. But now, to see women and girls come to our centre or call in to our call centre to report abuse and to seek help and justice is great progress.

Furthermore, our emergency shelter in the centre is open to survivors of sexual violence if they feel it is too dangerous for them to go back to their home or tent. They can stay safely at and participate in all the services and activities offered by KOFAVIV.

Excerpt:

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.

Starving and alone, the girl says she has resorted to exchanging sex for food scraps, selling her body to older men who routinely beat and abuse her, often refuse to wear condoms, and sometimes don’t even pay her at the end of the night.

Though Kettlyne dreams of returning to school and someday saving up for her daughter’s education as well, she says resignedly, “If my baby is crying for food, I am obligated to do anything.”

Kettlyne is one of numerous interviewees in a joint report released Thursday by MADRE, the Commission of Women Victims for Victims (KOFAVIV), the International Women’s Human Rights (IWHR) Clinic at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law, the Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law (GJC) and the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies at UC Hastings College of the Law (CGRS).

Coinciding with the two-year anniversary of the disaster that rendered more than a million Haitians homeless and plunged the country’s teeming displacement camps into a dark period of lawlessness, the report comes amidst an outgoing wave of humanitarian workers, NGOs and international observers from the island, with the message that, though time has passed, the crisis for Haitian women and girls continues unabated.

Roughly 300,000 women and girls still languish in makeshift shelters in and around the capital city of Port-au-Prince, places where all existing social structures – from families and homes to schools and medical facilities – have broken down in the face of extreme poverty, hopelessness and hunger, leaving scores vulnerable and desperate.

“With international organisations moving out, taking with them the few temporary services that had been available after the earthquake, girls as young as 13 years old are trading sex for the equivalent of half a sandwich, a few U.S. dollars, or access to education,” Lisa Davis, MADRE human rights advocacy director and co-author of the report, told IPS.

After conducting a series of in-depth interviews with women and girls between the ages of 18 to 32 living in the Champ de Mars, Christ Roi and Croix Deprez displacement camps, and in the neighbourhood of Carrefour, the report concluded that none participating in this new- found “economy of survival” described themselves as commercial sex workers. Rather, their actions are a “coping mechanism” in the face of supreme hardships.

Most of the sexual transactions take place between young girls and men who hold positions of power in the camps: administrators of cash- for-work programmes, managers of food supplies and especially men in charge of educational programmes.

According to a 2012 UNICEF report, Haiti’s educational infrastructure was already in shambles before 2010. Still, the earthquake took with it over 4,000 educational establishments, stripping roughly 2.5 million students – well over half of Haiti’s four million youth under the age of 18 – of a chance for education.

A gaping lack of medical facilities has seriously exacerbated the problem.

Last year, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published its findings from a series of interviews, revealing that few women had access to prenatal or obstetric care.

Though all of the 128 women interviewed claimed that they wanted to deliver in a hospital, well over half gave birth outside of a medical institution, without a skilled medical attendant present, while many delivered their children on the mud floors of tents or in the streets on the way to the hospital.

Though no reliable data has yet been collected on the consequences of transactional sex, Davis speculated, “I can only imagine that it’s going to make women and girls much more vulnerable to HIV and other (sexually transmitted diseases). Already, Haiti has the worst HIV rate in the hemisphere in terms of numbers.”

The deficiency in medical care also means more illegal abortions and higher rates of maternal and infant mortality. Already, 3,000 Haitian women and girls die annually from complications in pregnancy and childbirth, so the possibility of a further deterioration in maternal and child health could spell disaster for the small, struggling country.

While it is vital to shed light on the immediate crisis and the short-term needs of the affected population, the long-term causes and consequences of this epidemic remain of central concern for many experts.

Economic underdevelopment caused largely by western-imposed structural adjustment policies, misdirected or mismanaged foreign aid and a constitution that has long ignored the tragedy of gender-based violence, particularly in times of political instability, have all fermented into the current crisis.

“Grassroots organizations like KOFAVIV do a lot of work to fight GBV, sexual violence, and survival sex; however, our voices are not always heard,” Malya Villard-Appolon, co-founder of KOFAVIV, told IPS. “We are rarely included in decision-making processes so government agencies that have the resources to enact change do not hear our perspectives and reports from the ground.”

“Women have not received equal treatment in government positions,” she added. “Of 17 ministers, only three are women.”

Villard-Appolon repeatedly stressed the need for a more comprehensive and inclusive educational framework for girls who have long been disenfranchised even at the familial level, staying home while their brothers are sent off to school.

“Although President (Michel) Martelly has stated his commitment to enforcing the constitutional right to a free primary education in Haiti, this is far from the reality,” Blaine Bookey, staff attorney at the CGRS and co-author of the report, told IPS. “We are concerned about reports from the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee that millions collected in taxes for educational purposes are unaccounted for.”

She also made various recommendations for moving past the crisis, including allocating more resources to grassroots coalitions, restructuring the government and judicial system to better tackle sexual violence and exploitation of all kinds and exerting more control over reconstruction funds such that aid doesn’t simply flow back into the coffers of international NGOs and private contractors or corporations.

“Survival sex will not end until Haitian women and girls can access what they need to live,” Margaret Satterthwaite, professor of Clinical Law for the GJC, said Thursday.

“Haitian women want economic opportunities and the capacity to access basic resources. The international community should work closely with the Haitian government to create jobs, extend microcredit to women and provide free education to all.”

By IPS Correspondents
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 29 2011 (IPS)

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.

According to Annie Gell, Bureau des Avocats Internationaux’s coordinator of the Rape Accountability and Prevention Project in Port-au-Prince, “The lack of lighting, the lack of patrols, the inability of women to lock their doors” contribute to the “incredibly insecure situation for women and girls” in the camps.

She accused MINUSTAH, the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, of “generally (staying) on the perimetre of camps,” instead of going into the areas where women’s lives are actually at risk, especially at night.

According to a March 2011 survey conducted by the Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law, “an alarming 14 percent of households surveyed reported that, since the earthquake, one or more members of their household had been victimised by rape or unwanted touching or both.”

Marie Françoise Vital Metellus, a gender unit officer with MINUSTAH, told IPS the peacekeeping force has created a trained unit – the UNPOLs – to patrol in the camps and provide specialised assistance to women victims of GBV.

But she acknowledged that the number of camps is huge, and most of them are overcrowded. That makes the UNPOLs’ work, along with the National Haitian Police’s, particularly difficult.

“We’re seeing more women coming forward to report rapes and GBV,” Gell told IPS that adding, “a lot of people are moving out of camps because they’re so insecure, so dangerous.”

Grassroots groups take the lead

“Grassroots groups have the expertise of what needs to be done on the ground, because they live and work in the camps,” Lisa Davis, human rights advocacy director with the women’s group MADRE and an adjunct professor of law for the International Women’s Human Rights Clinic at CUNY Law School, told IPS.

Among these groups is KOFAVIV (Commission of Women Victims for Victims), a Haitian organisation founded in 2004 by rape survivors to provide assistance to others, which recreated itself in the camps after the earthquake.

On Mar. 25, women activists from MADRE, the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, CUNY School of Law and Women’s Link Worldwide testified before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in Washington about the severe problems in the camps.

Three Haitian women – Malya Appolon-Villard, Marie Eramithe Delva and Jocie Philistin – attended the hearing to convey the reality of life in the camps, a “nightmare”, according to Gell.

But “their voices (of grassroots movements) are being excluded from the planning sessions,” Davis told IPS.

She said that while the United Nations GBV cluster should bring together all the actors dealing with sexual violence in Haiti, “(it) is not working with the grassroots groups.”

“We’re (thus) hoping … that the commission will reinforce that the grassroots groups’ voices must be included in planning sessions to end sexual violence,” Gell said.

The decision the IACHR will take after all the hearings – likely in a week or two – is “binding on Haiti in a sense that Haiti is a member of the Organisation of American States (OAS), and the Commission is a body that interprets the treaties and laws” signed under the OAS, Gell explained to IPS.

But the government itself was crippled by the earthquake, and lacks the capacity to fully address the issue of gender- based violence. Despite the existence since 1994 of a Ministry of Women’s Affairs and Women’s Rights (MCFDF, Ministère à la Condition Féminine et aux Droits des Femmes), its programmes are weak due to a lack of resources, Vital Metellus of MINUSTAH told IPS.

She nevertheless stressed that “the state is the key actor”, adding, “In its current state, it needs the support from women’s groups and U.N. agencies.”

As Gell noted, “It’s not necessarily that they (the Haitian government) don’t want to help women and girls, it’s that they don’t have the capacity or the will right now to do that.”

The organisations hope that donor countries will provide more funding to target the GBV problem, Davis told IPS.

According to Gell, that requires “mak(ing) not only the government of Haiti but the world aware (of the) epidemic of violence against women and girls.”

“(In order to) reinforce the capacity of the government’s action to be effective in protecting women and girls,” emphasised Gell, the organisations are using the petition and the hearings before the IACHR as a way to put pressure on the Haitian government and at the same time on the international community, particularly the donors.

She also stressed to IPS “the need for supporting domestic mechanisms for prosecution,” since the attackers usually go unpunished.

Excerpt:

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”.

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

Rice made no mention of historic patterns of Western coercion, occupation, interference and destruction in Haiti, which has rendered the grassroots movement in the country virtually powerless.

“It was striking to hear Rice talking about the ‘will’ of the Haitian people as essential to moving forward,” Peter Hallward, author of “Damning the Flood – Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment”, told IPS.

“For her to say this publically involves a level of hypocrisy that is quite staggering in light of what the U.S. has done to disrupt the mobilisation of the Haitian people over the last hundred years or more,” Hallward said.

Since the earthquake, Haiti’s biggest stakeholders, namely, the U.N., the U.S., Britain, France and Canada, have dominated the news and analysis coming from the country.

Grassroots vs. IHRC: a Donor Deadlock

Natural disasters anywhere have already proved to be enormously lucrative for superpowers with the capacity to step in and “rebuilt, recreate and reconstruct”. In Haiti, critics say “disaster capitalism” has taken on a whole new meaning.

Lisa Davis, a professor in the International Women’s Human Rights Clinic at CUNY law school and human rights advocacy director for MADRE, told IPS, “We’re fast approaching the one year anniversary of the donor conference where donor countries pledged almost 14.2 billion dollars towards reconstruction efforts.”

“Right now, very little of that money has been released; of that which has, most has gone to international NGOs rather than to local Haitian groups or even directly to the government,” she said.

“What seems to be more important are the economic goals of donor states and their perception of what Haiti’s should look like post-earthquake,” she added.

“This is the cookie cutter process of countries being rebuilt from the outside, for example, when donors create economies that manufacture goods for export rather than to meet the needs of the Haitian community,” Davis said.

The presence of so many international agencies who are either unable or unwilling to engage with existing local groups, combined with NGOs’ top-down method of aid distribution, has exacerbated disparities, shortages and violence in the camps, critics say.

Declaration from Below

MADRE works in close partnership with KOFAVIV, a grassroots organisation working tirelessly to support women in the more than a thousand IDP camps spread across the country. Yet despite the U.N.’s ostensible benevolence, Davis said that MINUSTAH has consistently failed to partner with KOFAVIV, or use its funds to increase the group’s capacity.

“MINUSTAH’s peacekeeping troops are totally disorganised, cannot speak the language, they’re not patrolling at night, or even policing all the camps, which means a huge amount of funding is being poured into something completely inefficient,” Davis told IPS.

“The U.N. subcluster that is supposed to be tackling gender- based violence actually said they had trouble identifying all of the 22 camps in the country,” Davis said, “but this is ridiculous because all they had to do was ask KOFAVIV! This is indicative of a perpetual disconnect between the donors and the grassroots.”

While the international community pontificates on the ‘future’ of Haiti, coalitions on the ground are mobilising to push their own agenda, on an indigenous, organic platform.

As early as February last year, over 50 NGOs representing all corners of the vibrant Haitian landscape, from peasants and youth to farmers and women, met in Port-au-Prince and drew up a declaration.

It included priorities as particular as “putting the earth before capital and protecting life from commodifcation”, as well as broader principles such as creating a participatory democracy, privileging Haitian producers in decisions on trade and development, placing social needs at the centre and prioritising agriculture.

Without the explicit and sustained participation of this thriving movement, real recovery in Haiti likely remains a distant dream.

By Jane Regan and Kanya D'Almeida
PORT-AU-PRINCE/NEW YORK, Jan 6 2011 (IPS)

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.

The women are members of KOFAVIV, and they live in the squalid refugee camps and some of the capital’s toughest and poorest neighbourhoods. Today, they each brought along a male friend for a workshop on how to prevent violence.

Dressed in their Sunday best, the participants joked and jostled as they broke into groups.

“Happy New Year!” said one young woman with huge hoop earrings, but then she corrected herself – “No, I won’t say ‘happy,’ but I’ll say, ‘good health to you.'”

As the discussions started up, smiles melted away.

“Well, that’s what we have in our camp too,” said a young girl in blue jeans and a spaghetti strap top.

A man wearing a perfectly ironed white shirt interjected, “Okay, but what are we going to do about it?”

A full year after a 7.0 earthquake in Haiti obliterated 230,000 lives, injured 300,000 and rendered a quarter of the population homeless, Haitian women are now weathering a second catastrophe.

In the 2,000 makeshift displaced persons camps clustered across the country, women and girls are caught in the midst of an onslaught of sexual abuse, savage beatings and heinous crimes against humanity.

Two million people are still crammed into enclosures, which have become microcosms of pre-earthquake patterns of the gross income inequality, social exclusion and abject poverty that has plagued Haiti for centuries.

A report released Thursday by Amnesty International lays bare the appalling conditions in which Haitian women are forced to live – the paltry shelters in the open-air camps seldom comprise anything more than flimsy tents, or tarps stretched over a patch of earth.

According to the report, “Aftershocks: Women Speak Out Against Sexual Violence in Haiti’s Camps”, over 250 rapes, in various camps, were reported a mere 100 days after the earthquake first struck. Many women and girls have been raped multiple times, often by several different men at once. Virtually every victim has also been beaten and tortured.

Medical and sanitary conditions in the camps are appalling; women and girls are forced to bathe in public and walk long distances to communal toilets at night. A total absence of privacy, lighting or solid barriers against perpetrators leaves even girls as young as 12 and 13 years old entirely vulnerable to the wave of sexual violence, most of which occurs after dark, the report says.

“Women’s organisations on the ground helped us access the victims,” Kerrie Howard, a Haiti expert at Amnesty International, told IPS. “Because the camps are a very closed community, it’s extremely difficult for women and girls to speak out.”

One of Amnesty’s key local partners, and arguably the most active organisation working through the crisis, is KOFAVIV.

“At KOFAVIV we believe in education and we believe in preventing violence before it happens,” Jocie Philistin, KOFAVIV’s project coordinator, told IPS. “All of our members are survivors who are rehabilitated, and we are now trying to help others. And the solution doesn’t lie with women only. We need men and women to work together.”

But neighbourhood watch patrols and training sessions aren’t the only answer, Philistin admits.

“Violence has two aspects – one is poverty, meaning it’s economic. The other is politics,” she said.

Whenever there is political turmoil or the economy worsens, violence against women increases. Rape has been used as a political weapon. Young people, especially girls, trade sex for a meal or a roof over their heads.

Now, one year after the quake, KOFAVIV admits a sense of hopelessness.

“In the camps, in the communities, things have gotten worse,” Philistin said. “We have a completely absent state, we have NGOs who are in the camps mostly for public relations and they aren’t even allowed to work in the ‘red zone’ areas, which are the most dangerous neighbourhoods.”

A ray of hope

In early October, a coalition of prominent legal and social justice groups, including MADRE, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and the Bureaux des Advocats Internationaux filed a formal request with the Inter- American Commission on Human Rights on behalf of 13 Haitian women and girls.

On Tuesday, the IACHR accepted the request and issued unprecedented recommendations to the Haitian government, which are binding under Haitian national law.

The measures include providing medical and psychological care such as emergency contraception and culturally sensitive female medical staff members; implementing effective security measures like street lighting and increased patrolling by security forces; and, perhaps most importantly, ensuring the full participation and leadership of grassroots women’s groups in planning and implementing policies to combat the sexual violence.

Lisa Davis, the human rights advocacy director of MADRE, was the primary author of the request.

“We have been working with women’s groups in Haiti since the rape crisis in the 1990s,” Davis told IPS. “And we consult with our local partners every step of the way.”

While Haitian women are of course concerned with long-term political changes that address the root causes of sexual violence and the blows of patriarchy, the need for immediate safety now trumps all, she said.

In a report entitled “Our Bodies Are Still Trembling: Haitians Women’s Fight Against Rape”, the parties of the IACHR request record in chilling detail testimony from women and girls in the camp. Women as old as 60 and as young as eight or nine have all been subjected to unspeakable cruelty which has increased sharply since the 2010 elections.

“We have reports of men going into camps and randomly shooting women who were wearing politically-charged t- shirts,” Davis said.

“Every single woman I talked to said what she wants more than anything is housing,” she stressed. “And if they can’t get that – because it’s not being offered to them right now – then they want to feel safe.”

*Jane Regan reported from Haiti.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
GONAIVES, Sep 20 2010 (IPS)

“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.

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

Cetoute Sadila, now middle-aged, has worked since she was 15 at the Lester market in the valley of Artibonite, Haiti’s largest department.

“I have been selling rice here since I was little girl,” she says. “I used to sell a medium-sized can of rice for 30 gourdes (74 cents). Now, I have to sell it for 105 gourdes (about 2.60 U.S. dollars) because the fertiliser is very expensive.” Still, Sadila said she is able to send her children to school and university.

Not all are so lucky. While Artibonite, and its capital, Gonaives, were largely spared by the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake, Port-au-Prince and its surrounds suffered colossal damage.

The slow pace of recovery has pushed women who were already on the brink of destitution over the edge.

Rosemene Mondesir is a single mother of seven children who has lived in a displaced persons camp for the last eight months. “I have always been the mother and father of my children – before and after the earthquake,” she says. “I need assistance to feed and send them to school.”

The filthy, ramshackle camp is situated about a 40-minute drive north of Port-au-Prince. Residents have dubbed it “the desert of Canaan” because there are so few trees and no potable water. The area used to be a dumpsite for the victims of death squads, particularly following the first coup against former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991.

But in Haiti, women are always well-organised, whether in the marketplace or the camps. As the dust from the quake settled, they have joined hands to combat rapists and opportunistic thieves.

Stephanie Henry, a 28-year-old civil engineer, is the leader of Ann Kore Yo/Let’s Support Them, a grassroots women’s group based in Cersal camp in the Delmas district. “A group of women and I decided to found this organisation to help other young women,” she told IPS. “The young are more vulnerable.”

“Some of them lost their parents in the earthquake. They have to sell their bodies to get some money to live. It is very sad,” Henry says.

Teen pregnancy is also much more visible than before the earthquake. Dr. Magalita Lajoie, a general practitioner who specialises in community health, told IPS, “I was working in a camp where I registered six cases of 13-year-old girls who became pregnant after Jan. 12.”

“Rape is a big problem in the camps,” she said. “We have trainings for 14-year-old girls living in the camps we work at. We teach them what to do in case someone rapes them. We also teach them how to protect themselves from getting pregnant. In turn, they teach the other girls.”

Those who work with women in the camps say that the authorities are often indifferent to crimes against women and rapists are rarely brought to justice.

“The Haitian government and MINUSTAH [the U.N. peacekeeping force] have to take responsibility to provide security for the camps. They have to protect the women and children from being abused or raped by the predators,” said Mario Joseph, a lead attorney with the Bureaux des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), at a press conference last month with Blaine Bookey, a U.S. lawyer working with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH).

A report published in July by human rights groups including Madre, IJDH and BAI called “Our Bodies Are Still Trembling: Haitian Women’s Fight against Rape” detailed ongoing sexual violence in the camps and criticised the Haitian president and U.N. mission in Haiti for not providing security or electricity.

Komisyon Fanm Viktim Pou Viktim, or KOFAVIV/Committee of Women Victims for Victims, has worked with survivors of sexual violence since 2004. In a report published Jul. 18, KOFAVIV contradicted U.N. claims that security has been provided in problem areas. “People living in many camps are forced to provide their own security, with little resources, through informal security patrols or ‘brigades’,” the group said.

In the first two months after the earthquake, KOFAVIV tracked 230 incidents of rape in just 15 camps in Port‐au‐ Prince.

While the government and the international community work on a reconstruction plan, many feel that the immediate problems facing Haitian women have slipped under the radar – even though they must play a key role in putting Haiti back on its feet.

Besides personal safety issues, there are no child support laws to protect single mothers, who comprise the majority of homeless seen on the street.

Marie Benjami, a mother of three, is among the more fortunate ones. She has a job at the Zanmi Agrikol farm, a project of Zanmi Lasante/Partners in Health, located in Bas- Plateau Central.

“I have been working with Zanmi Agrikol/Friends of Agriculture for two years. I can only help my children by coming here. If I didn’t work here, I don’t know what I would do to support them,” she said.

This Nov. 28, Haitians will head to the polls to choose a new president, 10 senators and 99 members of parliament. Fanmi Lavalas, widely seen as the most popular political party in the country, has again been excluded from the election on technical grounds.

But women may still have something to cheer about. Despite their many hardships and a culture of discrimination, at least two – Mirland H. Manigat and Claire-Lydie Parent – have registered to run for president.

Excerpt:

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, May 25 2010 (IPS)

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.

“That child was gravely injured in the face! It was miserable, they were throwing gas everywhere,” said Junior Joel, a young man hanging with friends at night outside the palace – still partially collapsed from the January earthquake.

Three volunteer doctors from the NGO Partners in Health who were working in the emergency room of the General Hospital said they treated at least six individuals with wounds from rubber bullets.

“They were bleeding,” Sarah McMillan, a doctor from New Hampshire, told IPS. “There was a little girl with a big laceration on her face. It needed about 10 stitches. She’ll probably have a scar.”

The girl was discharged from the hospital and could not be found in the tent camp as of publication time.

Thousands of families are crowded into the public squares in the Champs du Mars zone around the palace, after the earthquake killed at least 200,000 people and drove nearly two million from destroyed neighbourhoods.

A coalition of political organisations called Tet Kole, Haitian Creole for “Heads Together”, has staged protests in the area for the past month, demanding the resignation of President René Préval over his handling of the post-earthquake crisis.

The walls of the Faculty of Ethnology school are dotted with graffiti denouncing Préval and the United Nations. Students said they gave Brazilian peacekeeping troops stationed in jeeps outside the campus the middle finger sign late Monday afternoon.

When the troops tried to enter the campus, angrily calling students thieves and vagabonds, the students showered them with rocks. As the soldiers fled, they fired three bullet rounds in the air and one of them struck the front-facing wall of the school, students said.

When the troops returned in bigger vehicles, Frantz Mathieu Junior said he ran to hide in a bathroom, but the soldiers kicked the thin wooden door open. Junior said he was forced to the ground and kicked repeatedly, then taken away. He says he was force-fed while in detention.

The students showed IPS on Tuesday the cracks in the wooden door and the bullet hole next to a second-storey window. After Junior was taken on Monday, they took to the streets in an angry protest, throwing more rocks.

Edmond Mulet, the head of the peacekeeping mission – known by the acronym MINUSTAH – issued a statement blaming an unnamed student for “the provocation” of throwing stones at a patrol, but apologising for the troops’ intrusion on university grounds to seize him.

U.N. troops never fired any bullets or tear gas on Monday, said MINUSTAH spokesperson David Wimhurst. He said only pepper spray and rubber bullets were used to quell an out-of-control protest.

CNN crews heard gunshots, smelled tear gas and saw gas canisters littering the area surrounding the palace. According to witnesses from the surrounding tent camps, U.N. troops blanketed the area with tear gas and fired rubber bullets at 6 p.m. on Monday.

“Everyone ran because nobody wants to be around when there’s so much gas,” Joseph Marie-ange, a 24-year-old mother of four, told IPS. “They’re abusive. They shot the gas in here and the children and elders were falling, everyone was feeling the effects.”

Hours after the protests and swirling gas dissipated, Levita Mondesir trudged with her three-month-old baby towards the General Hospital’s exit.

“We live in Place Petion, across from the Ethnology school,” she told IPS. “The students came, then MINUSTAH released the gas. When I got back to the camp, everyone was running, so I ran too.”

“I tried to cover my child and told the other children to lay down under the bed,” she continued. “There was smoke and the kids and people were falling. My baby wasn’t responding, I was worried he died. I was crying and others helped me take him to the hospital.”

She caught a motorcycle taxi to the hospital and received a reserve ticket for her baby to be x-rayed the next day. Tines Clerge, her husband, said he can’t continue living there now. “I can’t stay at Chanmas anymore,” he told IPS.

The opposition protests continued Tuesday afternoon in Chanmas. Scores of U.N. troops and Haitian police ringed the national palace with barricades. The demonstrators accuse President Préval of seeking to grab power by extending his mandate past the original end date. Parliament approved the extension.

Some are also upset with the Haiti Interim Recovery Commission, which directs the spending of nearly 10 billion dollars in aid money. A majority of the commission members are foreigners, though Préval has a final veto on all decisions.

“If they want to suppress the protest, why didn’t they shoot the gas at the school where the students are?” asked Malia Villa, an organiser with the Haitian women’s group KOFAVIV, who fled the Chanmas area Monday night. “How can they shoot it in the middle of the camp, where we have children and families? They say they’re here for security in the country, but how can the government work with them now when they do this?”

“We can’t continue to tolerate this anymore. It’s revolting to us,” she told IPS, throwing up her hands.

U.N. troops have been dogged by persistent accusations of abuse since their mission was established in 2004 after the ouster of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Incidents occurred in 2008 and 2009 in which Haitian witnesses said troops recklessly fired their weapons, killing or injuring civilians, while MINUSTAH internal investigations cleared their troops of wrongdoing.

Further political demonstrations are scheduled for Thursday, according to opposition groups.

*Ansel Herz blogs at http://www.mediahacker.org.

Excerpt: