Sexual Violence Against Women In Haiti
In January 2010, the 7.0-magnitude earthquake in Haiti destroyed 70 percent of the buildings in the 15 districts of the country’s capital Port-au-Prince. Consequently, thousands of people were left homeless. Since then, 1.3 million people have been placed in tents and makeshift camps.
These precarious housing conditions have exacerbated vulnerability of Haitian girl women and adolescent girls. In camps, females are facing risks of rape and sexual violence. Melanie Megevand, Protection Officer of American Refugee Committee, comments on this issue and says that “it is difficult to say if the cases of violence have been increases since the earthquake, because we had no figures from before to compare with.”
As police stations and court houses were devastated by the quake, authorities assistance is even more limited than it was before the disaster. Since only few cases end up in conviction, with this knowledge attackers behave with impunity. A 16 year old rape victim featured in the video report explains that she did not want to file a complaint because she feared that her aggressor might take revenge on her.
Therefore, protection and safety of women and girls must be a top priority of any humanitarian plan. Empowering women socially and economically is one of the main challenges of Haiti reconstruction and developement.
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5:32 pm
Rape is a violent crime of abuse and humiliation to control and dominate the victim. It is something to educate the victims to places where it could happen at so that the potential victims can be aware of their circumstances to try not to be by themselves and get caught by a rapist unprotected, but in the end the best way to prevent rape is to keep known sex offenders and rapists locked up. It is not an issue where people get raped as the perpetrator is not sexually satisfied or needs therapy it is a crime, like breaking and entering a home, to steal something from the occupant that can never be replaced.some of the same strategies to prevent places where burglars can hide can be used to design apartment buildings and home landscaping such that persons cannot hide to attack women at home or going home and the windows and door latches can be designed to be difficult if not impossible to open from the outside to prevent intruders from gaining easy access to their victims. I was raped once by a man who took advantage of the fact that no one else was home in the household, after I had tried the days preceding to get into a domestic violence shelter to get away from him and his violent friends who had threatened to kick me in the head when I was trying to sleep at their home recuperating from miscarrying. The day after I was raped the perpetrator told me I was lucky I was not hanging in the backyard as his victim afterwards. Two years later I got into a state run program to keep my home address confidential so that I could not be stalked back to home and was assigned a safety planner by the domestic violence shelter I went to and given a booklet to read published by that county on their domestic violence services. In the booklet was a story by my safety planner on why she became a domestic violence advocate, due to the experiences she had dealing with her next door neighbor when she worked as an emergency room nurse. In one instance her neighbor was brought to the emergency room after her husband had tried to kill her by hanging on the clothesline next door.After I read the booklet I realized that my perpetrator of rape had read all the information published in their community about dealing with domestic violence and sexual assault and was quoting parts of the safety planner’s comments out of the booklet to me the day after raping me, so I felt really unsafe. He later with a group of people and his cousin robbed and murdered my elderly father pretending they were doing a drug bust at my parents home and stole their car, living room furniture and contents of their garage pretending it was a methamphetamines manufacturing site that they had discovered and apparently just tried to do the same thing with a group of male rapists who use marijuana, pretend my mother was someone who provided seeds to people to grow marijuana as a retired US government employee and widow, another lie, to rob and apparently make her into a missing person. Whatever the community does for women , it must keep it confidential so that male rapists and sadistic people like this group do not get their hands on the materials and set up murdering the support system of their victims pretending to be investigating illegal drug trafficking. My perpetrator’s nickname was Moby Dick and he graffitied busstops and any transportation system he could get to to terrorize me and other rape victims that we could never get away from him. His brother worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and apparently thought it was sport to set up his brother’s victims to be murdered or their family members to rob them, claiming to be the victims of abuse by anyone that had previously abused us as his victims and they acted out their fantasies that their victims were someone they had to rescue from prostitution networks to abuse them further by kidnapping them and forcing them into sex slavery once they were their victims and killing them if they did not cooperate with their relatives as law enforcement officers in posing as decoys and being forced to have sex as prostitutes and use all their crime victims compensation and property to lure in wanted and known narcotics traffickers to arrest, then force their victim to lose all their property instead of that of a drug dealer being interdicted in revenge for filing a police report naming the relatives of law enforcement and government officials as the perpetrators.That is why the country needs to use NGOs to provide services.
12:31 pm
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2:34 pm
Great articles & Nice a site….
4:54 pm
thanks, your article is very informative.
3:13 pm
I don’t even know how I ended up here, but I thought this post was good. I do not know who you are but definitely you’re going to a famous blogger if you are not already
Cheers!