4/15/2013
ICFRC
By Lorraine Taggart
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Last month’s International Women’s Day saw celebrations of the contribution that women and girls have made to the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement across the world. In Haiti, the Red Cross society took the initiative and planned several activities such as a workshop on cardiovascular disease, a presentation on women’s roles in the voodoo religion, as well as an exhibition of artwork designed and created by women to commemorate this day. The focus for this year’s International Women’s Day was preventing violence against women and girls, a subject that attains added relevance in a post-disaster context. Women across the country had the opportunity to express themselves and to speak out about how women in Haitian society can become more engaged in community life as well as what roles women can play on the reconstruction of the country after the devastating 12 January 2010 earthquake. In Haiti women are often the subject of stigmatization and discrimination. Certain jobs are not offered to women simply because of their gender, and many time husbands forbid their wives from accepting certain jobs that are deemed too masculine. Such was the case for Marie Rachel Preval. Her home was destroyed during the earthquake and she was forced to live in a tent for several months with her 4-year-old son before finally moving into her aunt’s home in Carrefour located in the southern part of Port-au-Prince. In December 2010, she was offered a job with the Red Cross society as a security guard. She accepted it although her husband was against her doing that kind of work and pressured her to quit. To this date she is the only female security guard at Haiti Red Cross Society headquarters in Port-au-Prince. “Many people asked me why I accepted to take a job like this. A job where I would be surrounded by men all day. My husband told me to quit but I couldn’t because I needed a job to take care of my son.”
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Two years later Marie Rachel says that all her co-workers have come to accept her as an equal and she feels very comfortable in her job. “In this society, women are often mistreated. We shouldn’t listen to people who tell us we can’t do certain things because we are women. I think that we as women are capable of doing anything we want to.” The organization's beneficiary communications tools were also used to spread messages and awareness concerning International Women’s Day. Text messages were sent nationwide over the Digicel mobile phone network encouraging the population to take part in a survey launched on the Red Cross IVR system. By dialing 733, people were be able to answer questions on violence prevention to not only test their knowledge on the subject but to gain additional knowledge as well. The Red Cross radio show, known as Radyo KwaWouj, had a special edition of the show which discussed the need for people in society not to discriminate against women who are HIV positive and to understand that they need the same support as any other woman. The sound truck was also used to share messages throughout the metropolitan area to raise awareness about International Women’s Day. The messages encouraged the protection of women against violence and the equality for women and girls. Although the Haiti Red Cross Society actively promotes and encourages the equality of women and the role that they are capable of playing in society, International Women’s Day was another opportunity to emphasize the importance of women in society.

http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/HDQ902_0.pdf

By ATHENA KOLBE and ROBERT MUGGAH
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A TEXT MESSAGE was the first sign that something was wrong. In the week after Hurricane Sandy hit Haiti, our research team was assessing post-disaster crime, food security and service provision. The message came from a Haitian researcher in our group, an enthusiastic and talented graduate student whom we’ll call Wendy. She had been walking alone a few blocks from our hotel when she was forced into a house and brutally raped. We quickly located a doctor but he refused to examine Wendy, saying she needed to be seen by the authorities first. We then contacted the police, and after a grueling interview in which one officer repeatedly asked Wendy, “What did you do to make him violate you?” the police said she was free to be examined. The doctor, however, couldn’t be found. Although Haiti routinely suffers from political and natural disasters, rape is an especially insidious crisis. Haiti’s brutal dictatorships used rape as a political tool to undermine the opposition. A 2006 study reported that some 35,000 women and girls in Port-au-Prince were sexually assaulted in a single year. In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, residents of the capital’s tent cities were 20 times more likely to report a sexual assault than other Haitians. Haitian prosecutors are reluctant to pursue charges against rapists unless a victim is examined by a doctor within the first 72 hours to “certify” the assault, but few victims are able to satisfy this requirement. The police referred Wendy to a state-run clinic in the nearest large town, a three-hour drive over washed-out roads. When Wendy arrived she was told the doctor was out. A nurse mentioned that he could be found at a private clinic nearby.
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It had been more than 16 hours since the attack. Wendy hadn’t slept or bathed. Her clothes were ripped and dirty. Dried blood matted her hair where the rapist had slammed her head against a wall. The doctor wanted verification from the police that a sexual assault complaint had been filed before he conducted an examination to retrieve fluids left by the perpetrator. The police were called but they claimed a “fee” was required before they would release a copy of the sexual assault complaint. A women’s rights organization in the capital suggested we pay a bribe and complain to the policeman’s superiors later. Our colleague drove several hours back to the town where the assault had taken place, paid a $25 bribe, and waited while the officer wrote up a report that merely stated that Wendy had lodged a complaint against a particular man but not that she had been raped by him. After some argument, the officer agreed to include the allegation of sexual assault. It took more than 24 hours before Wendy finally saw a doctor who admitted he’d never been trained to examine a rape victim. She cried the entire time. Random individuals wandered freely in and out of the room during the exam, including patients, nurses and a man visiting his sick wife in an adjacent bed. In North America, rape victims are often given medication to fight possible exposure to sexually transmitted disease as well as the morning-after pill. Wendy was terrified of pregnancy. She declared that although she didn’t believe in abortion, she would rather “die” than have “that man put a baby inside of me.” Wendy knew about the morning-after pill but wasn’t aware if it was available or legal in Haiti. The doctor falsely told her that after 24 hours it was too late to use it. After Wendy’s exam, the police refused to pick up the medical report or fluid samples collected by the doctor. Instead, she was told to take them to a state-run medical clinic for sexual assault victims in the capital, a 15-hour drive away. The doctor then demanded an exorbitant fee for the medical report. The final document stated simply that Wendy had complained of being raped and was found to have evidence of sexual activity. No record was made of the bruises covering her thighs or the many lacerations on her body.
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BEFORE Wendy could shower, she had to return to the small town where the assault occurred for yet another interrogation by the police. Our colleague, meanwhile, was scouring pharmacies for the morning-after pill. He finally tracked down a pharmacist who knew what it was. But the medication, like most pharmaceuticals in Haiti, was imported. The instructions were in Arabic and Portuguese, neither of which the pharmacist could read. He didn’t know which package contained the morning-after pill and which contained hormones taken by post-menopausal women. Nor did our colleague, who closed his eyes and picked a box, which by chance happened to be the right one. After taking the pill, Wendy slept for the entire ride to Port-au-Prince, helped into oblivion by the glass of homemade gin the doctor had prescribed. We had no intention of sweeping this incident under the rug. We contacted the police, women’s rights organizations and various government ministries. We spoke with the police chief from the area where the assault had taken place. He said he had questioned the perpetrator, who claimed that Wendy had had sex with him willingly. Because the medical report made no mention of violent assault, the police officer in charge, who had seen her bruises and cuts himself, said there was nothing he could do. Calls to the women’s rights organizations and other civil society groups confirmed that there was little to be done. “You could pay something, give them a gift so they arrest the guy,” one human rights worker suggested. “But he’ll probably just pay another bribe and get out.” For decades, Haitian victims were blamed for inviting rape, and seldom spoke out. Politicians and the media perpetuated these stigmas. So did the law: a woman’s testimony that she didn’t consent to sex was insufficient for conviction, and monetary restitution or marriage to the rapist was considered a solution. A 2005 law made rape a punishable offense after intense lobbying from survivors and the Haitian Ministry of Women’s Affairs. In 2010, the law was updated after chilling reports of rapes committed against the elderly and children.
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But old habits die hard. In Haiti, attitudes toward rape are similar to those that were common in the United States before the 1970s and ’80s. Haitian officials often claim that residents of slums and displaced person camps are promiscuous. Despite new laws, few women will ever report the event because of the prevailing social norms that blame victims for their own assault. Even fewer survivors will be in a position to navigate the complicated procedures to bring charges against a rapist. Having an education, money and connections doesn’t necessarily help. By the time Wendy returned to Port-au-Prince she wanted only to return to her family. Her mother thanked us for getting her medical attention and asked that we never mention the rape to Wendy again. Wendy said she just wanted to forget about it. She blamed herself for walking alone, for wearing borrowed pants that were too tight, for smiling and saying hello when the man first approached her, for freezing up and not screaming when he attacked her. Despite her education, resilience and dedication to fighting violence against women, Wendy could not bring herself to face the grueling road of rape prosecution in Haiti. So she dropped it and asked us to do the same. When we told the women’s rights group she didn’t want to pursue a case, they weren’t surprised. “It happens all the time,” said a member of the staff. “We get dozens of cases each month, and out of those sometimes not even one woman will put herself through this process.” It is hard to blame them.
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Athena Kolbe is a researcher from the University of Michigan School of Social Work and co-director of a social work institute in Pétionville, Haiti. Robert Muggah is the research director of Brazil’s Igarapé Institute and a professor of International Relations at the Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro.

By Allie Torgan
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Haiti's terror didn't end when the ground stopped shaking. Reports of rape and sexual violence have been all too common after the January 2010 earthquake that killed more than 220,000 people and displaced almost 25% of the entire population. "On the evening of January 20, several young men were firing gunshots in the air. They came into our shelter and grabbed my 19-year-old niece," one woman, Dina, told Amnesty International. "They just came in, grabbed her and dragged her away. ... She was raped by several men. They took her at around 9 p.m. and let her go at around 2 a.m." Another woman, Guerline, told the rights group that she and her 13-year-old daughter were attacked on the same night in March 2010. The men wore hoods and told Guerline that if she went to the police, she would be shot dead."There is nowhere safe where I can live, so I had to keep quiet," she said. "I didn't take my daughter to the hospital. She was too scared. I sent her to another town where some relatives live." In the days following the disaster, camps were set up to provide shelter for more than a million displaced Haitians. But these "tent cities" have been far from ideal, according to Malya Villard-Appolon, one of this year's top 10 CNN Heroes.
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"After the earthquake, the situation was inhumane and degrading. There was no security. There was no food; there was no work," said Villard-Appolon, a rape survivor who co-founded an organization, KOFAVIV, that helps other victims find safety, medical aid and legal support. "Two years after the earthquake, it is still the same," she said. "The people are still under the tent, they don't have electricity, they are getting raped." Nearly 370,000 people remain in displacement camps, according to the U.N. And gruesome reports of violence, inadequate health care and substandard living conditions have painted a picture of horror and hopelessness. In one study, published in January by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (PDF), 14% of households reported that at least one member of the household had been a victim of sexual violence since the earthquake. And 70% of households surveyed said they were now more worried about sexual violence.
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Residents have cited lack of lighting, long walks to the bathroom, and flimsy tents as some of the issues putting females at risk of attack. Many females also are on their own for the first time. "Women and girls were left to fend for themselves in camps," said Anne-christine d'Adesky, project coordinator for PotoFanm+Fi, a nonprofit that has been working with more than 70 Haitian support groups to track post-earthquake violence. "Because of the great displacement, people lost that sense of community protection." Women and girls were left to fend for themselves in camps. ... People lost that sense of community protection. Anne-christine d'Adesky, project coordinator for PotoFanm+Fi Accurate numbers of gender-based violence are difficult to find in the aftermath of such devastation, especially when many victims fear retaliation. But d'Adesky said her group has seen a steady rise in reports, which she attributes to increased outreach. One young woman, Marie, was raped in the Champ de Mars camp and had her jaw broken. She said she was also forced into prostitution so she could eat and survive. High numbers of adolescent girls are engaging in what they call "transactional sex" for shelter and food, d'Adesky said. Many of those interviewed claimed they had never sold sex before, but the earthquake had left them no option.
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"I call this gender aftershocks," said d'Adesky, whose group is publishing their report on Haiti next month. "These women and girls have no means of survival and are engaging in transactional sex work -- or survival sex -- sometimes just for shelter." And many of those women -- as well as those who have been raped -- are becoming pregnant, raising fears about rising maternal health issues. Even before the quake, Haiti was the most dangerous place to be pregnant in the Western Hemisphere: the lifetime risk of dying during childbirth there is 1 in 47. "We followed up with a number of pregnant girls who were no longer pregnant," d'Adesky said. According to her sources, there has been a high rate of illegal street abortions and child abandonment. But amid the depressing and dire reports comes a glimmer of hope.
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Nearly 370,000 people remain in Haiti displacement camps, according to the U.N. KOFAVIV and other groups are working to help young girls and women, giving them safety, support and training so they can make money and not have to sell themselves.
Better lighting has been installed in some displacement camps. More than 10,000 military and police personnel are now helping to provide security throughout the country, and hundreds of U.N. peacekeepers have been assigned to specifically work with the Haitian National Police. And in the last two years, there has been a big change in the way rape is prosecuted, according to legal experts. More women are reporting the crimes, and more rapists are being prosecuted. "There has been a higher percentage of complaints that are turning into pre-trial investigations and are leading to formal charges," said Brian Concannon Jr., director of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti.
In the first two years after the quake, sources in Haiti had estimated there were few, if any, rape convictions. But this year there have already been more than 60 convictions for sex crimes in Haiti, according to the National Human Rights Defense Network.
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This summer, 22 rape cases were prosecuted and there were 13 convictions, said Meena Jagannath, a lawyer who has worked with Haitian rape victims. There was one acquittal, and eight of the trials were "left blank" for a number of reasons, including lack of representation for the victim who may not have even known she was to appear in court. "It sounds like it's a small number, it sounds like more should have been filed since 2010," Jagannath said. "But we should take into consideration the biases of the system and level of disorganization and corruption. It really is an accomplishment. I've heard those numbers are much higher now than even before the earthquake." Concannon said Haiti's justice system has a history "of not taking rape that seriously." It wasn't until 2005 that rape was classified as a crime on par with an assault. Before that, rape was a "crime against public morals," which Concannon says is something like a misdemeanor compared with a felony. Now the challenge is changing attitudes and empowering women to speak up. While it still can be difficult for many victims to file a police report and obtain the necessary medical documents needed to pursue justice, there are more resources for women who want to speak out. "All this progress is the result of advocacy by KOFAVIV and other grassroots women's groups and their allies," Concannon said. "I believe that the progress has the potential to play a key role in transforming attitudes about violence against women -- not just in the justice system, but in Haitian society as a whole."

9/21/2012
UN Women
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On a small peninsula between two bays on the northern coast of Haiti, the village of Le Borgne shelters the Asosyasyon Famn de Boy (AFB), Creole for the Women’s Association of Le Borgne. Supported by UN Women, the association helps women survivors of gender-based violence to access medical and legal care. Six hours drive from the capital Port-au-Prince, Le Borgne was spared from Haiti’s recent disasters, but has also been largely ignored by the inflow of international assistance that has saturated the earthquake-affected areas. Just off the main square, is the AFB centre, an unfinished cinderblock building. Inside, Francia Orel Estimanle and her team have gathered a group of women and girls who they have assisted in receiving medical services and justice. Trained by UN Women on counseling survivors of violence against women, Francia encourages them to share their stories with each other, and support each other.
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One young woman tells how she resisted an attempted rape, only to have her aggressor beat her face and knock out several teeth. Knowing that she would find both solidarity and support, she went to the AFB office. She was taken to the nearest city, Cap-Haitien, where she was examined by a dentist and got a proper diagnosis. While AFB helped her secure an arrest warrant, the aggressor fled the area before he could be apprehended. A second woman relays her harrowing experience of being targeted for revenge due to an unpaid debt of a distant family member. After the hooligans could not find her relative, they pounced on her while she was collecting water and beat her viciously. She managed to make it to AFB where they immediately escorted her to the hospital to get treatment and the medical certificate needed for a warrant. “If I couldn’t come here to get support, I would have died,” she explained. Her aggressors also fled but arrest warrants await their return.
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UN Women supports AFB to accompany survivors to medical and justice services and follow up on their cases. According to Kathy Mangones, UN Women Country Programme Manager, “The chances of a woman receiving justice are multiplied if she is accompanied by an advocate.” AFB cites cases of women receiving justice and convicted aggressors being tried and put into jail. The consequences for violence, as well as the increasing lack of tolerance by survivors of gender-based violence in the community, send a strong message to potential perpetrators. UN Women and partners are also linking response efforts with Local Security Committees, which at their monthly meetings, identify specific security issues facing women and girls and devise solutions. They work to prevent violence occurring in the first place. The Committee in Le Borgne is attended by the local magistrate, the Haitian National Police inspector for the municipality, local public health officials, religious leaders, civil society representatives and journalists.
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AFB, established in 2004 in this densely populated town of 80,000 people, has conducted broad sensitization campaigns on women’s rights and violence against women, as well as served as a referral centre for survivors of violence. While challenges are plenty, the Local Security Committees have also succeeded in mobilizing police to apprehend suspects, change patrol patterns to monitor high-risk areas and spread awareness about the consequences of violence against women and girls. The efforts are bringing results. Police Inspector Luc Codio says, “Men are more hesitant to beat women because they are more aware of the measures and laws that are in place.” Magistrate Germaine Louse Gerard attributes the reduction in violence to the reduction in impunity. “When the perpetrators see a victim get justice, the sanction serves as a disincentive,” she says. More women and girls are coming forward as awareness of AFB and the Local Security Committees grow. Wilna, AFB’s deputy head, summarizes the vision of AFB, “Our dream is to help women find solidarity among themselves and achieve a society where women are less vulnerable and economically secure.” UN Women and AFB are also working to initiate economic empowerment activities in Le Borgne to offer livelihood support to vulnerable women.
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UN Women supports AFB and the Local Security Committee in Le Borgne, as well as similar initiatives in eight other under-served Haitian communities in partnership with Britain’s Department for International Development and the Australian Agency for International Development.

8/31/2012
ICRC
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Lying in the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, tucked away beside a potholed side-road just off the heavily policed - and infamously insecure - highway 9, the camp of Fondation Zami Timaun is home to around 200 families. An unremarkable place by the standards of Port-au-Prince’s numerous camps, Fondation Zami Timaun was no ‘tent city’, just an average camp where people live day-to-day and struggle to get by. But thanks to its low lying and exposed position, in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Isaac, Fondation Zami Timaun finally found some unwanted recognition – as one of the camps worst affected by the wind and rain. Four days after the storm, fragile tents are still inundated with a thick coat of clay-like mud; mothers and children are sleeping in nearly six inches of mud, their mattresses and few possessions buried, their tents reduced to ragged shelters. Mud-streaked toddlers and children wander through the remains of the community, staring with disbelief at the loss of the structures they previously called home. With its location rubbing up against the neglected and volatile Cite de Soleil, a place most aid agencies consider off-limits, Fondation Zami Timaun has been largely left to its own devices for more than two and half years.
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As a result, women here have been particularly neglected. Their power has been lost by virtue of their gender, and women obtain few opportunities to meet and benefit from each other’s knowledge, companionship and strength. Deprived of safe spaces to meet - such as schools, shops and clinics that most of us take for granted - many have been compelled to turn inward, pushed beyond their psychological and physical limits. Against this background, teams from the Haitian Red Cross and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) visited Cite Soleil the day after the storm, and realised that in a camp so affected by the dynamics of violence and poverty, any attempt to help the most vulnerable with any relief distribution would mean engaging with the entire community and the camp’s female residents in particular. During the planning stage, agreement was reached that women will be given priority for receiving relief items, and that the distribution site will function as a ‘Safe Space’, an opportunity for the women of the camp to gather and speak freely amongst themselves without fear.
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While most emergency distributions are judged on speed and volume, this is one where the time and attention people receive will be the measure of success. On the day of the distribution, Daniel Louise Marie, an IFRC hygiene promotion supervisor, was asked to lead her all female team in distributing hygiene kits – packs containing female sanitary items and undergarments - as well as wood beams and tarpaulins. For Daniel, a veteran of many Red Cross operations, it is easy to empathize with the frustrations of the women in the community. “We made this space for women,” she explains. “Men have a more dominating presence, and sometimes create a barrier for women to speak up. The women we gave items to said they felt more comfortable, especially when we helped them place the relief items on their heads to carry. They looked up at us and smiled, they saw we could do exactly what a man could do.”
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The elderly women are particularly happy to participate in a distribution managed and staffed by women, she adds. Stephanie Etienne, the Haitian Red Cross’ violence prevention officer, was also on site, charged with personally greeting each of the women in line and sharing vital information about personal protection. For Stephanie, her role in the distribution at Fondation Zami Timaun is just the start of more concerted efforts to protect vulnerable women and promote their inclusion in the ongoing recovery efforts. On the same day as Stephanie was giving out protection advice, the President of the Haitian Red Cross was signing off on a Memorandum of Understanding with the IFRC to expand violence prevention and response activities in Haiti. The ‘Kote Trankil’, which translates as “safe space”, project sits hand-in-hand with the IFRC’s Integrated Neighbourhood Approach (INA) to assisting earthquake affected areas of Port-au-Prince. INA has incorporated violence prevention activities into its overall programming to help ensure that safe spaces for women and young people are preserved and fostered, and opportunities for learning and jobs are open to them. For today though, in Fondation Zami Timaun, 28-year-old Vanite Dora is heading back to rebuild her shelter with the items she has just received from the Haitian Red Cross. “Having women manage everything was good,” she says. “When men are there they get angry, it gets noisy. This was calm, I feel proud.”

During a visit to Haiti 19–22 July 2012, the president of UN Women’s Executive Board, H.E. Kim Sook, Permanent Representative of the Republic of Korea to the United Nations, called for an end to gender-based violence and the promotion of women’s participation in politics. “We cannot wait for poverty to be eradicated in Haiti before dealing with issues affecting women.” said Ambassador Kim. “Gender-based violence, discrimination and lack of access are some of the problems women in Haiti come up against – problems that must be resolved as soon as possible,” he added. Ambassador Kim stressed the urgent need to lobby for gender equality and women’s political participation, as well as to bolster efforts to put an end to gender-based violence and to promote the empowerment of women in Haiti. Ambassador Kim met with Haitian authorities and with various women’s rights organizations. The aim of these meetings was to assess progress on women’s rights as well as to identify challenges to be faced. Ambassador Kim said that UN Women’s presence in the field would be stepped up in the coming year.
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Ambassador Kim also met with the Yanick Mezile, Haiti’s Minister of Women’s Affairs and Rights, and Rose Anne Auguste, Minister for Human Rights and Poverty Eradication. Talks were also held with Marie Mimose Felix, the Minister responsible for rural population. Ambassador Kim participated in a working session with Kevin Kennedy, the UN Secretary-General’s Deputy Special Representative in Haiti. During a meeting with female politicians and women’s rights organizations in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, Ambassador Kim raised the issue of the implementation of a recent constitutional amendment favoring the establishment of a 30 per cent minimum quota pertaining to women working in public administration. Ambassador Kim also met the Korean contingent of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) stationed in Léogane, a city located approximately thirty kilometres from Port-au-Prince. He was then hosted by UN Women partners, Mouvement des Femmes Haïtiano-Dominicaines (Haitian/Dominican Women’s Movement) where the issue of prevention of violence and women’s empowerment was discussed. In Jacmel, located in the South-East of the country, Ambassador Kim visited the first temporary women’s shelter which was opened on 15 June. The temporary shelter Magalie pour la Vie is run by the women’s rights organization Fanm Deside (Women Decide) and was built with support from UN Women. Ambassador Kim emphasized the importance of such shelters as part of the response to gender-based violence.

Associated Press
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The United Nations mission in Haiti says the prosecution of rape cases in the impoverished Caribbean nation remains bogged down, with justice rarely served. A study released Tuesday by the U.N.'s human rights section in Haiti examines a sample of 62 rape complaints filed over a three-month period in 2011 at some of Port-au-Prince's busiest police stations. None of the complaints had gone to trial more than a year after they were filed. The government prosecutor's office in Port-au-Prince reviewed only 25 of the 62 cases, and judicial authorities were ordered to investigate 11 of them. Of those, four were dismissed and the rest remain under investigation. Only one was referred to trial, which is pending.

UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti
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Near Petionville, Haiti, there is an Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camp containing approximately 17,000 residents from 4,500 different families. The camp, which lies in a valley with tents, markets, and other signs of life, is the equivalent of many small cities and villages around the world. Within this IDP camp, there are two schools where children attend at no cost, two churches for worshipping, and a hospital is situated at the top of a hill. The guardians of this community are members of the Haitian National Police (HNP) and the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti’s police (MINUSTAH UNPols). On February 2, 2012, I toured this camp to report on the activity that goes on in daily life. The sights that greeted me were signs of hope. There were two schools with children separated by grades studying their lessons or playing at recess. At one school, aptly named “Ecole de L’espoir” or “School of Hope,” a group of girls was skipping jump ropes while their peers held the ends and the boys played soccer. All of the children, scrubbed clean and immaculately dressed in their uniforms, created a setting worthy of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn.” They all laughed, smiled, played, and learned in a setting free of fear.
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The catalyst of this climate of safety and security is observable in the operation and interaction of the HNP and UNPols. According to Deputy Team Leader, Alain Parfait Chadaton, 19 UNPols staff the camp each 24-hour period in conjunction with 6 HNP officers. A small administrative center is located along with a newly constructed “Welcome Center” for victims of gender-based violence facilitated by MINUSTAH Gender personnel. This office will be jointly staffed with HNP and UNPol, Haiti’s Ministry of Women’s Condition and Women’s Rights (MCFDF), as well as camp residents to address gender crime issues. In addition to the HNP and UNPol patrols, 52 solar powered lights spaced through the 5 sectors of the camp enhance security. A camp committee, whose members are vetted by the Office of International Migration (OIM), works with the HNP and UNPols in a neighborhood watch and advisory capacity. The President of the committee, Raynald Romelus, accompanied the group through the camp.
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The working relationship between the HNP and UNPols “has been very good,” according to UNPol Rachelle Redmond, one of seven IDP Camp Coordinators. The HNP officers assigned to the camp are willing to work and help the residents, as well as work with MINUSTAH personnel. These officers conduct foot patrols with UNPols and take the lead in camp security efforts. Touring the camp by foot required approximately one hour. This circumambulation took the group up the sides of steep hills and down into narrow grades. At all stops along the way, the UNPols and HNP officers stopped and visited with local camp residents. The attitudes of the residents were cheerful, and they were grateful for the assistances paid to them. I was invited to visit the elementary schools and met a number of young boys and girls in different grades who were attending their lessons. Other than the location, the classrooms could have been a replica of those anywhere else in the world. This writer could have spent the day watching the lessons being taught, but alas, the groups’ presence was a distraction to the children. Rather than see them be scolded for being curious about the newcomers, we pressed onward to other areas. In this environment of safety and security, it appears that in spite of less than ideal conditions, a society is existing in harmony with a positive mindset and attitude. The human condition is capable of noble exertions and with the assistance of the HNP and MINUSTAH UNPols, Haitian citizens are empowered to overcome their adversity. Thus, the conclusion of this tour left the writer with a positive impression that good things are taking place within this camp by those dedicated to the guardianship of the small city’s citizens.

Inter Press Service
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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. "Women are living in harsh and degrading conditions in the displacement camps," said Eramithe Delva, co-founder of KOFAVIV (Commission of Women Victims for Victims). 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.
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Excerpts from the interview follow.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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Q: What are main causes of this problem and what must be done to tackle them?
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Q: Where you have seen major progress being made?
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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.
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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.
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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.

British Red Cross
By Ellie Matthews
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When a devastating earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, the British Red Cross was quickly on the scene helping communities recover. Two years on, we are still there. Why? Because recovering from such a huge disaster takes time. At least, it does if you want to improve people’s lives permanently. By adapting our approach to the local context, working directly with the affected communities and ensuring that the work we do is sustainable, our programmes can continue improving people’s lives long after we have left. By taking a long-term view, we are helping people in Haiti rebuild their lives in a way which reduces their vulnerability to future disasters.
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When responding to a disaster, we need to adapt to new challenges. In Haiti’s South Department, the British Red Cross ran a livelihoods programme from October 2010 to October 2011, giving grants and training to the most vulnerable people. However, shortly after the programme began, a cholera outbreak spread to the region. One of the only organisations to respond to the outbreak in the south, we quickly began treating people, delivering medical supplies and spreading hygiene information. Many remote communities in the south could only be reached on foot or by donkey. Despite this new challenge, we continued to help people through our livelihoods programme – reaching over 3,000 households. Luciana Pierre Jean was displaced from Port-au-Prince after losing everything in the disaster. Using cash grants and training from the Red Cross she improved her small commerce business. She says: “The way I run my business now is different. I make more profit and I can use the profit to buy things that I need for my baby and myself. The Red Cross has helped me so much. I am not just surviving now, I feel like I am progressing.” Our programme in the south has now finished, and we have given thousands of vulnerable families the ability to continue providing for themselves once we’re gone. In addition, by training local government medical staff and Haitian Red Cross staff and volunteers in cholera treatment and hygiene promotion, we have ensured that they can continue working to prevent and cure cholera.
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In the Automeca and La Piste camps in Port-au-Prince, the British Red Cross has been running water and sanitation-focused projects since July 2010. As in the South Department, it soon became necessary for us to provide cholera prevention and treatment services too. Before the earthquake, many people in Port-au-Prince had limited access to the services we now provide in the camps – basic necessities such as clean facilities and water. Before our programmes in the camps finish at the end of this month, we are working with the Haitian government and other agencies to ensure that vital services continue to be provided. This way, improvements to people’s way of life can be sustained until more permanent resettlement is possible.
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Another way to make sure that benefits are long-lasting is by working with local communities. In the Delmas 19 area of Port-au-Prince we are working with the community to regenerate their local environment. This includes addressing shelter, livelihoods, health and hygiene issues. By enabling the community to determine the pace of recovery, what’s needed and when, we can help them recover in a sustainable way. As Luis Sfeir-Younis, programme support officer for recovery, says: “You have to take the time to work with communities, or it is superficial and the impact doesn’t stick. We want to make communities stronger and more resilient”. The British Red Cross will continue working in the Delmas 19 neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince until at least 2013. Luis says: “We have a strong understanding of the multi-faceted problems this community faces. Using this information we are helping vulnerable people rebuild their lives.” We’re no longer taking donations for our Haiti recovery work, but you can help us to provide immediate aid when disasters like this strike by donating to our Disaster Fund.

1/13/2012
UNFPA
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PORT-AU-PRINCE — Two years after the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti, more than 500,000 people still live in camps as reconstruction efforts have not kept up with demands for housing and cholera remains a serious killer. As humanitarian relief operations wind down to make room for long-term development projects, hundreds of thousands of displaced people continue to rely on aid to survive. Gender-based violence has become an alarming issue in the camps as well, where the combination of minimal lighting and cramped conditions creates insecurity. In some of the larger camps, rapes are almost part of everyday life. To address the problem, UNFPA Haiti installed 200 durable solar streetlights in 40 of the camps last year. The lights were installed near showers, latrines and water distribution points – places where women may be vulnerable to violence. The project was made possible from the support of the United Nations Foundation and the American music band Linkin Park, which collected funds through a sensitization campaign among its fans.
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Besides helping to prevent sexual violence, the lamps allow some women to continue their informal trade outside their shelters at night and to socialize. The lamps also enable students to study in the evening if they do not have electricity. Women living in camps face other considerable challenges, such as limited access to health-care services and maternity wards. The pregnancy rate in Haiti significantly increased after the January 2010 earthquake, so UNFPA initiated the Clinique Sourire (‘Smile Clinic’) project with partners to build maternity centres in rural areas offering full care. The country currently needs about 84 such clinics to meet the needs of pregnant women. The fourth Smile Clinic is now being built and will open by March; it and the three others are located in the West, Artibonite and South East departments, areas strategically mapped by the Haitian Ministry of Public Health. "The idea is to allow people living in remote areas to have access to basic services, such as prevention, antenatal clinics, diagnosis, medical care, delivery, perfusion, distribution of medications, hygiene of mother and child,” says Stephanie Orsucci, a midwife in Haiti.
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Midwives will also take part in organizing inventories, management and administration at the centres. In Haiti, only 25 per cent of all deliveries occur in health institutions, and the maternal death rate is 630 mortalities per 100,000 live births, the highest in the Americas. However, the Haitian experience has shown that when midwives are used, more mothers’ lives are saved. In addition to services for admission, delivery, postpartum and childbirth complications, the clinics provide care for low birth-weight babies, prevention of HIV transmission from mother to child and screening for cervical cancer, which is the third-leading cause of death for Haitian women. Obstetric fistula is also becoming a serious problem in Haiti, where some women have little or no access to emergency Caesarean sections during prolonged or obstructed labour. That is often the case in crisis situations, says Gillian Slinger, the coordinator of the global Campaign to End Fistula. To help remedy the problem, UNFPA arranged for two Haitian urologists to travel to Niger in November to participate in a three-week training course on fistula surgery and techniques. There, they worked on 29 fistula patients.
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—Vario Serant and Alexandra Sicotte-Levesque

1/12/2012
IPS
By Kanya D'Almeida
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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 hundreds of 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.
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Villard-Appolon also called attention to long-term unemployment that pushed scores of men into drug abuse and spun a web of economic desperation over Haiti, long before the quake. (The media and the government should) pay more attention to the rural areas of Haiti: in the provinces, there is nothing, people do not have access to education, health services or even have the means to generate income for themselves," she said. "They have little opportunity to farm and sell produce. Cheap imported goods have flooded the market, making it hard for them to make money from their products. The issue of deforestation is a vicious cycle: trees were once cut down and burnt to make coal to sell for money in the markets. But now, there are no more trees, so many families have lost their only means of income." While the rape epidemic that swept the camps after the quake has been well documented, a second and equally horrifying crisis remains hidden, human rights activists say. "Displaced women and girls are being forced by circumstance into survival sex," Marie Eramithe Delva, co-founder of KOFAVIV, said Thursday. "It is an epidemic, but one that has gotten little attention from the Haitian government or international community."
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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.
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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."
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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.
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"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 (U.S.) 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."

12/23/2011
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Many find themselves with larger families, as they take in children and elderly relatives, but shrinking or non-existent incomes. Since the earthquake, women and girls are particularly vulnerable. Displacement, loss of shelter, lack of security provision by government, crowded living conditions, and poorer access to medical facilities and economic opportunities have threatened their lives and livelihoods. The rights of women remain weak and, as such, in the chaos of the aftermath of the earthquake their protection from violence is often overlooked. Marianne recently received the first of two cash grants of USD$250 from the Red Cross, as part of a programme to support people displaced by the earthquake. She and her husband live in Débauchee, Coteaux, with three other elderly people, including Marianne’s sister who is severely disabled. She said the money would be used first to ensure everyone had enough to eat, and then the rest would be invested for the future. “We need to make this money last for us as long as we can,” she said. “We will use it for a combination of increasing our agricultural production and buying things to resell. For example, with the first grant we have decided to buy coffee in the high season, and then wait to resell it when there is not as much coffee around, so we can get a better price for it.”
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The cash grant, she said, was a lifeline for her and her extended family. “We feel that life will be more comfortable now. Yesterday the situation was bad. Today it is another story.” Bertha Henry, 17, lives in La Piste camp with her family. A small extension, built by a Red Cross construction team, on the side of her shelter marks Bertha’s first business – a small shop selling beauty products and food to friends and neighbours which she runs after school. “I started with cosmetics first as I knew they would sell,” she said. “Lots of young women come here to buy soap, crèmes and body lotions. One of the best things about the shop is that I get to use the products.” Bertha sees the business as something that could grow and help fund her future ambitions, but school comes first. “I would love to grow the business to the point that I could sell food for cooking and cold drinks,” she said. “When I come home from school I eat, shower and then open the business. If I have homework to do, I do it in the shop.” The money Bertha is saving is already making a difference: “The money is keeping me in school and has helped buy my books. Ultimately I want to be a doctor so I am giving education the priority in my life right now,” she said. School was also a priority for Marie Bernard, 56, who said the earthquake didn’t harm her physically, but left her financially crippled. She received a cash grant of $125 from the Red Cross. “The first thing I did was to pay off my children’s school debt so they could continue their studies,” she said. “I owed the school money and every day they would send the kids home. They are so much happier now they can go back.” Marie used to sell food and would like to restart her business, but currently lacks the money to start. The second available cash grant will be conditional on the production of a workable business plan, so with the children’s education back on track, that will be the next priority. “At least now I can get a good night’s sleep. That makes life a little bit better,” she said.

11/30/2011
The Guardian
Mariano Fernandez
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It's wrong to claim that the UN doesn't tackle sexual violence in HaitiWe are doing what we can to protect women and girls despite a lack of resources Your international development supplement reports that "Haiti … is witnessing an 'epidemic' of rape in the [internally displaced persons] camps, with cases growing in number and brutality" (A search for sanctuary, 21 November). The situation of women and girls in Port-au-Prince and in Haiti in general is truly precarious, especially for those living in camps. Cases of rape and sexual violence have increased inside the camps and outside, while protective measures are still in their infancy. Unfortunately, gender-based violence is not just a consequence of post-earthquake displacement and insecurity, but was a fact of life for too many women in pre-earthquake Haiti, where a culture of exclusion and discrimination solely on the basis of gender is unfortunately well entrenched. Haitian and international partners on the ground are focusing on this scourge, but the task is huge and resources limited. Contrary to your report, however, there is not a complete absence of action. The report examines the work of Kofaviv, a Haitian rape victims support organisation, and quotes Javier Zuniga of Amnesty International on the role of the United Nations: "The UN, which has a mandate for protection, does a small amount of patrolling around Port-au-Prince but they do very little monitoring of the camps. As for the protection of women, they are doing nothing at all."
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The UN has taken many measures to provide protection for camp residents with a specific focus on combating sexual, gender-based violence. We have established, with the Haitian national police, permanent police stations in the seven largest camps, staffed 24 hours a day. A special unit within the UN police forces focuses exclusively on the camps and conducts joint patrols with the Haitian police – around 1,500 per week. A mobile gender unit, with specially trained personnel, operates around the clock and responds immediately to any reports of sexual violence. The UN has also installed hundreds of solar lamps to improve night-time safety. Finally, the UN, the International Organisation for Migration and our partners work with camp committees and with courageous women to provide protected spaces for those who are abused or at risk. These measures are never enough, of course, but to cite a complete absence of such security measures is erroneous. We agree that sexual violence remains a serious concern and that much more action is needed. Long term, sustainable solutions lie in the strengthening of the Haitian criminal justice system, state, social and medical services, education and women's financial and legal empowerment. The UN in Haiti is contributing in all of these areas, training the police, pushing the justice system to deliver just outcomes in individual cases, supporting the transition of camp-dwellers back into their neighbourhoods and more. As for Kofaviv, the organisation receives funding from several UN bodies such as UNHCR and Minustah itself.

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=94118
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More than 18 months since the earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010, women and girls living in makeshift camps remain vulnerable to sexual violence. IRIN's latest film follows a survivor of rape, Shirley Christoff, as she attempts to rebuild her life in a rundown informal settlement in Port-au-Prince. Christoff, together with thousands of other women, lives in constant fear for her safety. Haiti’s Rape Survivors follows a survivor of rape, Shirley Christoff, as she attempts to rebuild her life in rundown informal settlement in Port-au-Prince. According to human rights organizations, continued lack of security is one of the main factors contributing to high levels of rape in and around the internal displacement camps. More than 250 cases of rape were reported in several camps in the first 150 days after the earthquake, according to Amnesty International. Sexual violence and other forms of gender-based violence were widespread in Haiti even before the earthquake. In the 1990s, Human Rights Watch (HRW) documented the use of rape as a form of oppression during the regime of Raoul Cédras. From 2004 to 2006, the UN Security Council estimated that 35,000 women and girls were subjected to rape and sexual violence. "After you have been raped, you have nowhere to go, you have to return to the camp and face the person who raped you," says Christoff. As police stations and courts were reduced to rubble during the earthquake, the few protection mechanisms that did exist were destroyed. According to Amnesty and HRW, the post-earthquake humanitarian and government response to gender-based violence has been wholly inadequate. While effort was being invested to ensure basic needs were met, little to no attention has been paid to the rights of women and girls to be protected from sexual violence. Survivors of sexual violence have taken matters into their own hands, with two grassroots organizations providing support to thousands of women. The first emergency response system dedicated to sexual violence was set up in October and a call centre has already recorded 400 cases of rape. This film is the 10th in a series of films about displacement, Forced to Flee. Others in the series include Bolivia’s Changing Climate, Israel’s African Migrants and Haiti’s Homeless Hotel.

UNHCR
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Shirley* seems like a typical young woman – energetic, excited and hopeful. Her smile is contagious and her voice clear and strong. However, when she begins to share the horrors she has experienced, her voice drops and her gaze turns downward. The 20-year-old lost her mother and aunt in the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti. With no place to go, she moved into one of the sprawling tent camps in the capital, Port-au-Prince. One night she came back to her tent to escape the rain. A man approached her and asked to go inside. She said he hit her and pushed her into the tent: "He threw me to the ground and raped me. After that I was haemorrhaging for a month." Explaining further, she said, "The tents are not secure. Anyone with a razor or knife can cut the tent and come inside. There are no walls and no protection and before you know it someone is there in your tent." Her ordeal is not unique. Twenty months after the catastrophic earthquake, conditions in Haiti continue to deteriorate. Today, there are nearly 1,000 makeshift camps across Haiti and approximately 600,000 internally displaced people. The International Organization for Migration manages most of the camps, but fading international interest has affected the humanitarian community's ability to provide assistance. Women are particularly vulnerable in the camps, where there is little to no privacy, security or lighting. UN reports indicate sexual violence against women is occurring at alarming rates. "Sixty-five per cent of the victims are minors," said Jocie Philistin, a director of a local non-governmental organization known as KOFAVIV (Commission of Women Victims for Victims). "Since the earthquake we have been seeing more children, minors and babies aged one to 17 months who have been raped." The NGO's findings reflect a recent Amnesty International study that showed 50 per cent of rape victims were young girls. In addition to having to live in unsafe conditions, Shirley had no way to pay for her basic expenses. She said her only way to make money was to become involved in survival sex. "After the earthquake there was a system where you could get food but you had to sleep with the guys who were in charge of the food, even though it had been given out by the government. So a lot of young women were forced into prostitution to survive," she said.
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As one of several organizations supporting the humanitarian efforts in Haiti, UNHCR interviewed women from 15 camps. They all reported that survival sex was a serious but invisible problem in their camps. With no gainful employment opportunities and widespread despair, Haitian women often feel there is no other option to access the food and water they and their children desperately need. One woman living in a camp near the airport noted, "There was a girl who lived near me. She was raped. She had no parents and no one to defend her. That girl had no place to stay because she came from the provinces. She begged for money, but no one gave her what she needed. She had to turn to selling herself, and that was a form of sexual violence." To help combat widespread sexual violence in the camps, KOFAVIV has trained dozens of community outreach workers to locate victims and provide them with much needed services. UNHCR is working with KOFAVIV to run one of the few safe house projects in Haiti for survivors of rape and forced prostitution in Port-au-Prince. Over the course of three months, the women receive shelter, health training, psychological support and business training. After they start to earn their own money, they will be moved to longer-term housing and supported as they continue to get back on their feet. This month (September) UNHCR chief António Guterres visited the safe house project and encouraged the local staff to continue their efforts. Shirley is one of 15 women chosen to take part the project. Her nightmare ended in June when she finally moved out of the camp into the safe house. For the first time in over a year and a half, she has a bedroom door with a lock. "Now I have a safe and secure place and a new family," she said, smiling at the thought of returning to school and starting a small shoe business. Grateful for the help she's received, she is also working with KOFAVIV to provide support to other rape survivors.

8/31/2011
LA Times
By Tracy Wilkinson
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Nearly 20 months after Haiti's devastating earthquake, women and girls have been badly neglected in recovery efforts, subjected to sexual violence and left without access to obstetric care even as they give birth to scores of babies in squalid tent cities, human rights activists say. Despite a mammoth humanitarian-care push in the wake of the Jan. 12, 2010, quake that killed as many as 300,000 people, serious gaps exist in the healthcare that women and girls are receiving, according to a report released Tuesday by the New York-based Human Rights Watch. Pregnant women reported having to give birth in alleyways or on floors; being unable to afford transportation to hospitals, and not having access to prenatal care. Human Rights Watch also documented widespread sexual violence and "transactional sex," where women trade sex for food or other basic survival needs. Three girls, ages 14 and 15, and three women interviewed by the organization had become pregnant through rape but had been too fearful or too ashamed to seek help. The 78-page Human Rights Watch report is entitled "Nobody Remembers Us."
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"It is inconceivable that, 18 months after the quake, with so much money pledged … that women and girls are giving birth in muddy tents," Amanda Klasing, the report's main author and a fellow in the group's women's rights division, said in a telephone interview from Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital. Most Haitians face extraordinary hardships even today. More than half a million continue to live in ramshackle collections of tents with minimal sanitation. Food and jobs are scarce, a cholera epidemic persists and street violence is on the rise. It's worse for women, largely excluded from the reconstruction process despite their importance to the informal economy, the report's authors said. In a country already beset by the highest maternal mortality rate in the Western Hemisphere before the quake, women and girls face unwanted pregnancies, unhealthy conditions for their children, a lack of access to education, poverty and the risk of eviction from already precarious living quarters. Heavy rains this time of year also add to the woes by flooding tents and spreading filth. Very little post-rape care has been made available to the majority of female victims. "The earthquake has exacerbated the vulnerabilities of this already vulnerable group," the report says. Klasing said resorting to "survival sex" by women had become common. Women trade sex for food as a way to provide for themselves and their families. "You have to eat," a woman named Gheslaine, who lives in the crowded Croix-des-Bouquets camp outside Port-au-Prince, told the investigators. Tragically, Klasing said, the women's lack of access to healthcare comes despite numerous international programs that exist in Port-Au-Prince which could help. The Haitian government has failed to distribute information about available care to females in the camps and has failed to protect them, the report says. The group noted that of $5.3 billion pledged by international donors after the quake, $258 million was dedicated to healthcare — of which only $118.4 million has been disbursed. "For all women and girls in Haiti," the report concludes, "fulfillment of their rights to reproductive and maternal health and to live free of violence is fundamental to any effort to rebuild their lives after the devastation and disruption caused by the earthquake." More Times coverage of the plight of women in Haiti.

By Jacqueline Charles
jcharles@MiamiHerald.com
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PORT-AU-PRINCE -- Fourteen-day-old Alexandro Joseph has never been seen by a doctor and 7-month-old Lovemika Belzi has suffered from diarrhea since the day she was born. In the sprawling camps that continue to dot this broken capital after last year’s devastating earthquake, health and human rights officials warn of an another crisis: a population explosion of tent babies. “The camps are not an appropriate place for delivery and not for a newborn,” said Olivia Gayraud, health and nutrition manager for Save the Children’s Port-au-Prince field office, which works with pregnant women in five camps. “You have wind, rain, mosquitoes and cholera. The conditions of the life of these families with newborns are very difficult. It can be a disaster.” Even before Haiti’s killer January 2010 earthquake, more women died before, during and after childbirth — and more babies died before their fifth birthday — than anywhere in the Americas. Twenty months after the disaster, the crisis has triggered a breakdown of Haiti’s social fabric and made an already vulnerable population of girls and women even more desperate amid a population spike in the tent cities.
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“There is usually a [pregnancy] peak after carnival,” Gayraud said, referring to the pre-Lenten debauchery. “It seems though that we are now always in a peak.” Haiti’s tent baby phenomenon comes as the country continues to struggle to rebuild, and as the nearly 600,000 Haitians still living in hundreds of squalid camps in quake-ravaged communities see the avalanche of medical assistance from foreign doctors and nongovernmental organizations disappear. “We have NGOs telling us, we are packing up and leaving at the end of this month,” said Emmanuelle Schneider, spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, who blames a lack of funding for the departures. “Of the $300 million consolidated appeal the U.N. system is requesting to cover humanitarian needs, only 52 percent has been funded.” The lack of funding means less access to prenatal and maternal healthcare in a country that was already struggling to get women to deliver in hospitals instead of at home, said Sylvain Groulx, Haiti’s chief of mission for Doctors Without Borders, which runs a maternity hospital for high-risk pregnancies in Delmas 33. “Haiti has been suffering in terms of health services for many, many years,” he said. “The lack of services has been compounded by the earthquake, especially for people living in Port-au-Prince, Carrefour and Leogane.”
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Population explosions after a disaster are nothing new. But in a country already rattled by a collapsed health system, cholera epidemic and now sordid conditions in congested camps, experts say they are worried about the impact. Adding to the concerns are conditions under which the pregnancies are occurring: insecurity and rapes in the camps despite increased U.N. peacekeeper patrols, lack of education and medical services, and desperation among girls, some as young as 13. “There is a lot of transactional sex going on as a coping mechanism for young girls to survive poverty, to address some of their needs,” said Dr. Henia Dakkak of the United Nations Population Fund, which found that pregnancy rates in Haiti’s camps after the quake were three times higher than in urban areas. “It’s a concern for all of us.” And that includes the camp residents, too. “A lot of parents have just given up,” said Rose Mona St. Fleur, 33, a camp resident and head of a women’s group. St. Fleur said her camp near the airport doesn’t have a problem with rape but it has seen an “explosion” in teenage pregnancy.
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“After the quake, you see all of the young girls, living by themselves in their own tents, and finding pleasure in the company of young men,” she said. “The parents can no longer control them or say anything. As soon as you see a young lady living by herself under a tent, it’s only a matter of time before she ends up with an unplanned pregnancy.” On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch will release a 78-page report detailing the vulnerability of girls and women in camps. Interviews showed how gaps in access to available healthcare services are failing to prevent maternal and infant deaths, and how young girls and women are giving birth on mud floors, in alleys and without medical help. The organization is calling on the Haitian government and the international community to do more to protect women and girls. “Despite gains made due to free healthcare services, the government and international donors have not addressed critical gaps in access to health services or addressed conditions that may give rise to maternal and infant deaths,” said Kenneth Roth, the organization’s executive director. On the lawn of the prime minister’s quake-ravaged office building, new mother Christa Oviles recalls how she gave birth on the muddy floor after two days of labor. With no doctor or a nurse available in the camp, she relied on friends who willed her to push. She finally delivered Alexandro on Aug. 15. But when she couldn’t deliver the afterbirth, she was rushed to a hospital across town. These days, the baby spends most of his time inside, Oviles says, his body constantly attacked by mosquitoes. In the tent, Oviles’ small bed is in one corner and a charcoal stove a few feet away. Her only other possessions — clothes — are wrapped in sheets against the sides. “This is no place for a baby,’’ she said.

By Lauren Gilger,
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JIMANI, Dominican Republic — A motorbike kicked up dirt as its teenage driver rushed up to a clinic in this town just across the border from Haiti. His passenger, a pregnant woman wearing spandex pants and a pink scarf around her head, struggled to get off. “I’m bleeding,” she said. The woman has no immigration papers, like thousands of pregnant Haitian women who come to the Dominican Republic for medical care. But the armed Dominican soldiers guarding the gate dividing the two countries let most of them through. Haitian women make up roughly half of the patients giving birth in Dominican hospitals, officials here say. They come because they don’t have access to health care in Haiti, especially since last year’s earthquake. They come because they can get free health care in the Dominican Republic each year, and so that they can have their babies in hospitals instead of on the floors of their homes. In Haiti, 27 of every 1,000 newborns in 2009 died, according to the latest numbers from UNICEF, nearly seven times the U.S. rate. For the mothers, the situation is even worse. The lifetime odds of a woman dying while giving birth in Haiti are one in 93. The rate in the United States is 1 in 2,100. And those were the numbers before the January 2010 earthquake, which killed more than 300,000 people, injured and displaced hundreds of thousands more and collapsed the impoverished country’s infrastructure.
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Across the country, on their half of Hispaniola island, Dominican hospitals and clinics are being overwhelmed by Haitian women. “The border is imaginary. It’s just a door,” said Jose Delancer, director of the Dominican Ministry of Health with the Department of Women and Children. “It’s a problem of poverty; it’s a problem of education; it’s a problem of empowering of women.” It is also a problem of access. In the Dominican Republic, health care is provided free of charge whether the individual has documentation or not. Joaquin Recio, vice director of nursing at Hospital General Melenciano, the public hospital in Jimani, said doctors and hospital administrators widely support the policy. “If God has given you this gift to give service to others — this special service, of health — then you have to give it with quality, warmly, with love to whomever, no matter their creed or race, their color, it does not matter,” he said. “You have to give service to the person. This is what is important.”
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But that comes up against a harsh reality: The Dominican health-care system is designed to care for about 7 million people, Delancer said. The Dominican Republic has a population of nearly 10 million, and more than a million of them are Haitians, with more coming every day. Delancer worries about those numbers: “How many of them are in reproductive age?” he asked. “How many of them need health care?” Camila Perozo treated patients for four years in Haiti before she and her husband spent their life savings building the health clinic in Jimani, a town of more than 14,000 about an hour’s drive east of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital. “I picked this area because it is too poor,” the Dominican-educated doctor said. “There are other border crossings. But this is the one that takes people directly from the capital.”
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Her patients are often in dire condition, the victims of malnourishment, anemia, septicemia and poverty. Few have had prenatal care before coming to the clinic. Other women arrive on the backs of motorbikes at the Jimani public hospital, often in the throes of labor. “Here we call them ‘time bombs,’ ” said hospital director Francis Moquete. Of the 40 or so deliveries performed at his hospital each month, about 30 are Haitian births, Moquete said. At least four come without any previous medical care, he said. “This is what most worries us when they come like this — suddenly, with nothing, absolutely nothing,” he said. At the Jimani public hospital, which is a few minutes’ walk from Perozo’s clinic, two women wearing street clothes rested on small cots. A nurse injected a clear liquid into their IVs. Next to each woman lies a baby, both just hours old and neither named. “They are illegal,” Moquete said of the women. By that afternoon, the women are gone and their beds stripped clean. “One wants to go where there is better service,” Moquete said. “So they come here, this is where they want to come.”
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This story was produced as part of the Borderlands Initiative at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

By Bill Quigley
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"We women demand!..." sang out a hundred plus voices "...Justice for Marie!" Marie, a 25-year-old pregnant mother, was injured by government agents when they slammed a wooden door into her stomach during an early morning invasion of an earthquake displacement camp in Port au Prince. The government is using force to try to force thousands to leave camps without providing any place for people to go. The people are fighting back. The people calling for justice are residents of a makeshift tent camp called Camp Django in the Delmas 17 neighborhood of Port au Prince. They are up in arms over injuries to Marie, one of their young mothers, and repeated government threats to demolish their homes. Despite the 100-degree heat, over a hundred residents, mostly mothers, trekked across town to demand the government protect their human right to housing. At their invitation, we followed them back to the place they have made lived since the January 12, 2010, earthquake that left hundreds of thousands homeless. In a sloping lot smaller than a football field, two-hundred-fifty families live in handmade shelters made out of grey and blue plastic tarps/tents, scraps of wood and mismatched pieces of tin. The tarps under which they live are faded from a year-and-a-half of sun but still show brands of USAID, World Vision, Rotary International, UNICEF, UNFAM, Republic of China and others. Outside the camp, big green trees with flame orange flowers provide color and shade.
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Inside, babies and little children peek out of tent openings that reveal mats on the ground and beds and boxes. Families live inches from their neighbors. They buy water outside and carry it back to their tents. Four topless wooden boxes with blue plastic UN tarps are the showers where people can wash themselves if they bring their own water and soap. Hole-in-the-dirt toilets are few, full and pungent in the 100 degree heat. They are surrounded by razzing flies. When it rains, rainwater flows into tents and the mess from the toilets spreads all over. A teenage boy clad only in his underwear soap washes himself in between tents. A middle-age woman sits under a banana tree nursing a dollar bill-size patch of open wound on her foot, a quake injury that demands a skin graft she cannot afford. A family has an aluminum pan filled with grey water and skinned bananas. Camp leaders tell us their community contains over 375 little children including 20 children whose parents died in the earthquake. "We are earthquake victims," the women and men of the camp tell us as they show us around. "We have a human right to live somewhere. We do not want to fight for the right to stay in these camps. It is very hot here and we cannot stay in the tents in the middle of the day. But we all search and search and there is no other place to go. Until we get housing, these homes are everything we have."
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There are nearly a thousand such camps of people across Port au Prince. Some house thousands; many like Camp Django, housed hundreds. A government myth says people gather in the camps only to receive food and water and medical services. The truth is that many, many camps, including Camp Django, get no water, food or medical services. They are there, they tell us, because they have no other place to go. We visited Marie (not her real name for her protection) in her boxlike tent. She lies on a bed writhing in pain. She has been vomiting and bleeding and was surrounded by other residents of the camp. They were taking turns propping her up and drying her forehead. They explained to us that she had been assaulted by men who entered their camp at the order of the Mayor of the Port-au-Prince suburb of Delmas. Last Saturday, a group of five men, some armed with guns, stormed into the camp and threatened the residents. Four of the men were wearing green t-shirts that read "Mairie de Delmas" (The Office of the Mayor of Delmas). The Mayor's men told the people that they would soon destroy their tents. They bragged they would mistreat people in a manner worse than "what happened at Carrefour Aero port," referring to the violent unlawful eviction of a displacement camp at that location by the same mayor and police less than a month ago.
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The Mayor's men pushed their way through the camp, collecting the names and identification numbers of heads of household and marking tents with red spray painted numbers. When the men pounded on the wooden door of the tarp covered shelter where 25-year-old pregnant Marie lived with her husband, she tried to stop them from entering. Marie tried to explain that her husband was not home. But the leader of the group, JL, violently slammed open the wooden door of her tent into her stomach, causing her to fall hard against the floor on her back. Three days later, Marie remained in severe pain and bed ridden, worried sick about her baby. When one of Marie's neighbors protested JL's brutality, JL became enraged and threatened to kill him. Onlookers in the camp feared his words, particularly when they noticed a pistol tucked into his belt. When the government pushed their way into the camp, residents called human rights advocates from Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) and asked them to come at once. Jeena Shah, a BAI attorney, arrived at Camp Django while government agents were still there. Jeena asked JL who had sent his group to Camp Django and why they had marked the tents with numbers. JL was evasive, repeating over and over that "the government" had sent him. Finally he stated that "the National Palace," a reference to current President Michel Martelly, had sent him. As of the writing of this article, the President had neither confirmed nor denied authorization or participation in the threatened eviction.
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Camp Django residents rightfully feared that their camp faced the same fate that so many displaced persons had since the earthquake more than 18 months ago -- violent eviction, exacerbation of their already vulnerable situations and homelessness. Camp Django is but a small example of what is going on in Haiti. The International Organization on Migration estimated that as of April 2011, 166,000 homeless earthquake survivors were facing imminent threats of eviction, one-fourth of the displaced population. The evictions have been carried out by the government or with the government's tacit approval despite rulings by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights' directing to the Haitian government to place a moratorium on evictions and create adequate measures to protect the displaced population from unlawful forced evictions. It is still unclear whether the Mayor of Delmas encouraged or condoned these specific acts of violence against the residents of Camp Django, but the Mayor's stand on forced evictions is well known. After leading a rampage of violent unlawful evictions last month, he recently stated on Haitian television that he will continue forcing displaced communities out of their tent camps, even though they still have nowhere else to go. President Martelly, who has refused to publicly condemn the violent forced evictions perpetrated by the Mayor of Delmas, is responsible for any threats and harm that befall the community of Camp Django and Haiti's thousand other displacement camps.
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The women sing out for justice. "The rich," they tell us, "use force against the poor in Haiti." They demand justice for Marie. And they insist their human right to housing be protected. They are organizing. Their voices are strong. Their passion is pure. Their cause is just. They inspire us to join them. Bill teaches at Loyola University New Orleans and is Associate Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). Jocelyn is an Ella Baker associate at CCR working at Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) in Port au Prince.

The Daily Beast
By Lisa Armstrong
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With fewer shelters, more girls—many orphans from the quake—have no choice but to have sex just to scrape by. Lisa Armstrong reports on their brutal reality and the aid groups trying to help. The women who work the streets near Champs de Mars, Port au Prince’s main park, are brazen. They pose under streetlights, where the men drinking kleren, cheap, homemade alcohol, at makeshift bars, and the foreigners returning to Le Plaza Hotel can see them. Should a car pause, just long enough, along noisy Rue Capois, the main road that separates the sea of tents and tarps of the Champs de Mars camp from the hotel, the women approach, flirt, and proposition.
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The teenagers who stand a few blocks away, on the dark corner by the Monsieur Henri Photo Studio, pose too. They lean against the fence, hips jutted out, their legs exposed by scanty pink shorts and skimpy dresses. But they look like little girls playing dress up, with their bright purple eye shadow, tinted hair, and glossy red lips. And they stay in the shadows, run from cars that linger too long, as if they at once want to be seen but at the same time want to make themselves invisible. “This is how we make money. This is how we eat,” says Madeleine, a 16-year-old with dark eyes, full lips, and a shoulder-length black weave. “But I am ashamed. I feel embarrassed of what I am doing. I have no choice, I must accept what is going on, but it is not my will.”
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It is not like teenage prostitution didn’t exist in Haiti before the January 2010 earthquake that left 1.5 million displaced, tens of thousands of them living in haphazardly-placed tents in Champs de Mars. But in the 16 months since, the number of girls, some as young as 8, who have been forced to have sex in order to survive has drastically increased. The situation will likely get worse as in late May, shortly after President Michel Martelly took office, police destroyed about 200 makeshift tents in Delmas, leaving their occupants without anywhere else to go. According to the International Organization of Migration, 25 percent of those in camps have been threatened with eviction. “If there are no safe places for girls to go, no plan for transition, some will be forced to exchange sex for shelter,” says Emilie Parry, a consultant with Refugees International. Many girls were orphaned when their parents died in the disaster, and were left to fend for themselves, often having sex with men in order to secure a place in a tent or under a tarp. The problem was exacerbated when organizations stopped distributing food in the camps. “General food distributions by the U.N. World Food Program (WFP) were abruptly ended just three months after the earthquake,” says Melanie Teff, senior advocate for women's rights at Refugees International. “They were in fact stopped at the request of the Haitian government, which wanted a quick return to normality.”
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The government’s plan was to replace food distribution with cash-for-work and cash-for-food programs, and Elizabeth Jennings, external relations officer at WFP Haiti, said that WFP only stopped the general food distribution after food prices had returned to pre-earthquake levels. “It enabled economic activity to resume, which also favors the most vulnerable, especially women who live from small trade, mainly the sale of fresh food and cooked meals and snacks,” wrote Jennings, in an email. “People now consider that one of the best decisions because it enabled small businesses, very often owned and run by women, to resume.” Nonetheless, the decision to stop food distribution left many girls without a way to eat, and they were forced to survive the only way they could see how, by trading sex for money or food in order to avoid starvation. Madeleine’s parents died before the earthquake, and she lives with her aunt, cousin and 2-year-old brother under a tarp in the Champs de Mars camp.  Her aunt has had five surgeries to remove various tumors from her body and is unable to work, so when organizations stopped distributing food, the family went hungry. “Some days, we would spend the whole day without eating, one day, two days like this,” says Madeleine.  “My neighbors and friends would say, ‘You are a young woman, your aunt cannot work, so you have to do something.’”
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Madeleine had been attending school before the earthquake, as her mother, who was a vegetable vendor and traveled between the countryside and Port au Prince, used to send money to pay for school. Madeleine had no vocational skills, and so when some girls from the camp told her she could make money as they did, working as a prostitute, she went with them. “The first night, they told me to stand there and wait,” says Madeleine. “A few minutes after, one of the girls left with a man and then came back and said ‘Okay, I made money. It’s easy, you just need to have sex and then they are going to give you 100 or 150 gourds [$2.50 or $3.70] and that's it.’” Madeleine is reluctant to share details of what happened that first night—she looks down as she talks, and her hands and feet are in constant, nervous motion. She says she was so ashamed that she could not go back the following evening. “But after 15, 20 days, I realized that I cannot eat, so I decided to start again,” she says. “But I still don’t feel normal when I am having sex with a guy like this. I don't know if the man had a shower, I don't know what he was doing before, and I am going to stick my body to his body and that’s not easy.” Because the girls are young, and do not feel empowered, few if any can make men wear condoms, which means that many contract diseases or become pregnant. Eramithe Delva, one of the co-founders of KOFAVIV, a Haitian grassroots organization founded by and for rape survivors, says that of the 35 girl prostitutes the organization has been working with since the earthquake, 19 have become pregnant. KOFAVIV offers some food and financial support for the girls, but it is never enough. “We supply them with basic things like sugar, soap,” says Delva. “Sometimes we have delegations that come from abroad with things for babies, because these girls will never have money for say a diaper, they will use a dirty sheet.”
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When 15-year-old Imogene came to KOFAVIV a few days ago with her 6 day old son wrapped in a towel, his face pockmarked with dozens of mosquito bites, Delva gave her 500 gourds ($12.50). Imogene was apathetic, awkwardly holding the baby as if she was not quite sure what to do with him. Delva says that sometimes the babies die, because their mothers are too young to know how to properly care for them. “In a case like Imogene, you can see the way she is, she doesn’t have anywhere to sleep, she’s dependent on someone else to give her a place to stay, so the life of the baby and the mother are at risk,” says Delva. KOFAVIV has been offering training for the girls—sewing, jewelry and pottery making—to try to give them another way to support themselves. The organization also holds weekly support meetings, to help boost the girls’ self-confidence. “We have to work on their self esteem, because sometimes they consider if they get 25 gourds [60 cents] from someone, that is their worth, they are nothing anymore,” says Delva. “We provide tools so they can work, so they know if they can earn 25 gourds, they can earn more with the tools and training we give them.” For the past few days, 17-year-old Jeanne has been working on a beading project at KOFAVIV. U.S.-based Fairwinds Trading is paying the women, all rape victims, and girls $7 a day to make necklaces that will be sold at Anthropologie stores this summer.
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Jeanne lives by herself in a small tent in the Pétionville camp, which is run by Sean Penn’s JP/HRO. She had been living with her aunt and stepmother before the earthquake, however, they were killed when the house crumbled. A few weeks after the earthquake, Jeanne was sitting outside her collapsed house, begging for money for food. “I had not eaten for three days, and I asked a man and he agreed to give me money but said I have to give him something back,” says Jeanne. “As I had not eaten for three days, I decided to give him something back, and this is how I started.” Through prostitution, Jeanne was able to save enough to buy a tent, a cell phone, and clothes. Her plan was to continue until she could save enough to return to school, but two days ago, a doctor came to KOFAVIV with results from a recent check up and informed Jeanne that she is pregnant. Even with the training she has received from KOFAVIV, she is not sure how she is going to care for a baby when she can barely support herself. “My future is spoiled and I see black,” says Jeanne. “What I have seen before, that is not the reality. I always had in my head I could have gone to a professional school and I could have learned something to make money, but now look what happened.” One of the other issues that these girls face is rape. Madeleine has been raped and beaten several times, and sometimes, after the men have sex with her, they refuse to pay.
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She only stays out on the streets long enough to make 150 gourds ($3.70), which is just enough to buy food for herself and her family. Then she returns to the tent, where she sleeps in a cramped corner on a dirty blanket on the floor with her brother. “Usually I take 50 gourds [$1.25] that night to eat and I save 100 gourds [$2.50] for the next day,” Madeleine says. “With that money, I prepare food for everyone in the tent. I cannot buy rice, but I prepare spaghetti, something that is very easy and cheap.” By day, at times, Madeleine seems just like any other teenage girl. She jokes, laughing raucously with neighbors, and stands in the doorway to the tent painting her nails a deep brown. She does this every week, she says, because it makes her feel pretty. But as she stares at her hand, waiting for her nails to dry, she becomes wistful. “I don’t like what she does, but I don’t have another way to provide,” says Madeleine’s aunt, Marguerite, as she turns to look at Madeleine.
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At first, when Marguerite saw Madeleine going out, all dressed up, she was angry, because she assumed Madeleine was going to parties. But when Madeleine returned with money, Marguerite realized what she was doing, but has had to turn a blind eye. She would like Madeleine to return to school, but there is barely enough money to eat, let alone pay fees. Like many Haitians, Madeleine and her aunt believe that President Martelly will do something to help them. “I am expecting [the government] will do something for us because they say they are going to do something for those people living in the camps,” says Madeleine. “I had not eaten for three days, and I asked a man and he agreed to give me money but said I have to give him something back,” says Jeanne. “As I had not eaten for three days, I decided to give him something back, and this is how I started.” Requests for a comment from President Martelly about the issue of child prostitution went unanswered, but Parry says that the Haitian government and international community are going to have to do a better job of coordinating efforts to help not just the girls, but all displaced persons.
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“There needs to be long-term investment and a comprehensive plan for creating sustainable economic viability,” says Parry. “It really requires listening, which seems to be the greatest failure of international humanitarian systems.” Parry says that organizations like Fonkoze, Zafen and The Lambi Fund, which offer micro-financing, education and training, could provide a way out of prostitution for these young women. “They could develop marketable skills, begin a business or get hired for a job, save money, afford to move out of the camp into a community, and so on,” says Parry. “Of course, there are other pieces to the puzzle which could be addressed with good coordination across resources and agencies: safe places to live and land to live on, homes that are built to safe and affordable standards, community networks, water and sanitation.”
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For the foreseeable future, Madeleine will have to continue working as a prostitute. Now that the rainy season has begun, it has been hard for her to work at night, which means that she and her family have again been going days without food. Before she goes to sleep, Madeleine prays that God will send someone who can help her and her family. Her greatest wish is to return to school. Sometimes, Madeleine sees her old classmates who ask when she plans to reenroll.  Occasionally, she runs into them when she is out working on the street at night. “I still have friends that I used to have before the earthquake, but they don't know what kind of life I have,” she says. “When they say ‘Madeleine, what are you doing here?’ I say, ‘I came here to buy something,’ or ‘I am waiting for someone.’” To cheer herself up on days when she is especially depressed, Madeleine says she remembers the afternoons spent on the streets with these other friends, doing other things. She and her friends would joke with each other and make mischief by playfully bumping into people as they walked home from school. “Now when I go to fetch water and I look at the girls coming from school in their uniforms, I have that memory, and I smile,” she says.
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Lisa Armstrong covers humanitarian issues around the world. She has written for magazines, newspapers and organizations including The Washington Post, National Geographic, Parade, USA Weekend, O Magazine, Unicef and the World Bank.

Nearly a week after the inauguration of the newly elected president, Joseph Michel Martelly, Haitians displaced by the 2010-earthquake are receiving an increasing number of threats from landowners to leave their camps. Ten days ago, more than 150 families living in Palais de l'Art camp, in a suburb of the capital, Port-au-Prince, found themselves imprisoned. That morning when a group of displaced persons tried to leave, they realised the gate to the street was locked. In a desperate attempt to climb the wall, some were injured. "It's a strategy used by the landowner to force us out", one internally displaced person (IDP) explained. A day earlier, residents in the same camp had found the bathroom doors nailed shut. Moreover, the same landowner threatened those who tried to remove the nails. In an earlier meeting with members of the IDP camp committee, in which the International Organisation for Migration and JRS regularly participate, the landowner had given the displaced until 1 May to leave. According to the landowner's lawyer, the leasing agreement signed with his client for 25,000 US dollars had expired in December 2010. "Despite the time given to the interior ministry to prolong the contract, nothing has been done. … We'll intend to notify the ministry and the local authorities of our decision to evict the displaced within eight days", said the lawyer.
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"I've been living in Palais de l'Art [camp] since 13 January 2010. My house was damaged by the earthquake, and I haven't been able to return because my husband and I are unemployed; I don't have any money to repair it. With the short notice given by the landowner to leave the camp, I don't know what to do", Marjorie Simon said with a tone of desperation. "I have lived here for six months. After the earthquake I went back to my hometown in the countryside. But, later, I went to the camp because a friend invited me here. At that time, we didn't have anywhere else to go. If the living conditions had been good in my hometown I wouldn't have come here. I came here looking for work", confessed Benita Pierre. Others factors aggravating the vulnerability of IDPs. Their vulnerability will be heightened during the hurricane season from June to November. Researchers from the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Colorado, have warned it is highly likely that the Caribbean region, where Haiti is located, will be hit by 17 cyclones and nine hurricanes. The situation could be extremely serious for camp-based populations. Displaced populations are already forced live in deplorable conditions, without access to basic services. Increasingly violence surroundings particularly endanger women and children. Given their precarious circumstances, normal rainfall and winds would be enough to destroy the already rundown tents and flood the camps. Almost 18 months after the earthquake, despite efforts by the Haitian authorities and the international community to temporarily relocate displaced persons, 'dignified and permanent housing solutions for the 680,000 persons who continue to live in tents as return communities' have yet to be found, admitted the head of the International Organisation for Migration in Haiti, Luca Dall'oglio. In the light of the circumstances, JRS urges the new Haitian authorities to suspend the evictions until conditions 'allow internally displaced persons to return voluntarily, in safety and with dignity, to their homes or places of habitual residence, or to resettle voluntarily in another part of the country', in line with article 28 of the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement.

Addressing Sexual Violence Against Women and Girls in Haiti’s Displacement Camps - Young girls and women living in Haiti’s displacement camps since last year’s earthquake have been particularly vulnerable to sexual violence and abuse with many sources pointing to an increase in reported cases of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in the country. Data available from police, health facilities as well as national and international organizations seem to indicate that the rising numbers are linked to a growing trust between survivors and the police and service providers as access to services increase. Nevertheless, with no prevalence study having been carried out to determine whether there has been any real increase in SGBV in the country and victims often unwilling or unable to seek help, there are few reliable statistics on the issue.
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Women and girls are the greatest victims of SGBV in Haiti. Of the 60 people affected by SGBV helped by IOM since 2010, 97 per cent were women and girls, with men representing the remaining 3 per cent. Fears of reprisal attacks mean victims do not file charges. Rape has only been criminalized since 2005 and poor training of police, lawyers and judges makes it extremely difficult to secure convictions. It is also difficult for survivors to acquire the medical certificates needed to win convictions in court. Although there are currently about seven institutions in the greater Port-au-Prince area providing medical services for victims, most of the SGBV survivors interviewed by IOM said they had little idea who to report cases to or where to seek medical assistance. Many did not have the wherewithal to reach health facilities or were afraid to go alone. Sexual abuse of child victims of trafficking has also come to light during IOM’s work. Since January this year, IOM has identified close to 400 cases of trafficked children living in the displacement camps in extreme poverty, with about 50 per cent of them having suffered physical and sexual abuse by the time they were rescued.
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More cases have been uncovered in the most poverty-stricken areas of Port-au-Prince and in the provinces where so many victims of the January 2010 earthquake fled. In addition 30 trafficked Haitian children were identified and rescued in the neighboring Dominican Republic. Working to lessen the vulnerability of women and girls including child victims of trafficking to SGGV in the camps, IOM is using US$ 1 million of funding from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) to help prevent and respond to SGBV in 20 priority displacement sites across Port-au-Prince’s seven communes. Solar lights in key public areas such as entrances, water and sanitation facilities and community spaces will be installed by IOM to help reduce the risk of attack. Skills training programmes are also being developed jointly with national partners so that young Haitian women are more self sufficient and less vulnerable to victimization. IOM efforts to further protect victims of trafficking are also being scaled up with US$1.6 m of funding from the US government’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons and UNICEF which will allow the Organization to assist about 1,000 people. “The earthquake exacerbated pre-existing abuses in Haiti and IOM is working with its local partners to prevent another generation of women and girls being victimized, now that they are living cheek by jowl in crowded, unsanitary, poorly lit conditions in camps,” says IOM’s chief of mission in Haiti, Luca Dall’Oglio. An estimated 680,000 are still living in camps in Haiti since January 2010.

Trustlaw
By Tim Large
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Both Haiti's new president and the head of the majority party in parliament have vowed to fight an epidemic of sexual violence in the quake-shattered country, throwing their weight behind a TrustLaw initiative to strengthen anti-rape laws and tackle impunity. The bipartisan pledges came as Thomson Reuters Foundation hosted an unprecedented forum of Haitian government officials, police, lawyers, prosecutors, doctors and women's groups in Port-au-Prince. The goal was to find practical ways to ensure better protection, care and justice for women and girls in a country where rape has only been outlawed since 2005 and hundreds of thousands live in insecure "tent cities" following last year's earthquake. "We don't have the necessary means, the necessary infrastructure or the necessary mentality," President-elect Michel Martelly said in a meeting with Thomson Reuters Foundation after the forum. "We need to change all this. It is our will and our mission to change all this, to make sure the rule of law reigns in Haiti, that justice is for everybody, that the police do their job. The problem is very serious and I don't underestimate the problem of sexual violence. "I have asked the national police to put in every post a female agent as they are better to listen to the problems of women." Speaking earlier at the forum, Joseph Lambert, majority leader in the Haitian parliament, expressed "solidarity with Thomson Reuters Foundation's programme to help reduce sexual violence against women and children" and said he would pass legislation to achieve that goal.
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Accurate statistics are scarce, but police say cases of sexual violence shot up in the aftermath of the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake, which left more than a million people living in crowded camps with few lights at night and little security. Among the obstacles to justice for victims cited by rights groups are fears of reprisal attacks, a lack of training among police, prosecutors and judges in dealing with rape cases and difficulties in obtaining the medical certificates deemed necessary to bring cases successfully to court. Joelle Deuize, a doctor at Haiti's University and Educational Hospital (HUEH), the country's largest, said that before the earthquake she typically examined two or three rape victims a day. Right after the disaster the number rose to four and five. More than a year later, she said it is more like 15. The Port-au-Prince police chief says 622 rapes were reported in 2010. Of those, 385 of the accused are in jail and 45 have been convicted. Rights activists say such figures are just the tip of the iceberg. KOFAVIV, a grassroots group that supports rape survivors, reported 100 rapes in the 22 camps in which it works in January and February alone. There are more than a thousand displacement camps in Port-au-Prince.
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In response to the problem, Thomson Reuters Foundation has mobilised members of its pro bono network of 160 law firms and corporate counsels to conduct a review of Haiti's anti-rape laws and compare them with legislation in six other jurisdictions: France, Sweden, Canada, the United States, South Africa and Brazil. The comparative study, launched via the Foundation's TrustLaw Connect platform, will be presented by international women's group MADRE to the United Nations' Human Rights Council meeting on Haiti in October. Martelly, due to be inaugurated as president on May 14, said the review could help his new government reform laws around sexual violence. "Democracy in Haiti is very young and we still have difficulties getting things just right," he said. "It would be super to benefit from this expertise in other countries who had to face these kinds of issues. Alone we cannot change everything but with the experience of others we will bring about this change." The May 6 forum marked the first time representatives of grassroots women's groups like KOFAVIV had sat around a table with senior officials from the women's ministry, health ministry, justice ministry, chief prosecutor's office and police.
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In the Champ-de-Mars tent city in the heart of the capital, KOFAVIV has helped reduce sexual violence by organising security patrols of 25 men, to protect women and children in a setting where thousands have to bathe in public and razor blades easily slash canvas walls. Women's groups accused police of not taking reported rape cases seriously and of sometimes implying victims themselves were to blame. At one point, a representative from the prosecutor's office raised activists' ire by suggesting women could help prevent rapes by wearing trousers instead of skirts. Female police officers at the forum acknowledged macho attitudes occasionally prevailed in precincts dominated by male colleagues, some of whom didn't consider rape to be a crime. They said police were overwhelmed by other priorities and severely lacked resources for prevention and enforcement.
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Participants did reach consensus on the need for concrete action in these key areas:
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- Information campaigns to inform women and girls of their legal rights, reinforce the point that victims are not to blame and help people avoid dangerous situations. One delegate gave the example of a child lured into a tent to watch television who was subsequently raped.
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- The Prosecutor's Office has a 24-hour hotline -- 604 96 02 -- to advise women who have been raped but few people know about it. This number should be widely disseminated on TV and radio.
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- More female police officers should be appointed to help change attitudes in precincts and provide better support for rape survivors.
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- The forum recognised that a significant barrier to justice is linguistic since French rather than Creole is the language of the courts.
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- Delegates also agreed on the vexed issue of medical certificates documenting evidence of sexual intercourse and often violence, which are central documents to rape prosecutions.
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- Under existing rules, medical certificates can only be issued by general hospitals accredited by the health ministry. That makes it extremely difficult for people living outside of Port-au-Prince to get the certificates within the three days needed to issue an immediate warrant.
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- Women doctors at HUEH are often asked to redo medical certificates performed by doctors at other institutions, meaning that victims have to undergo a second examination. The forum called for a less centralised process.
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- Delegates said that women who call the hotline of the Prosecutor's Office should be advised on what to do to file an official complaint. They should also be told that they need to present an original of the medical certificate since copies are routinely discredited by defence lawyers.
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- They said doctors needed to be trained to reduce the incidence of poorly completed medical certificates, which defence lawyers take advantage of.
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- Judges should be trained to make sure they understand and accord proper weight to medical certificates. They should also be trained to be fairer to victims. For example, they should understand that a woman can still be raped even if she is not a virgin.

Life after Haiti’s earthquake has been especially difficult and dangerous for displaced women and girls. In addition to the ongoing crises of homelessness and cholera, a chronic emergency of sexual violence prevails in the settlements where hundreds of thousands still live, well over a year after the disaster. Groups of Haitian women have been struggling to defend themselves, banding together to prevent assaults and now taking their case to a wider world. At a hearing March 25 in Washington before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a grass-roots group, Kofaviv, joined other human-rights advocates in pressing for an end to what they called a rape epidemic. The police, they said, rarely patrol inside unlighted camps or investigate attacks. Victims live in constant fear and shame while attackers go unpunished. Their evidence, compiled in a wrenching petition delivered to the commission last fall, led the commission to demand urgent action by Haiti to protect its women and girls. The Haitian government, beset by political and other crises, has failed to do its job. But others, including the United Nations, the United States and other international donors and aid agencies, can and must do more. The camps need more police and better lighting. Community groups need training and resources to protect victims and identify predators. Women’s groups must be drawn fully into relief and reconstruction planning. While the world’s attention has turned elsewhere, Haiti’s misery remains. The U.N. reported in March that contributions to its ongoing emergency appeal are lagging and funds are running out for even such basics as clean-water delivery and sewage removal. This month’s meeting of Haiti’s recovery commission and the selection of a new president may begin to put the recovery back on track. Women and girls in Haiti’s camps must not be forced to live in constant fear.

By Arikia Millikan
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While the UN has reported that about 50 percent of women living in Haiti's shantytowns have been raped or sexually assaulted, documenting the individual events is a trying process. Victims will often not come forward for fear of incurring additional violence and ostracism within their communities, or out of frustration with the legal system. A medical certificate must be issued within 72 hours of the rape in for legal action to proceed, but they are only issued in a few hospitals and could take days to obtain. Many rape cases occur in Internally Displaced Persons camps, where it is especially difficult to identify and locate perpetrators -- whose conviction, ultimately, is unlikely. "There is a culture of impunity here", said Emilie Reiser, the Haiti Programme Manager of Digital Democracy -- an organisation that encourages civic engagement through digital technologies.
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For KOFAVIV (Komisyon Fanm Viktim pou Viktim, The Commission of Women Victims for Victims), a rape crisis and victim advocacy centre founded by victims of rape, the process of bringing these cases to light was made that much more difficult when the earthquake struck Haiti on 12 January, 2010 -- all the documents pertaining to rape cases they had collected since 2004 were lost. Since February, Digital Democracy has been working with KOFAVIV to digitize their database of rape reports so that statistics from the reports can be generated and data published through Noula, an open-source incident reporting platform for crises in Haiti that translates to "We're here". Its goal is to provide a platform where data can be channelled between the general public and the government or international groups who are providing services. Making quantifiable data accessible is the first step to changing denialist perspectives that impede proper resource allocation. Earlier this year, the lack of data on rapes prompted political blogger Brendan O'Neill to claim that reports of rape in Haiti are "overblown" and "unlikely". But as Haiti Rewired's Alister Wm Mcintyre pointed out, there is woeful under-reporting that confounds the ability to formally define the problem as "epidemic".
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When it comes to gender-based violence, "there has not been any comprehensive attempt at collecting data", Reiser said, whereas with general health problems, there is an abundance of online documentation that the Haitian government and international groups can use to assess resource distribution and determine plans of action. While there are several SMS-reporting databases that have been adapted to enable victims to report rape and child trafficking, Reiser said that these systems were not easily adopted because people don't naturally share accounts of rape and other sensitive information in this way -- they talk to trusted people. The digitized database system at KOFAVIV is designed to integrate the process of collecting and reporting rape data with the process of providing services to victims. Reiser hopes that this method of reporting will then become the standard for similar centres.
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"Our hope ideally with the database, which we built on an open source platform so it can be easily adaptive, is that once the system is effectively up and running, to have other [organisations that focus on gender-based violence] adopt this platform to match their intake process, so we have multiple reporters aggregating into the same place," Reiser said.

The database will contain a digitised version of the paper dossiers that are filed at the KOFAVIV centre for each victim that comes in. In addition to confidential information that KOFAVIV's legal partners, the BAI (Bureau des Avocats Internationaux) and IJDH (Institute for Justice & Democracy Haiti) would be able to use to prosecute rapists, the digital dossiers will provide information about the context of rape cases: time of day the rape was committed, location, if the victim was a minor or adult, if a medical certificate was received, and more. At the end of each month, Digital Democracy and the database managers at KOFAVIV, who are all women, will create report suitable for public disclosure that will be used to provide various regulatory and service organizations with concrete statistics that these crimes are occurring.
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Currently, KOFAVIV's database managers are working to transform the paper dossiers that are filed at the centre into digital versions that will be backed up locally, in the cloud, and on an external hard drive. They receive 40-80 dossiers each month, and have already input all the data for January, February, and are working on data from March and the 459 cases reported to the centre in 2010. It is the hope of all involved with this project that digitising and quantifying rape reports will help change the culture in Haiti that enables men to rape women with impunity. In the history of the 70 cases KOFAVIV has referred to the IJDH legal team, including a case that prosecuted a 53-year-old man for raping a one-year-old girl, no convictions occurred. But seven cases have progressed to the penultimate stage, which ends with either the Judge d'Instruction dismissing the case or referring the case to the Tribunal Criminal for sentencing, according to Annie Gell, a lawyer with IJHD. In addition to helping with the database, Digital Democracy has been engaging Haitian women in technical projects involving photography, blogging, and computer training at the WE-LEAD computer resource centre for women, an initiative launched by Heartland Alliance in partnership with KOFAVIV and MADRE. The centre is open to women only, Monday through Friday until 4pm. It has 10 computers, internet access, and everything is free.

3/29/2011
IPS
By Cléo Fatoorehchi
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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.
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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.
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"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 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.
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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.
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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."
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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.

Medical News Today
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This Friday, petitioners MADRE, the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), CUNY School of Law and Women's Link Worldwide will testify before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in Washington, DC on the crisis of sexual violence in Haiti. In October, the aforementioned group of advocates and attorneys submitted a legal petition to the IACHR, calling for immediate action to address the epidemic of rape in Haiti's displacement camps. In response, the IACHR issued a call for urgent "precautionary measures" to protect women and girls in the camps. As an IACHR member state, the Haitian government is legally obligated to uphold this ruling. These measures include the installation of lighting, the provision of security and the inclusion of grassroots women's voices in policy-making spaces.
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At this Friday's hearing, the petitioners will underscore the constant threat of sexual violence faced by women and girls in Haiti's displacement camps and the need for immediate implementation of the IACHR's recommendations. They will highlight the need for the international community to support the capacity of the Haitian government to meet its human rights obligations. Malya Villard-Appolon, Marie Eramithe Delva and Jocie Philistin, representatives of KOFAVIV, a grassroots Haitian women's organization founded by and for rape survivors, will participate in this hearing. This hearing is open to the public.
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Date of Hearing: Friday, March 25, 2011
Time: 9am-10am
Location: 1889 F Street NW, Washington, DC, Rubén Darío Room (8th floor, GSB)
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Malya Appolon-Villard, co-founder of KOFAVIV, said, "Every day, we see women and girls who have been raped. They have no protection in the camps, and their attackers go unpunished. The IACHR's binding decision for the Haitian government is a first step, and we are ready to work with the IACHR and all of our international partners to ensure that the Haitian government fulfills these demands." Lisa Davis, MADRE Human Rights Advocacy Director and Adjunct Professor of Law for the International Women's Human Rights Clinic at CUNY Law School, said, "The situation for women and girls living in displacement camps remains dire. The IACHR decision was triggered by the demands of grassroots Haitian women, and now the international community must commit to support the Haitian government in its implementation."
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Annie Gell, Coordinator of the Rape Accountability and Prevention Project (RAPP) at the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, applauded the IACHR for its decisive precautionary measures. "The BAI and its US-affiliate, IJDH, now call on the Haitian government and international community to fully commit to increased cooperation with and support of grassroots Haitian groups and their allies. This must include support for domestic prosecutions of rapists through initiatives in Haiti like the BAI's RAPP initiative. Together, we can end this nightmare."
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Katherine Romero, Staff Attorney for Women's Link Worldwide, said, "The Inter-American Commission is setting a global precedent by ensuring the rights of victims of sexual violence in contexts of natural disaster and humanitarian emergencies are being duly protected. We expect the rest of the international community to join in." To read the legal petition submitted to the IACHR in full, click here.

LA Times
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Halya Lagunesse thought she knew despair. Nearly seven years ago, the soldiers who had killed her husband gang-raped the Haitian woman and her daughter Joann, who was 17 at the time. But that pain pales in comparison to the torment of learning last March that her 5-year-old granddaughter had been raped. The attacker gave the child about 50 cents to go and buy rice. On her way back, he intercepted her and dragged her into a cemetery.
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"How did that happen? How did that happen?" Lagunesse, 50, cried, wringing her hands. "This situation does something to their minds and makes people sick," she said. "Their hearts are bad." Hers is a tragedy of rape compounded: Her granddaughter, now 6, was conceived in the gang rape of her daughter. Rape wasn't even considered a serious criminal offense in Haiti until five years ago. The women who pushed for the legislation making it so also built Haiti's first shelter for abused women. Next they had hoped to make fathers legally bound to acknowledge their children and pay some support. Haitian women are the poorest and most disenfranchised in this poorest of nations in the hemisphere. And yet, through the work of a spirited coterie of feminist activists, real strides were being made.
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Haiti's cataclysmic earthquake killed hundreds of thousands, left this capital in ruins and sent more than a million people into a life in crowded, squalid camps. It also devastated a strong and surprisingly successful women's movement, which, a year later, struggles like the rest of the nation to recover, even as women are being subjected to horrific sexual violence. So much has been lost. Magalie Marcelin, the indefatigable activist with the gap-toothed smile who founded one of Haiti's most important women's advocacy organizations, Kay Fanm. Crushed to death as she mentored an aspiring feminist. Myriam Merlet, broad-faced, cheerily abrasive and endlessly effective, whether in her position at the Women's Ministry she helped shape or lobbying for the rape law she helped enact. Died in her home under a ton of concrete.
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And there were so many more, equally and less famous, midwives, nuns and professors, peasant leaders and government officials, all who worked for women. All gone. "It was a very big loss," activist Danielle Saint-Lot said. "We cried together. We are mourning together." The young men were watching Fania Simone. They had picked her. Picked her for rape. They went to her tent and seemed to know she would be alone. Her mother had left for the countryside in search of food. Three of them. They wore masks. They threw her to the dirt floor. They kicked her in the ribs and slapped her face. "If you tell anyone," one of her attackers threatened, "we will kill your brother or your sister." After the rape, Simone, 23, sought medical attention. Then an organization that helps rape victims, Kofaviv, took her under its wing and gave her psychological counseling. But she still lives in the plastic-tarp tent, and her attackers lurk, murmuring their threats, watching her. "I feel very unsafe," said the young woman, whose bright eyes widen as she tells her story. "I have nowhere else to go. I am tortured."
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Rape has long been a scourge in Haiti. It was used as a form of political repression in 1994 and in 2004, periods of upheaval when military dictators and their brutish gangs of enforcers seized power. Men who opposed the regime were abducted and killed, women raped. An entire generation of Haitians is filled with children of rape. The earthquake generated new shockwaves of sexual violence. Hundreds, maybe thousands — there is no comprehensive count — have been raped. Some of the assaults are crimes of opportunity, but increasingly they seem a calculated, predatory form of stalking and attacking. Only a few of an estimated 1,300 tent encampments that are spread through this shattered capital have nighttime lighting or significant police presence. Tents do not have doors or locks. People are jammed together in dehumanizing density without privacy. Social networks and family unity have been destroyed by death and flight; children are often alone and unsupervised as their parents, if they have them, spend days searching for sustenance. The institutions of law and order, to the extent they ever had influence, have crumbled.
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Young women are easy prey for uneducated, unemployed men who populate the camps, often stoned and with time on their hands. They see women and girls as fair game. Many women have denounced camp leaders, always male, for demanding sexual favors in return for tents, food and building materials. Activists are bracing for a jump in teen pregnancies and HIV and AIDS cases, whether from rape or unprotected sex, since clinics that dispensed birth control and advice were also destroyed. The United Nations estimates that Port-au-Prince needs at least 1,000 maternal-care clinics. There are 10. "We started receiving reports of rapes from the very first day after the quake," said Jocie Philistin, one of the women who run Kofaviv. "At first we thought, this can't be true! But it was." "Women, I know you lift a lot of buckets of water. It's not enough. Work your arms!" Murielle Dorismond, one of Haiti's top judo masters, is leading a self-defense workshop for women in the camps. Upper-body strength and self-confidence are the most important tools she tries to teach the women. Several women's groups are taking action to confront the violence. International and national organizations have joined forces to arrange training sessions, psychological counseling and legal advice. Kofaviv, which lost about 10% of its membership as well as its headquarters to the quake, sends "agents" into the camps to find women who have been attacked, averaging two cases a day. (And that, all involved say, is but a tip of the iceberg.) Women have been given whistles and taught to use them Three short toots means, "I am being attacked." One long toot: "I have found someone who has been raped and needs immediate help."
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Before 2005, rape was considered an offense against honor, or "crime of passion," meaning it was a minor infraction in which the perpetrator would go free if he agreed to marry his victim. Then it was elevated into a serious crime with penalties. In addition, victims were allowed to seek care at any health facility, instead of the main state hospital, and no longer had to pay for the examination. Still, victims are stigmatized, abusers rarely caught and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Malya Villard-Appolon, a founding member of Kofaviv, recalled how police leered at her 14-year-old daughter when the two went to a police station to report the girl's rape. One officer said girls and young women get raped because they're "in heat."
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"Some of these men have the same old mentality," said Valerie Toureau, a doctor who works with rural women. "The woman for them is an object, one more piece of property. We've tried to change the mentality, but the effort has been nearly completely lost." The voodoo priestesses thumped drums and lighted candles as they chanted the names. Magalie…
Myriam… "They were real fighters," Philistin, the activist, said. "Every woman in Haiti knows about these women. They gave their time and their souls for the progress of our struggle." At this memorial ceremony on the first anniversary of the quake, huge photos of Magalie Marcelin, Myriam Merlet and others flanked the makeshift stage. Marcelin and Merlet, in their 50s when they died, were trained as lawyers but did their work in the streets and homes and government offices.
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Merlet also wrote, collecting stories about Haitian women and campaigning to have streets named for some of the prominent ones. Marcelin once packed a courtroom with angry women to pressure for a guilty verdict against a politically connected man accused of beating his wife. Both had fought against Jean-Claude Duvalier's brutal regime, and each had spent time in exile or in hiding. "Every day we try to recover and to replace them," said Yolette Mengual, chief of staff in the Women's Ministry, who was overseeing the memorial. "We can't. We are still searching. We have to keep fighting."

Talking about rape is not very useful is it? How about some self-defense training and some decent clothing and maybe security fences and flash-lights ... if all else fails why not MACE?

Looks like they could use some garbage containers, shovels, wheelbarrows, rakes, buckets, scrub-brushes, soap, disinfectant, brooms, mops, wash-basins, clean decent clothing, shawls, blankets, cushions and mats, workboots, work-gloves, hats

... above all ... clean water

... food ... good nutritious food

... safe, discreet sanitary toilets

... that is what I would need ... what I would consider a real gender issue

... then when I was finished cleaning a space for myself I'd need some sort of shelter ... a tent perhaps ... maybe some sort of framing for a wall ... perhaps fabric for curtains and as a temporary solution I could use the type of divider that is used at trade-shows ... next I'd need cooking supplies ... pots, pans, dishes, cups, spoons, forks, knives, all in various sizes ...

If the weather is a problem simple communal buildings might be a temporary solution. The larger the area that gets cleaned, the larger the building could be. Of course the land beneath the building needs to be solid and uncontaminated with garbage.

All of the above are legitimate gender issues because they affect both genders.

Mac and MoJo photo editor Mark Murrmann have been in Haiti all week. Read her previous posts here, and read her features on AWOL aid and the rapists terrorizing the tent camps. And check out more of Mark's photos here. The tent cities that hold some million people left homeless by Haiti's earthquake last year have a serious rape problem. With no security, no lights, and a dense, often desperate population, the camps are hotbeds of sexual violence. When I met with FAVILEK president Yolande Bazelais. Photo by Mark Murrmann FAVILEK (a Creole acronym for Women Victims Get Up Stand Up), a local group that advocates for women's rights, in September, it was hearing from several new rape survivors every week. And the organization's services cover only a dozen camps. Out of more than a thousand. I caught up with Bazelais the other day in Port-au-Prince. For lack of funding, FAVILEK still didn't have an office; we met in a driveway of another NGO's office, while dozens of FAVILEK members packed into an unlit concrete shed in the back for a meeting. Bazelais explained that her group is still getting several calls a week from women who have been raped. It is currently trying to care for four women pregnant with the offspring of their rapists. Bazeliais wants her group to be able to help victims by getting them out of the camps and away from the violence. Long-term, she said, "we want to give them education and possibilities and jobs," but "we can't even give them food." She said that camp dwellers have been so hungry for so long that she's now seeing the spread of child prostitution. So, I asked, had FAVILEK seen any improvements in the rape crisis since we'd met four months ago? Bazelais didn't hesitate for one second. "No."

1/16/2011
Philadelphia Inquirer
By Kathy Calvin (CEO of United Nations Foundation)
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In the long list of challenges facing Haiti, going to the restroom shouldn't be one of them. Yet in Haiti's sprawling tent cities, something as simple as a lighted pathway to the latrine can make a huge difference for a woman trying to survive the night without fear of sexual violence. In some of the larger camps, rapes are almost a daily occurrence. Even before last year's earthquake, Haiti was one of the toughest places in the Western Hemisphere to be a woman. Nowhere else in Latin America, North America, or the Caribbean is the maternal mortality rate higher, literacy rate lower, and life expectancy shorter than for women in Haiti. Yet relatively simple actions can go a long way toward improving the safety and welfare of women living in tent cities.
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One of the most common requests from camp residents is lighting. Dark, unsafe conditions embolden predators. That is why the United Nations, the U.N. Foundation, and other partners are distributing solar-powered lights to camps - and letting women decide where they should be placed. A number of reports indicate that teenage pregnancy is on a sharp rise in these camps. The lack of access to reproductive health services, education, and medical care makes pregnancy dangerous - particularly for young girls. There were about 200 nurse midwives in Haiti before the earthquake. Now there are about 75. The earthquake destroyed several clinics. Today, women are giving birth on the sidewalks. The wave of teen pregnancies must be accompanied by measures to promote maternal health and bring reproductive health services to the camps. Without proper access to care and education, rates of sexually transmitted diseases can be expected only to rise.
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The United Nations is at the forefront of an effort to restore clinics, train midwives, distribute contraception, and provide reproductive and health education to teens surviving in difficult circumstances. To date, the U.N. Population Fund has distributed 25,000 "dignity kits," which include sanitary napkins, antibacterial soap, underwear, towels, and washing supplies. Fund workers have even commandeered two tap-taps - the elaborately decorated buses that are ubiquitous in Port-au-Prince. Youth leaders travel from camp to camp on these trucks to educate young people about reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, and family planning.
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This peer-education program has seen successes, but with only two trucks and limited staff, it is not enough. These efforts must be expanded, but there isn't enough funding. A U.N. appeal for its Haiti earthquake response is more than $400 million short of its target. With about 43 percent of households headed by women, they must be at the top of the international community's agenda for Haiti. As the country rebuilds and people move from tent cities to more permanent dwellings, it is critically important that we support employment opportunities for women and provide education for girls. While the circumstances are dire, brave and resourceful women are finding ways to survive and thrive. Even more can have a brighter future if we work to improve the health and welfare of Haiti's most vulnerable. First and foremost, that means protecting women and girls in Haiti's tent cities.

1/18/2011
PBS Newshour
BY TALEA MILLER
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Among the many hardships facing the more than one million Haitians still living in tent camps after the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake is the threat of sexual violence. While there are differing accounts of how widespread rape is in the camps of Port-au-Prince, most analysts agree that sexual violence in Haiti has been exacerbated by the conditions in tent camps.
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Amnesty International reported this month that the risk of rape for women living in camps has increased dramatically over the past year. The organization consulted grassroots groups working with women on the ground and interviewed more than 50 victims. “Women and girls are in a situation of extreme vulnerability [in the camps], especially the girls without the protective measures like school or a safe place to play,” Ducos said. The attackers, he said, are usually groups of young men roaming camps looking for victims. But Sylvie van den Wildenberg with the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) said sexual violence in the camps has decreased since the early months after the quake with the implementation of security measures. Regular patrols by MINUSTAH and the Haitian police were put in place to reign in crime and more lighting in the camps was added. "Sexual violence was already a structural problem in the society, that is what we found out from the testimonies of the women in the camp," van den Wildenberg said. "Yes, it was exacerbated by the earthquake and the situation in the camps, but in the camps now it's reduced and I would say the women in the camps now are better protected than some of the women in other areas."
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The number of rapes that have taken place in the camps is unknown – the new report does not include an estimate but says hundreds of cases have been reported--and data on sexual crimes prior to the earthquake is also sporadic, says Emmanuelle Schneider, spokesperson for the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Haiti. However, Schneider acknowledged that patrols are not set up for all of the more than 1,100 camps in and around Port-au-Prince, and that camps that are more informal and not as well serviced by aid organizations could be more vulnerable. Amnesty International called for beefing up and expanding the current security measures, as well as encouraging community involvement in cutting down the crimes and full prosecution of perpetrators.
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Madre, an international women’s rights group based in the United States, said its sister organization in Haiti, the Commission of Women Victims for Victims, has documented more than 300 rapes in 22 camps it has worked in since the quake. Many women are scared to come forward for medical help or to pursue prosecution, said Madre's human rights advocacy director Lisa Davis. But the organization has observed that attackers are becoming more brazen and are acting with impunity because so few cases end in a conviction. “A woman was pulled into a car in broad daylight by five men, so we are starting to see women raped during the day on the streets in front of people,” Davis said. One of the rape survivors Amnesty International interviewed, ‘Denise," told researchers she would have preferred to die in the earthquake instead of experiencing what she did.
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“On 10 June, I was sleeping under my tarp shelter when three men ripped it, came in and raped me,” she told researchers “These men came to the camp to do just that. A young girl from the camp was also raped.” On Wednesday, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued recommendations to the Haitian government to take immediate action to prevent sexual violence against women and girls in the camps. The petition was submitted by Madre and other women’s rights advocacy groups, who will now use the decision to advocate action by the United Nations. Amnesty also hopes the United Nations will start to expand its response to the issue. “What we are recommending is that the government and the U.N. system and other humanitarian organizations make prevention and response to sexual violence a priority as part of the humanitarian response,” Amnesty's Ducos said. “There is no alternative for these women and girls”

1/12/2011
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In Haiti, one year after its devastating earthquake, UN Women is working side by side with national counterparts to stop violence against women, expand women's economic options and increase space for women to participate in decisions that affect them. The head of UN Women in Haiti, Sheelagh Kathy Mangones, shares an update. What UN Women activities have been most successful since the earthquake?
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After the earthquake, we immediately teamed up with women's organizations and the Government to train more than 100 young men and women so that they could go into 70 temporary settlements and raise awareness about the vulnerability of women and girls to violence. Survivors of violence were able to tell their stories. They were assisted in going to women's organizations where they could access medical, legal and psychosocial services, and begin rebuilding their lives and confidence. We also were able to help reestablish a safe haven for young girls who have experienced violence. And we are about to open two new safe houses for women in the north and southeast regions.
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We will expand much of this work in 2011. An important new measure will be tracking the incidence of sexual and gender-based violence. Right now, we have very little data on this. We know that large-scale disasters generally increase risks for women, but we need to be able to show exactly what is happening so that we can work with national partners on coming up with the best ways to stop it.
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What are the top priorities for women and girls in Haiti today?
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The earthquake deepened gaps in gender equality and women's empowerment. Many of these are related to structural obstacles, such as attitudes and institutions that prevent progress for women. To really achieve change, we need to have a long-term vision that removes these obstacles. One key issue is increasing women's voice, certainly in political processes, but also more broadly at the community level, and in civil society and professional organizations. Women must be able to contribute their perspectives to national debates on priorities now and in the coming years. Haiti already has made advances in this area, and has many strong, vibrant women's organizations. So there is much to build on, but more must be done. A second critical area is economic development. Forty-two percent of households are now headed by women. We need to support and sustain their livelihoods, such as by recapitalizing microenterprises, or encouraging women in nontraditional jobs such as construction, among other issues. Ending violence against women is another priority, both prevention measures to change attitudes and behaviours, and protection for women survivors to recover and seek justice.
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Why is building on national capacities so important?
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People are the motor of change. We need to listen to them and recognize the capacities that they have, because these are the starting point for recovery. It is an extraordinarily empowering message to say that everyone has some capacity and value. Otherwise, when you assume that there is no capacity, you can end up marginalizing people, or re-inventing the wheel, or undermining the ability of people to step up and move forward. Over the past year, we have really worked with national partners to help them strengthen capacities for actions to achieve gender equality. We have urged international partners to recognize that Haiti has a history of gender advocacy and achievements that can be further developed, such as a national action plan for stopping gender-based violence and a set of protocols for responding to survivors.
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Haiti recently had an election. Looking forward, how do you see UN Women supporting women's political participation?
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Our experience in Haiti is that women increasingly want to participate in various types of decision-making, including through formal political processes. They want their voices to be heard. Before the 2009 elections, we began supporting a coalition of women's organizations that trained women candidates from a variety of political positions on the skills needed to run successfully for office, and to respond to gender equality issues once they are in office. We will be doing more of that, including to assist the growing number of women interested in politics at the local level. Since local elections may take place in the next year or so, there will be a strong push for their participation at that level.
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Do you feel hopeful about the future in Haiti?
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Yes. Because I believe in the capacities and vision of Haitian women and men, and the extraordinary hope of Haitian boys and girls. As UN Women, we can support them in moving forward, closer to their dreams. I think that we have an extraordinary opportunity with UN Women to scale up the work we do, in Haiti and globally. In creating UN Women, UN Member States have recognized that gender equality and women's empowerment are critical to all the development goals we want to reach. In Haiti, 2011 will be a year of challenges, but through UN Women we will also be sending the message that women and girls are not alone, and we will do much more to magnify their voices and advance their rights.
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What can people in other parts of the world do to help?
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The important thing is to remain engaged and in solidarity with the women and people of Haiti. People elsewhere can remind their governments, particularly those supporting the reconstruction efforts, that we must make achieving gender equality a key part of everything we do, whether the issue is providing medical services, creating jobs, or enacting security measures. Gender equality is not something we can put off until later, because women are at the forefront of any humanitarian disaster. They play key roles in ensuring the survival of families, rebuilding communities, and providing food and health care. It is not optional to empower women. It is essential.

1/12/2011
United Nations Entity for Gender Eauality and the Empowerment of Women (UN WOMEN)
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In Haiti, one year after its devastating earthquake, UN Women is working side by side with national counterparts to stop violence against women, expand women's economic options and increase space for women to participate in decisions that affect them. The head of UN Women in Haiti, Sheelagh Kathy Mangones, shares an update.
.
What UN Women activities have been most successful since the earthquake?
.
After the earthquake, we immediately teamed up with women's organizations and the Government to train more than 100 young men and women so that they could go into 70 temporary settlements and raise awareness about the vulnerability of women and girls to violence. Survivors of violence were able to tell their stories. They were assisted in going to women's organizations where they could access medical, legal and psychosocial services, and begin rebuilding their lives and confidence. We also were able to help reestablish a safe haven for young girls who have experienced violence. And we are about to open two new safe houses for women in the north and southeast regions.
.
We will expand much of this work in 2011. An important new measure will be tracking the incidence of sexual and gender-based violence. Right now, we have very little data on this. We know that large-scale disasters generally increase risks for women, but we need to be able to show exactly what is happening so that we can work with national partners on coming up with the best ways to stop it.
.
What are the top priorities for women and girls in Haiti today?
.
The earthquake deepened gaps in gender equality and women's empowerment. Many of these are related to structural obstacles, such as attitudes and institutions that prevent progress for women. To really achieve change, we need to have a long-term vision that removes these obstacles.
.
One key issue is increasing women's voice, certainly in political processes, but also more broadly at the community level, and in civil society and professional organizations. Women must be able to contribute their perspectives to national debates on priorities now and in the coming years. Haiti already has made advances in this area, and has many strong, vibrant women's organizations. So there is much to build on, but more must be done.
.
A second critical area is economic development. Forty-two percent of households are now headed by women. We need to support and sustain their livelihoods, such as by recapitalizing microenterprises, or encouraging women in nontraditional jobs such as construction, among other issues. Ending violence against women is another priority, both prevention measures to change attitudes and behaviours, and protection for women survivors to recover and seek justice.
.
Why is building on national capacities so important?
.
People are the motor of change. We need to listen to them and recognize the capacities that they have, because these are the starting point for recovery. It is an extraordinarily empowering message to say that everyone has some capacity and value. Otherwise, when you assume that there is no capacity, you can end up marginalizing people, or re-inventing the wheel, or undermining the ability of people to step up and move forward.
.
Over the past year, we have really worked with national partners to help them strengthen capacities for actions to achieve gender equality. We have urged international partners to recognize that Haiti has a history of gender advocacy and achievements that can be further developed, such as a national action plan for stopping gender-based violence and a set of protocols for responding to survivors.
.
Haiti recently had an election. Looking forward, how do you see UN Women supporting women's political participation?
.
Our experience in Haiti is that women increasingly want to participate in various types of decision-making, including through formal political processes. They want their voices to be heard. Before the 2009 elections, we began supporting a coalition of women's organizations that trained women candidates from a variety of political positions on the skills needed to run successfully for office, and to respond to gender equality issues once they are in office. We will be doing more of that, including to assist the growing number of women interested in politics at the local level. Since local elections may take place in the next year or so, there will be a strong push for their participation at that level.
.
Do you feel hopeful about the future in Haiti?
.
Yes. Because I believe in the capacities and vision of Haitian women and men, and the extraordinary hope of Haitian boys and girls. As UN Women, we can support them in moving forward, closer to their dreams.
.
I think that we have an extraordinary opportunity with UN Women to scale up the work we do, in Haiti and globally. In creating UN Women, UN Member States have recognized that gender equality and women's empowerment are critical to all the development goals we want to reach. In Haiti, 2011 will be a year of challenges, but through UN Women we will also be sending the message that women and girls are not alone, and we will do much more to magnify their voices and advance their rights.
.
What can people in other parts of the world do to help?
.
The important thing is to remain engaged and in solidarity with the women and people of Haiti. People elsewhere can remind their governments, particularly those supporting the reconstruction efforts, that we must make achieving gender equality a key part of everything we do, whether the issue is providing medical services, creating jobs, or enacting security measures.
.
Gender equality is not something we can put off until later, because women are at the forefront of any humanitarian disaster. They play key roles in ensuring the survival of families, rebuilding communities, and providing food and health care. It is not optional to empower women. It is essential.

Huffington Post
By Isobel Coleman
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A year after the devastating earthquake in Haiti last January, the situation on the ground remains grim: more than a million people are still living in tents, less than 5 percent of the rubble has been cleared from Port-au-Prince, and now a cholera epidemic, which has already taken thousands of lives, is raging across the country. Despite pledges to "build back better," international efforts in Haiti are struggling just to provide relief. The window for transformative change is closing. Donor fatigue is setting in, and new commitments are slowing to a trickle. Reality demands doing more with less, which is why it is so critical to invest in women. As demonstrated in other post-conflict and post-disaster situations, investments in women can have a significant payoff in terms of health, economic growth, and stability for the whole society. In Haiti's case, one area in particular -- midwifery training for women -- deserves support. Haiti has the worst maternal health statistics of any country in the Western hemisphere (and among the worst in the world). Prior to the earthquake, only a quarter of births were attended by trained personnel, compared with 98 percent of births in the neighboring Dominican Republic. Its maternal mortality ratio of 630 deaths per 100,000 live births ranks it alongside some of the poorest countries in Africa. A Haitian woman is seventy times more likely to die in childbirth than an American woman, a fact that serves as a marker of the country's nonexistent healthcare system, poor transportation, low education levels, and deeply rooted cultural practices that encourage women to stay at home during delivery. The challenge of fixing all these problems is overwhelming, but there are some cost-effective solutions that can make a difference.
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Experience from Afghanistan has shown that investing in midwifery can significantly reduce maternal mortality, even under the harshest circumstances. Midwives are significantly less expensive to train and maintain than doctors, they can be drawn from local populations with low educational levels, and as "local daughters," they are more likely to be accepted and trusted by, and continue to serve, hard-to-reach rural communities. Over the past seven years, the number of midwives in Afghanistan has risen from fewer than 500 to more than 2,000. Deliveries attended by skilled personnel have more than tripled, and maternal mortality has fallen significantly, albeit from extraordinarily high levels. As important, the midwifery programs in Afghanistan are creating a generation of young, empowered women involved in the healthcare of their whole community. They are teaching mothers how to care for themselves and their infants, and helping to improve hygiene and nutrition for the family. Midwives also earn a decent living, and as professional women in the community, serve as role models to society. Becoming a midwife is now such an attractive career path for Afghan girls in rural areas across the country that applicants outstrip availability of spots, even in some of the most conservative districts where women rarely venture outside of their homes.
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An expansion of midwifery programs in Haiti would not only help address the country's dire maternal mortality statistics, but also create economic, educational, and training opportunities for women. By almost every measure, women lag behind men in Haiti and their low status in society compounds many social ills. Haitian midwives can also be conduits for increasing access to family planning, as they have successfully been doing in Afghanistan and other countries. Some 40 percent of women of childbearing age in Haiti have unmet contraceptive needs. Not surprisingly, Haitian women have high fertility -- 4.7 children per woman on average. They also have the highest rate of HIV infection in Latin America, and the rate for women is higher than men. Midwives can be trained to counsel patients on family planning and HIV prevention. Expanding midwifery and family planning programs to women across Haiti can yield long-term gains that will benefit all Haitians. Prior to the earthquake, the Haitian government had a program that was graduating 40 midwives a year, but the main training hospital in Port-au-Prince was devastated. Several non-governmental organizations, like Partners in Health and Haitian Health Foundation, also run midwifery programs with great success, but the critical need is to bring these programs to scale across the country. Building back better in Haiti increasingly seems like a pipe dream, but smart investments in programs with demonstrated high returns, like midwifery programs, can give the next generation a chance.

1/12/2011
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One year after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, calls for increased support for women and young people in the country's recovery and reconstruction efforts. "After a disaster of such scale, women and youth need strong support to play a leading role in rebuilding their country," said UNFPA's new Executive Director, Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin. "UNFPA will continue to support the participation of women and young people in Haiti's reconstruction and the provision of reproductive health services and supplies to ensure safe childbirth and healthy infants," said Dr. Osotimehin. "Promoting the health, rights and participation of women and young people will speed up the country's development." Immediately after the disaster, UNFPA worked with young volunteers to distribute 'dignity kits' with hygiene supplies to displaced women, in addition to solar flash lights, mattresses and tents to the accommodation sites and communities. It also provided kits that included supplies to prevent cholera to non-governmental organizations, and installed solar lamps near latrines and high-concentration points in 36 accommodation sites. It also provided psychological support to more than 30,000 youths. Additional assistance that UNFPA will provide in the near future, with the Government and other partners, includes:
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• Building 10 centres for family support, including separate spaces for safe socialization among women, that will also provide emergency reproductive health care and family planning services.
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• Delivering 100,000 dignity-cholera kits to women and vulnerable groups to prevent cholera and protect women.
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• Rebuilding the National School of Midwives and supporting incentives to promote midwifery in Haiti.
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• Establishing safe spaces for sports, art and socialization for youth.
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• Economically empowering women and youth in vocational training and self-employment.
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• Promoting gender-sensitive security and patrols in displaced persons' sites.
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• Supporting the Government to prepare for the 2013 census.
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"When women have access to the same rights and opportunities as men," said Dr. Osotimehin, "they are more resilient and better equipped to lead reconstruction and renewal efforts in their societies. They can build back their country even better."
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Contact Information:
Abubakar Dungus
Tel: +1212 297 5031
dungus@unfpa.org
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Omar Gharzeddine
Tel: +1 212 297 5028
gharzeddine@unfpa.org

1/12/2011
Christian Science Monitor
By Ezra Fieser
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The women came first, gathering under a roofed plywood shack to learn basic skills that could help them get a job – to sew or speak English. The meetings soon turned into a sort of group therapy, where they discussed the pressures of living in a squalid, crowded camp with 26,000 earthquake survivors. But it wasn’t until their husbands joined them that the daily gatherings gave a few dozen Haitians a way to talk openly about sexual abuse – a problem that experts say has grown since last year’s earthquake. “At first it was like 15 or 20 guys who came down to complain that their wives were spending too much time here,” says Franklin Fontaine, who has led the group meetings. “But then we all got together and sat down. … It was unbelievable, for many of them it was the first time they had ever said the words ‘domestic violence.’” Amid a grim year of sexual violence that has plagued camps across Haiti, projects like this one, grounded in community involvement, have proved successful. Even before a 7.0-magnitude earthquake devastated this impoverished Caribbean country one year ago today, Haiti struggled to protect women from rape and domestic violence. In the nearly two years after the 2004 coup that toppled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an average of 1,600 rapes were being committed every month, a study published in The Lancet medical journal found.
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It has only worsened since the quake sent more than 1.5 million into unplanned camps, where an estimated 810,000 people still remain. With no running water and, in some cases, no lighting at night, women have been forced to bathe in public and make their way to latrines and showers in the dark. Even in their tents and huts, fashioned from flimsy sticks and tarps, they’ve been attacked. A report released Jan. 6 by Amnesty International found that sexual violence had grown dramatically since the earthquake struck and authorities were failing to stop it. The problem has persisted despite the presence of more than 12,000 police and military troops sent by the United Nations to Haiti to stabilize the country and years of warnings to the Haitian government. “There’s no justice, nobody is being punished,” Gerardo Ducos, the report’s author, says.
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Malya Villard-Apollon, a rape survivor and leader of KOFAVIV, a grassroots organization that works with victims, agreed. Working in 32 camps, her organization registered 859 cases since the earthquake. Only five cases have made it to trial and only one person – a police officer – has been jailed. She says incidents of domestic violence have spiked in the last year. “We have cases in which young girls whose parents died in the earthquake were living by themselves in a camp and then moved in with a partner who began beating them,” she says through a translator. “Cases have definitely increased since the earthquake.” One of those girls was 10 years old when she was raped, Ms. Villard-Apollon says.
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While much attention has been focused on random sexual violence, violence within the home is just as bad, if not worse, says Melanie Megevand, the protection coordinator for American Refugee Committee who started the program that brings women and their husbands together. Sixty percent of the cases her organization registered in the past year were victims of domestic violence and 40 percent were sexual violence cases. Ms. Megevand says the camp program has been successful in raising the issue in homes where it was not previously discussed. “Domestic violence existed long before the earthquake. … This allowed them to speak about the problem and to break the taboo,” she says. The basis of the program was an adaptation of the successful child friendly spaces – in which an area in a refugee camp is set aside to allow children to play and study. “It was good because we really didn’t know each other. We all came from different areas [to the camp.] So it allowed us to get to know each other,” says Ms. Zephayr Ylanne, who lost her home in the quake. “There was a lot of violence at the beginning, before this started. And we were all going through it or knew someone who was.”
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That communal spirit, though, led to a backlash from some husbands. “At first, it was really hard. They’d gossip and make fun of us,” says Billy Villa, a woman who was learning to sew through the program. But that turned to acceptance when the men “began to understand what this was about,” Ms. Villa says. “They liked being able to open up and talk about life here; talk about how hard it is to live like this.” One of the husbands, who asked not to be identified, says his first experience wasn’t what he expected. “We had a good time. We could all talk about things we were all experiencing and we could laugh at them,” he says. “It helped with the stress.” It also helped cut down on tension in the home, he says. Ms. Megevand says that 20 men who were victims of sexual or domestic violence even came forward to report their case in the past year. Although the program isn’t likely to solve Haiti’s overwhelming rape and domestic violence problems, it has served as an example for how communities can take control of the issue in their camps. The American Refugee Committee has recently turned the program over to a local grassroots organization that is expanding it into new camps. “For the people who participate, I think that it’s been huge,” Ms. Megevand says. “It allows them to transfer from victims to survivors.”

Wednesday will mark the one year anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti, which killed 300 thousand people and left more than a million homeless, living in makeshift camps amid the rubble. In addition to other crime and hardship, the incidence of rape for women and children is reportedly on the rise in the camps. Host Michel Martin speaks with Lisa Armstrong, who has written about this disturbing trend and efforts to prosecute rapists, for Essence magazine.
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MICHEL MARTIN, host: I'm Michel Martin and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. Every year the huge consumer electronics show shows off some of the latest and greatest digital play things. But we want to know, what were the coolest? We'll talk about that in just a few minutes. But, first, we go behind closed doors as we often do on Mondays. That's where we talk about issues people often keep private. As this week marks the one-year anniversary of that huge earthquake in Haiti that took so many lives and disrupted so many others, we wanted to take a look at how the quake has opened up the vulnerabilities of women and children in particular. There's no privacy for those in the camps, of course. But it turns out that women and children there are far less secure than they should be and at much higher risk of sexual violence. Lisa Armstrong is a journalist who wrote a piece about that. It's called "Fighting Back," in this month's issue of Essence magazine. She's been reporting in Haiti over the past year through a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. She stopped in our New York bureau on her way back to Haiti and she's with us now. Thank you so much for joining us.
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Ms. LISA ARMSTRONG (Journalist): Thank you so much for having me.
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MARTIN: I guess if you think about it, it's intuitively obvious that people would be more vulnerable if they don't have a secure place to live. But how bad is it?
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Ms. ARMSTRONG: It's really bad in that aside from the people who are living in these large tent cities, there are also people who set up informal shelters and there's absolutely no security at all and there are few people around. And the woman that I wrote about in the Essence piece lived in one of these types of shelters and was raped. And, also, in the camps, often when women are raped, nobody comes. The police are not patrolling. MINUSTAH, which is the U.N. peacekeeping agency, these women say, are not patrolling and not protecting them. So there really is no security anywhere.
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MARTIN: Could you talk a little bit about the woman you wrote about who opened your piece. And I'll just warn our listeners, this is a very difficult story to hear.
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Ms. ARMSTRONG: Well, Andrela(ph) lives in Jacmel, which is about three hours away from Port-au-Prince and it was also destroyed during the earthquake. And her house collapsed. Well, not collapsed. It was damaged during the earthquake. And so she moved into a large field with some other families. And one night, shortly after the earthquake, she was in her tent, it was about 1:00 in the morning. She heard someone trip over one of the ropes that holds the tent up and by the time she'd sat up, there were already seven men inside her tent. They raped her and then also raped her two daughters, who were 12 and 14, while she was there. And she basically stayed there overnight until morning when help came in the form of a neighbor who saw that her tent had been cut open and realized what had happened and basically gave her a needle and thread to stitch the hole up so that people wouldn't know what had happened to her.
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MARTIN: Why is that? Is it that women are stigmatized for having been raped?
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Ms. ARMSTRONG: Yes. I mean, there's a shame in being a rape victim. And so, you know, you don't want anybody to know that you've been raped. And it was kind of like, the way that Andrela described it, it was sort of like an almost wordless exchange where the woman gave her a needle and thread and implied, you know, stitch up your tent so that no one will know what happened to you.
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MARTIN: Is there any recourse for women like her? Are there any security forces, police trying to achieve justice?
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Ms. ARMSTRONG: Well, what the woman has said is that, you know, and I heard over and over again, in speaking with women, they would distinguish between whether they knew the rapist, whether someone who was their friend or a relative and whether they didn't know the person. And they would say, you know, if they didn't know the person, there's no sense in going to the police at all. And even if they did know the person and they did go to the police, women said to me that the police did not take them seriously. There were instances where the police made remarks basically implying that the women had asked to be raped. On the other hand, when I went and interviewed people from the police force, they said that they were doing everything that they could, but there are limited numbers of police officers and they couldn't be everywhere at all times. The other issue is that, as I mentioned, MINUSTAH, which is the U.N. peacekeeping force, women have said that they want MINUSTAH to do more to protect them. And then in speaking with people from MINUSTAH, their feeling is that this is a job for the police and, you know, the police are the ones who should be providing security.
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MARTIN: So, no one is prioritizing this, essentially.
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Ms. ARMSTRONG: Yes.
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MARTIN: But there is one other point that you made in the piece which I do think is fair to mention. You also point that there was a fairly lax judicial attitude toward rape as a crime to begin with. Until 2005, you make the point that rape was considered a crime of passion, that rapists were not routinely imprisoned. So, do you think that there still is kind of an attitude - men, let's just say it that way - don't think it's a big deal.
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Ms. ARMSTRONG: Yes. I mean, again, there's this attitude that it doesn't really matter what happens to women and the women themselves said to me, you know, they feel like they're being raped and nothing happens because they are poor. And then it's also, you know, one woman I spoke with said that you can have this rapist arrested, but he'll walk in the front door and as you're sitting outside waiting for justice, you know, the police will just let him out the back. So there's this attitude that men don't really care about what is happening to women.
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MARTIN: This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Michel Martin. I'm speaking with Lisa Armstrong, a journalist who spent the past year reporting on the increase in sexual violence aimed at women and children in Haiti. The piece you wrote for essence is titled "Fighting Back."
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Ms. ARMSTRONG: Mm-hmm.
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MARTIN: Why was it titled that way? What are the women doing to fight back?
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Ms. ARMSTRONG: In that particular story I wrote about a woman called Mary Lucy, and she runs an organization that before the earthquake, was helping people who affected and infected by HIV. And what she has been doing is she takes care of a large number of orphan girls. And how I came to this story was I was actually looking at HIV and interviewing some teenagers who were homeless after the earthquake and in speaking with them heard that they had all been raped. And so through that I spoke with Mary Lucy more about the work that she's been doing to try to help the girls to find shelter. She was helping Andrella(ph) just in terms of, you know, after her daughters were raped she found medication for one of the girls who was infected with the disease. And she's been trying to do whatever she can to find food and shelter for women and girls. Then in Port-au-Prince, there's also an organization called KOFAVIV, and that organization is made up of women who have been raped themselves. They have tried to do self defense courses, and they've tried to encourage women to go to the police and to put pressure on the police so that they will take these crimes seriously.
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MARTIN: And finally, I know that youre a journalist you're continuing to report on these and other stories. From what you saw, what will it take to achieve progress?
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Ms. ARMSTRONG: I think it's going to take a lot of international intervention. But also listening Haitian women in hearing their ideas as to what can be done to improve the situation. So there needs to be a collaboration between government, the Haitian people and these lawyers and other advocates from other countries.
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MARTIN: Well, presumably stable housing would help.
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Ms. ARMSTRONG: Well, yes. I mean stable housing obviously is the first thing. But I mean with a million people still displaced, there needs to be something done immediately, and the immediate solution is to have some sort of patrolling, have some sort of policing to provide security. But, yes, obviously, you know, if people can be housed, that's ideal.
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MARTIN: Lisa Armstrong wrote about sexual violence against women and children in Haiti for this month's issue of Essence magazine. The piece is titled "Fighting Back." She's been reporting in Haiti over the past year through a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. She's actually on her way to Haiti now, but she was kind enough to stop first in our bureau in New York. Lisa Armstrong, thank you so much for joining us.
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Ms. ARMSTRONG: Thank you so much for having me.

1/11/2011
By Tania McBride
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NEW YORK, USA, 11 January 2011 – Maricia Jean was raped and thrown into jail. Her son was brutally murdered, but she never made it to his funeral. She lived in hiding, fearing for her life and that of her remaining family members. And yet she is alive and taking action. Ms. Jean is the co-founder of a grassroots Haitian organization called FAVILEK (the Creole acronym for 'Women Victims Stand Up'). Based in the capital, Port-au-Prince, the organization is composed of over 80 women advocating for justice on behalf of other women and girls who have been victims of gender-based violence, both before and since the earthquake in Haiti. A Thomson Reuters Foundation-sponsored event held in New York last night – entitled 'Justice Denied: Sexual violence against women in Haiti' – featured Ms. Jean on an expert panel organized to raise awareness about the issue and to seek an end to impunity. The other panellists were Mendy Marsh, UNICEF Specialist on Gender-Based Violence in Emergencies; Yolette Mengual, head of cabinet at the Haitian Ministry for the Status of Women and Women's Rights; Lisa Davis, Madre Human Rights Advocacy Director; and Jayne Fleming, pro bono counsel from the Reed Smith law firm and human rights activist in Haiti. "In all emergencies, we know that gender-based violence is likely to increase due to a breakdown in social structures and protective systems," said Ms. Marsh. "It is critical that we have a range of multiple responses and practical solutions, and that gender-based violence issues are integrated into the humanitarian response in all sectors at the very beginning of an emergency."
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Practical solutions to prevent this kind of violence, such as providing solar-powered radios and lamps to vulnerable women and girls, have already been initiated in camps for the displaced in the Haitian earthquake zone. So has direct coordination on the issue with women's groups and child-protection agencies. UNICEF has also trained over 300 individuals on gender-based violence prevention – including police officers, caseworkers and judges, as well as humanitarian workers. During the panel discussion, however, Ms. Marsh cautioned that more must be done at grassroots level. "The community has to have confidence in services that are provided to survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. Communities themselves also need to know how to address and respond to violence. Creating survivor-centred policies is crucial, along with addressing the long-term root causes, such as social norms, if we are to prevent gender-based violence," she said. "Validating the voices of the victims is fundamental," added Ms. Fleming. "This is not a situation that is unique to Haiti. There is no shelter, no voice for grassroots organizations."
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In the course of the discussion, Ms. Mengual stated that the Haitian Government can't deal with these issues alone. Although the government criminalized rape in 2005, the problem of impunity still exists, Ms. Mengual said. She noted, as well, that financial support and a strengthened legal framework are essential to making Haitian women and girls safer. Ms. Marsh asserted that ending gender-based violence in Haiti is not going to be a quick fix. "We have to support the Women's Ministry," she said. "We have to ensure the community has confidence in the services and educate people on how they access services. Institutions have to be survivor centred, and funds are needed to address gender-based violence issues."

1/11/2011
http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/haiti_57363.html

Since the violent earthquake hit Haiti on 12 January 2010, the ICRC has registered 146 children who became separated from their families. So far, it has reunited 59 of them with their families and found the relatives of 21 others. Each case involved lengthy and meticulous research, complicated administrative procedures, much travel and, above all, constant efforts to ensure respect for the children’s rights. Isabelle Jeanneret, head of the ICRC’s programme for restoring family links in Haiti, talks about this work, which gives hope to so many.
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How do you go about finding missing relatives? Is the situation in Haiti unusual?
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The ICRC works mainly in armed conflicts, not in natural disasters. However, our methods in Haiti are the same as anywhere else: we open a tracing case when a child is looking for his or her parents and likewise when parents are looking for their child.
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After the earthquake, rescue teams poured in from all over the world. During the emergency phase, some of them evacuated small children without taking down their names or those of their parents. Although many children remained in Haiti, others were sent to France, the United States and neighbouring countries. As a result, we had to work with many different Red Cross organizations – far more than in other contexts – including the Haitian Red Cross, of course, and the American, French, Canadian and Dominican Red Cross Societies. One of the greatest strengths of our Movement is being able to rely on such a large network of sister organizations.
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How has the family-links programme evolved since January 2010?
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Immediately after the disaster, our priority was to restore contact between thousands of families who had lost touch with their relatives in Haiti and abroad. To do this, we provided stands where people could use the Internet and satellite telephones. We also set up a website that over 6,000 people used to let worried friends and family know that they were "safe and sound." Once communications in the country had been restored, ICRC tracing teams, working together with Haitian Red Cross volunteers, concentrated all their efforts on reuniting children with their parents. This painstaking task involves talking with many people and requires a lot of patience. The bulk of our work is now finished but we still have about 40 outstanding cases. Some of these involve children – some living in Martinique or Guadeloupe – who are in touch with their families but cannot yet be reunited with them for administrative or medical reasons. Then there are the most difficult cases – those involving children whose parents cannot be found despite all our efforts.
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What is the hardest thing about your work?
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One of our greatest difficulties is gathering enough information to trace the parents of very small children who have not yet learned to talk. In such cases, we put up posters with their photos on.
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What tracing methods are the most effective?
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The best method is simply going door to door and talking to people. Our teams start by visiting the last place where the missing person was seen. Then they talk to the person’s neighbours, visit his or her house or school, and ask everyone they meet whether they know anything about the case. In the most difficult cases – very young children who are unable to give us the information we need, or whose families had to move when their homes were destroyed – we display posters showing photos of the children. Our first poster campaign was quite successful as it enabled us to find the parents of eight out of 17 children. We are now launching a second poster campaign for the remaining cases.
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What happens to children whose families cannot be found?
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Once we have exhausted every means of finding their family, children either remain in their foster homes (providing the family and the child agree) or in the centre where they are living at the moment. If a child has nowhere to go, we look for centres willing to take them in or, failing that, we hand them over to Haiti’s child-welfare authority (Institut du bien-être sociale et de recherches - IBERS), which is run by the Ministry of Social Affairs. But we haven’t reached that point yet – as long as the search goes on, there is hope.

By Jane Regan and Kanya D'Almeida
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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. While a few pockets of international and local activists are stretching themselves thin, powerful bodies like the U.N. have been accused of doing too little, too late.
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"There is definitely a lot more that MINUSTAH can be doing," Amnesty International's Kerrie Howard told IPS, referring to the U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti. "Their policing function needs to have a much stronger gender focus," she said. "They also need to help the Haitian government to train their security forces and build the capacity of the forces to address gender violence if they are to ever deliver a solution for the women." Brian Concannon, director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, is highly critical of the way MINUSTAH has handled the situation. "The U.N. announced last summer that it would bring in a special all-women's police unit from Bangladesh to provide protection for the women," he told IPS. "The unit arrived, but is patrolling U.N. facilities, not camps. It's been reported that this is because of a lack of translators, but it seems that a force spending 2.5 million dollars per day could afford to pay for translators to make one of its priority projects work."
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"As we mentioned in our petition to the IACHR, U.N. officials in charge of gender violence have been downplaying the reports of rape coming from poor women's groups, and marginalising the grassroots groups – which are much more effective – in favour of the traditional women's organisations," Concannon added. "The woman in charge of the Gender Violence Subcluster wrote a blog post a month after she arrived in Haiti, saying that she had not yet met a rape victim. She took this as evidence that the rapes were not happening as reported. In fact, it was evidence that the U.N. subcluster did not have access to the information about rapes that was readily available from poor women." "Okay, let's make a list. What do we have at the Runway Camp?" asked an older woman who lives in a tent on the runway of Haiti's former military airport. "Okay, robbery, youth prostitution, rape, domestic violence and verbal abuse." "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?"
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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.
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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."
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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." 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.
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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.

MSNBC
By Jonel Aleccia and Meredith Birkett
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A year after Haiti’s devastating earthquake, women in Haiti’s still-teeming tent cities face yet another threat: sexual violence. With little protection from community or law enforcement, many have been violently raped, only to become pregnant with their attackers’ children. Photojournalist Nadav Neuhaus traveled through Haiti’s tent cities last summer, photographing and interviewing dozens of residents in the camps that still house more than 1 million people. During a visit to Camp La Piste, home to 50,000 displaced people, Neuhaus noticed an unusually high number of pregnant women. A community organizer and a local midwife confirmed his worries: Many of the women were pregnant as a result of rape.
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They came to Camp La Piste after losing parents, brothers and husbands in the earthquake, leaving them to fend for themselves in the sprawling squalor, where roving gangs of armed men terrorize residents. In a new report, Amnesty International documents the rise in sexual violence, including at least 250 rapes reported in the first few months after the earthquake. Fueled in part by these sexual attacks, the birth rate in Haiti has tripled since the quake, climbing from 4 percent to 12 percent, according to population experts. Most women told Neuhaus they don’t report the rapes, either out of shame or fear of repercussions. Even if they wanted to report the crimes, there's little help in a country where police and justice systems are destroyed or distracted and where resources for the powerless are almost non-existent.

1/7/2011
UNICEF
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One year after the devastating January 12 earthquake shook their fragile lives, Haiti’s 4 million children continue to suffer from inequitable access to basic water, sanitation, healthcare, and education services and protection from disease, exploitation, and unsanitary conditions, UNICEF said today. Today, more than 1 million people – approximately 380,000 of whom are children – still live in crowded camps. The relief and recovery efforts of Haitians and the international community have been extraordinary. Nonetheless, the United Nations children's agency noted in its report "Children in Haiti: One Year After - The long road from relief to recovery" issued today in recognition of the anniversary, that the recovery process is just beginning. “Children in particular suffered and continue to suffer enormously because of successive emergencies experienced in 2010, and they have yet to fully enjoy their right to survival, health, education, and protection,” said Ms. Francoise Gruloos-Ackermans, UNICEF Haiti Representative. “Haiti poses huge institutional and systemic issues that predated the earthquake, and that require more than an emergency response to resolve. This places even more emphasis on the need for organizations such as UNICEF to focus on developing and reinforcing structural interventions that will adequately prepare this country and its inhabitants for the future,” Gruloos-Ackermans added. Responding to the challenges of successive humanitarian emergencies requires commitment and investment in sustainable solutions for Haiti’s people. Water, sanitation and hygiene were on the decline prior to January 12, with only 19 per cent of people having access to basic sanitation facilities in 2006, down from 29 per cent in 1990.
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In response, UNICEF provided more than 11,300 latrines serving over 800,000 people. Every day, over 600 latrines are desludged as part of UNICEF’s ongoing efforts to maintain safe sanitation standards. While challenges remain in both water and sanitation, UNICEF is working to help implement sustainable solutions that include investing in water systems and focusing on community-led sanitation. In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, UNICEF, WHO and partners conducted emergency vaccination campaigns immunizing 2 million children against preventable diseases such as polio, diphtheria, and measles. A distribution of 360,000 insecticide-treated bednets reached more than 163,000 households in the malaria-endemic southern coastal regions. At the height of the emergency response, UNICEF and partners trucked a daily average of 8.3 million litres of safe water to approximately 680,000 people. With the ongoing cholera outbreak, UNICEF is providing more than 10.9 tons of chlorine and over 45 million water purification tablets to ensure safe water for 3 million people in the capital city and the surrounding towns.
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The UNICEF-led Child Protection Interagency Working Group helped register and reunite children who were separated from their families and worked with national and international partners to put in place 369 Child-Friendly-Spaces for close to 95,000 children across earthquake-affected areas. UNICEF also initiated prevention and response activities to gender-based violence, and, importantly, on child trafficking. In addition, to date, 4,948 children have been registered and 1,265 have been reunited. UNICEF and partners helped establish schools, procured tents and educational materials and allocated resources so that 720,000 children could resume their lessons, and in some cases, start school for the first time. Nonetheless, more than half of Haiti’s children do not attend school and school construction continues to be hampered by rubble clearing and land tenure issues. The earthquake highlighted the deeply rooted structural problems faced by Haiti's children, including chronic malnutrition, which affects one in three children under five years of age. UNICEF worked with partners to deliver nutritional supplements to address particular needs of infants and their mothers. By mid-year, a network of 107 ‘baby friendly tents’ was fully operational, providing nutritional advice and counseling for mothers and children, including a safe space to breastfeed. To date, more than 102,000 children and 48,900 mothers have been reached through these services with nutrition counseling and information.
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"We have seen results in the past year, but significant gaps remain and much more must be done in collaboration with UN, NGO, private sector, civil society, and government partners to ensure we are delivering on our commitments to children and women, including the commitment to resolve the situation of those still displaced by the earthquake and those in remote rural areas who struggle to meet their daily needs,” said Gruloos-Ackermans. "Haiti’s children have a right to grow up with education, nutrition, clean water, and safe sanitation; they have a right to be free from exploitation and disease – and we believe that with support and commitment, the seeds of recovery and development can be planted and these goals can be achieved.”
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Listen to a podcast with Tania McBride, UNICEF Communication Specialist for Haiti, and, Carlos Vasquez, architect and UNICEF Education Specialist, who have been working in Haiti to find out how the education system is moving forward one year after the earthquake.

Women and girls who survived the earthquake in Haiti almost a year ago are facing an increasing risk of rape and sexual violence, according to Amnesty International. More than one million people are still living in makeshift camps in the capital Port-au-Prince following the earthquake on January 11 last year, which left 230,000 people dead and another 300,000 injured. Those responsible for the attacks are mainly armed men who roam the camps after dark, the Amnesty report says. More than 250 cases of rape in several camps were reported in the first 150 days after January's earthquake and, one year on, rape victims continue to arrive at the office of a local women's support group almost every other day. One woman - Suzie, who lost her husband, brothers, and parents in the earthquake - told how she was living in a makeshift shelter with her two sons and a friend when they were attacked around in the early hours of the morning. The women were blindfolded and raped in front of their children by a gang of men who forced their way into their shelter. "After they left I didn't do anything. I didn't have any reaction... Women victims of rape should go to hospital but I didn't because I didn't have any money... I don't know where there is a clinic offering treatment for victims of violence."
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A 14-year-old girl, Machou, told how a boy raped her when she was going to the lavatory. "A boy came in after me and opened the door. He gagged me with his hand and did what he wanted to do... He hit me. He punched me. I didn't go to the police because I don't know the boy, it wouldn't help. I feel really sad all the time...I'm afraid it will happen again." Report author Gerardo Ducos said: "Women already struggling to come to terms with losing their loved ones, homes and livelihoods in the earthquake, now face the additional trauma of living under the constant threat of sexual attack. "For the prevalence of sexual violence to end, the incoming government must ensure that the protection of women and girls in the camps is a priority. This has so far been largely ignored in the response to the wider humanitarian crisis." Sexual violence was widespread in Haiti before January 2010 but this has been made worse by the conditions since the earthquake, says Amnesty.

1/6/2011
Amnesty International (AI)
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Women and girls living in Haiti's makeshift camps face an increasing risk of rape and sexual violence, Amnesty International said in a new report released today. One year after the earthquake which killed 230,000 people and injured 300,000, more than one million people still live in appalling conditions in tent cities in the capital Port-au-Prince and in the south of Haiti, where women are at serious risk of sexual attacks. Those responsible are predominately armed men who roam the camps after dark. More than 250 cases of rape in several camps were reported in the first 150 days after January's earthquake, according to data cited in the Amnesty International report, Aftershocks: Women speak out against sexual violence in Haiti's camps. One year on, rape survivors continue to arrive at the office of a local women's support group almost every other day. "Women, already struggling to come to terms with losing their loved ones, homes and livelihoods in the earthquake, now face the additional trauma of living under the constant threat of sexual attack," said Gerardo Ducos, Amnesty International's Haiti researcher. "For the prevalence of sexual violence to end, the incoming government must ensure that the protection of women and girls in the camps is a priority. This has so far been largely ignored in the response to the wider humanitarian crisis."
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Sexual violence was widespread in Haiti before January 2010 but this has been exacerbated by the conditions since the earthquake. The limited assistance the authorities previously provided has been undermined by the destruction of police stations and court houses. This has made it more difficult to report sexual violence. Over 50 survivors of sexual violence shared their experiences with Amnesty International for the study. One 14 year old girl, Machou, lives in a makeshift camp for displaced people in Carrefour Feuilles, south-west Port-au-Prince. She was raped in March when she went to the toilet. "A boy came in after me and opened the door. He gagged me with his hand and did what he wanted to do…He hit me. He punched me. I didn't go to the police because I don't know the boy, it wouldn't help. I feel really sad all the time…I'm afraid it will happen again," Machou told Amnesty International. One woman, Suzie, recounted how she was living in a makeshift shelter with her two sons and a friend when they were attacked around 1am on 8 May. Suzie and her friend were both blindfolded and raped in front of their children by a gang of men who forced their way into their shelter. "After they left I didn't do anything. I didn't have any reaction…Women victims of rape should go to hospital but I didn't because I didn't have any money… I don't know where there is a clinic offering treatment for victims of violence," Suzie said.
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Suzie lost her parents, brothers and husband in the January earthquake. Her home was also destroyed. Amnesty International's report highlights how the lack of security and policing in and around the camps is a major factor for the increase in attacks over the past year. The response by police officers to survivors of rape is described as inadequate. Many survivors of rape recollected how when they sought police help they were told officers could do nothing. "There has been a complete breakdown in Haiti's already fragile law and order system since the earthquake with women living in insecure overcrowded camps," said Gerardo Ducos. "There is no security for the women and girls in the camps. They feel abandoned and vulnerable to being attacked. Armed gangs attack at will; safe in the knowledge that there is still little prospect that they will be brought to justice." Amnesty International is calling for the new government to urgently take steps to end violence against women as part of a wider plan to address the humanitarian effort. The report states that women in the camps must be fully involved in developing any such plan. Immediate steps include improving security in the camps and to ensure police are able to respond effectively and that those responsible are prosecuted.

1/4/2010
International Rescue Committee (IRC)
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Just before 5pm on January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7 earthquake struck Haiti about 10 miles southwest of the capital, Port-au-Prince. It killed approximately 230,000 people and left another 1.3 million homeless. The International Rescue Committee quickly established emergency operations and moved to address the urgent need for clean water, sanitation and health care, as well the special needs of women and girls. In the last year, our mission has grown to include health care, child welfare, economic recovery and development, and programs to combat violence against women. The IRC provides direct support to nearly 100,000 people in 30 camps. Over the next week, we will provide a daily update on one aspect of our work in Haiti. Today -- a snapshot of of our efforts to keep women safe and healthy:
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• Women and girls are at the center of the IRC's relief effort. The IRC was the first agency to deploy a specialist dedicated to reducing sexual violence and runs a full-time program to help ensure the safety of women and girls.
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• The IRC has increased access to medical treatment and psychosocial services and provides safe spaces for women and girls who have experienced sexual or physical violence.
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• The IRC distributed solar lights in dangerous areas to enhance safety and security and constructed private bathing stations to ensure privacy.
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To learn more about the IRC's work in Haiti and how to help, visit theIRC.org/haiti.