By Sara Sid­ner, CNN

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/03/15/haiti.violence.women/

Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) — Carine Exan­tus should be sit­ting in her col­lege com­mu­ni­ca­tions class. Instead, the 22-year-old is teach­ing her­self how to avoid being attacked by the men who live in her new neigh­bor­hood — a maze of makeshift shel­ters spaced so close together that it is hard to get between them but easy to get inside.

“I, like every­body else, live in a very pre­car­i­ous sit­u­a­tion,” said Exan­tus, who was forced to make her own shel­ter when her home was crushed in Haiti’s Jan­u­ary 12 earthquake.

“As a young woman,” Exan­tus said, “I am afraid because I notice a lot of young men being aggres­sive toward women at night.”

In her camp, there has already been trou­ble. The camp lead­ers told CNN that two cases of attempted rape have been reported in the past few days and one sus­pect has been arrested.

“When the guys don’t have no money, their brain is not good,” said camp leader Jean Joseph Rudler. “When they have no work or food and just sit around, it is bad. When a guy is drunk, he will do any­thing [to a woman].”

Women can be eas­ily preyed upon when their four walls con­sist only of bed sheets or thin tents. But camp con­di­tions, a gov­ern­ment offi­cial said, isn’t the under­ly­ing prob­lem in Haiti when it comes to vio­lence against women.

“I’m gonna be blunt,” said Aby Brun, a mem­ber of Haiti’s Com­mis­sion for Recon­struc­tion. “Promis­cu­ity result­ing in absolutely con­demnable vio­lence and abuse against women is some­thing that has been going on in the slum areas and other lev­els of soci­ety for years. It’s a cul­tural problem.”

Exan­tus says she is often jarred awake by what she hears through the thin shel­ter wall. “There are some men who beat their girl­friends at night,” she said.

Dur­ing the day, women from the camp bathe top­less in an out­door foun­tain, their naked chil­dren try­ing to make a game of bath time by skid­ding around on the wet tiles in the blind­ing sun. Men sit nearby — watch­ing and some­times make lewd comments.

Before the earth­quake, Haiti was in the midst of imple­ment­ing what the United Nations Pop­u­la­tion Fund (UNFPA) called an impres­sive five-year plan to curb vio­lence against women and change the culture.

“It was a very ambi­tious achieve­ment for Haiti to cre­ate a five-year plan,” which began in 2006 and was to be com­plete by 2011, said Lina Abi­rafeh, the UNFPA gender-based vio­lence coor­di­na­tor in Haiti. “It looks at response to cases, data col­lec­tion, mon­i­tor­ing and pre­ven­tion. It really is a very robust plan.”

Abi­rafeh says the quake destroyed many of the ser­vices for women, such as rape coun­sel­ing cen­ters and Haiti’s Min­istry for Women’s Affairs. It also took the lives of three of Haiti’s most revered female leaders.

Steps are being taken to safe­guard women in the camps now. Solar flash­lights are being handed out, prox­im­ity to bath­rooms and light­ing are being worked on, and secu­rity patrols increased.

Author­i­ties point out that rape is by no means an epi­demic in the camps. City­wide, police say, they have received 20 reports of rape and made 10 arrests. But it is com­mon knowl­edge among experts that most of these types of inci­dents go unreported.

“Fig­ures for sex­ual vio­lence are under­re­ported every­where in the world. Every coun­try has an issue with this, and the fig­ures are only the tip of the ice­berg. They tell us very lit­tle,” said Abi­rafeh. “As far as I’m con­cerned, even one rape is one too many.”

What­ever the num­bers, young women like Carine Exan­tus say it’s hard to sleep well at night.

“We have to be afraid,” she said, “because we don’t know when some­body may have bad intentions.”