By Rapadoo, RH Real­ity Check

“The mother came back, got her daugh­ter and checked her daugh­ter and she said, ‘her inside was so’ –she empha­sized– ‘opened.’  And then she asked the daugh­ter, ‘what hap­pened to you?’ And the daugh­ter said, ‘while I went to the bath­room there was this man that held me and had sex with me’.”

To say “Begin­ning of the End,” is not to indulge mis­placed nos­tal­gia or sen­ti­men­tal­ity. That sce­nario, dif­fi­cult as it might have been to read, have finally exposed an age-old con­cealed win­dow into the stark real­i­ties of scores of Hait­ian women and chil­dren, Flore, in this par­tic­u­lar instance. She is a 10-year-old girl who has been sex­u­ally assaulted three times in the camp where she lived with her mother.

The hor­ror

Flore’s mom described her daughter’s ordeals through the report­ing of Carla Mur­phy, a jour­nal­ist cov­er­ing the rebuild­ing process in Haiti. Mur­phy used the pseudo name “Flore” to pro­tect the iden­tity of the child.

The first man who ‘wasted’ her daugh­ter, the mom explained, was a friend who asked for Flore to babysit his child while he went out.  She later found out that he repeat­edly raped Flore when she watched his baby. The sec­ond attack came at the hands of a 22-year-old man, lit­er­ally. She caught him red-handed, his fin­gers inside of her daugh­ter. Furi­ous, she had him thrown in jail only to watch him roam­ing the same camp later. The third episode, naïvely recounted by the child, occurred at night.

The cat­a­clysmic earth­quake has not only affected Hait­ian women dis­pro­por­tion­ately, but has also cre­ated new norms for them. Gen­der dis­crim­i­na­tion, and struc­tural inequal­i­ties have lit­er­ally reshaped their real­i­ties. In many instances, affected women have had to defend them­selves, their chil­dren, and aging par­ents against sex­ual vio­lence. A Human Rights Watch report high­lighted a woman whose kid­nap­pers took to an undis­closed loca­tion where she was “gagged, beaten repeat­edly, and gang-raped for two to three days until she was finally able to escape.

The pres­ence of an effec­tive Hait­ian gov­ern­ment to meet obvi­ous sys­tem­atic secu­rity needs is but an illu­sion and the UN response units are a scarce resource; hence, the rapists, pedophiles, and child traf­fick­ers alike have cre­ated their own ver­sion of the Wild West in the camps, which many have branded “breed­ing grounds for criminals.”

Abnor­mal Norms

The dys­func­tional judi­cial sys­tem, inef­fec­tive­ness of the police force, and an increased tol­er­ance on the part of the vic­tims have all but ensured the elu­sive­ness of the cul­prits, con­doned their sick behav­iors, and per­pet­u­ated their vicious cycli­cal ten­den­cies. In June 1999, 600 police offi­cers –10 per­cent of the force– were dis­missed on human right vio­la­tions, includ­ing sex­ual vio­lence. Fur­ther char­ac­ter­i­za­tion by Pierre Denize, Haiti’s Chief of Police then, unearthed the roots of the prob­lem. “Hait­ian police force was the prod­uct of a soci­ety whose his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ment was such that it did not rec­og­nize nor have any expe­ri­ence of an insti­tu­tional human rights pol­icy,” he expressed to the United Nations’ Com­mis­sion of Human Rights. In addi­tion, The Lancet pub­lished a chill­ing mor­tal­ity study of Haiti, which revealed, in no small mea­sures, that a stag­ger­ing 35,000 women were raped between March 2004 and Decem­ber 2006 in the cap­i­tal alone dur­ing the insta­bil­ity that fol­lowed the oust­ing of Pres­i­dent Jean Bertrand Aristide.

Mean­while, gov­ern­ment offi­cials have con­tin­u­ally down­played the pres­ence of a sys­temic prob­lem; hence, the barely notice­able –under­re­ported– empir­i­cal evi­dence has not done any jus­tice to the vic­tims. Nev­er­the­less, the sharp increase of rape cases since Jan. 12th of this year can barely be dis­missed as ran­dom or spo­radic acts. Accord­ing to its July 19thpreliminary report, the Com­mis­sion of Women Vic­tims for Vic­tims (KOFAVIV) has infor­mally tracked 230 rape cases in only 15 of the 1,300 camps. More­over, a sur­vey con­ducted in March 2010 by the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan revealed that 3 per­cent of women and girls liv­ing in dis­place­ment camps have been sex­u­ally assaulted, half of whom, minors.

Long Road Ahead

It has become abun­dantly clear that the atroc­i­ties against women and chil­dren in Haiti are a byprod­uct of sys­temic fail­ures and increased vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties of the dis­place­ment camps. As one coali­tion of Hait­ian civil soci­ety groups noted, “The extent of the dis­as­ter is cer­tainly linked to the char­ac­ter of the colo­nial and Neo‐colonial State our coun­try has inher­ited, and the impo­si­tion of neo‐liberal poli­cies over the last three decades.”

Beyond its nec­es­sary leg­isla­tive and judi­cial infra­struc­ture, Haiti needs a mech­a­nism for inclu­sive par­tic­i­pa­tion and inter­ac­tive engage­ment of all stake­hold­ers. That is, men, women, and chil­dren – rich or poor– have to be an inte­gral part of ongo­ing dis­cus­sions and strate­gic plan­ning. Tran­si­tion­ing from a status-quo, which –for far too long– has been insen­si­tive to their ordeals, is a daunt­ing task.

Clearly, such an inter­gen­er­a­tional ini­tia­tive has to be spoon-fed to Haitians. Even­tu­ally, the increased knowl­edge will help remap the psy­cho­graph­ics of the cul­tural con­scious­ness. Ide­o­log­i­cal changes are com­plex and usu­ally require elab­o­rate skills and a great deal of time to mate­ri­al­ize, as UNICEF’s 2010 report indi­cates. Mov­ing too fast risks alien­at­ing the vic­tims and/or pro­vok­ing more aggres­sion. Some women may even be reluc­tant to move away from the inhu­mane treat­ments that they have learned to rec­og­nize as a safe place.

Broader Per­spec­tive

Sev­eral NGO have right­fully called for Haiti’s lead­ers to pri­or­i­tize their responses to rem­edy cur­rent atroc­i­ties. How­ever, Haiti’s emer­gent polit­i­cal and social cul­ture presents a rare oppor­tu­nity to dis­cover her sus­tain­able roots and incite, in the con­text of evo­lu­tion­ary ide­ol­ogy, a psy­cho­log­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion in the mal­leable cog­ni­tion of her youths.

Fail­ure to design and imple­ment an effec­tive strat­egy with the par­tic­i­pa­tion of all Haitians would be inad­e­quate and would exac­er­bate struc­tural human rights infringe­ments that pre‐date the earth­quake. The dev­as­tat­ing result would leave the most vul­ner­a­ble mem­bers of Hait­ian soci­ety: women, chil­dren, and the poor in an even more frag­ile state.

http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/reader-diaries/2010/08/30/beginning