By Kre­mena Kru­mova, The Epoch Times

FINDING STRENGTH: Life after the earth­quake in Haiti is chal­leng­ing for women, who often become vic­tims of sex­ual and home vio­lence in the makeshift camps. Some women have access to sup­port pro­grams, like ‘Women: Box of Grief,’ which encour­ages women who have expe­ri­enced vio­lence to share about their expe­ri­ences. (Gior­dano Cossu and Benoit Cassegrain/‘Solidar’IT in Haiti’)

Eight months after the cat­a­strophic earth­quake in Haiti, hav­ing no home is still not the hard­est thing to bear. Thou­sands of women liv­ing in makeshift camps in south­ern Haiti dare not speak about the sex­ual and domes­tic vio­lence they are sub­jected to in the camps. Faced with being stig­ma­tized by police and soci­ety, or with revenge and impunity for the per­pe­tra­tors, they remain silent—and some say the sit­u­a­tion is get­ting worse.

One of the most dev­as­tat­ing earth­quakes of our time left 3 mil­lion peo­ple home­less, deprived them of their loved ones, and forced them live in camps where they lack food, clean water, and basic necessities.

More than half of the 1.5 mil­lion Haitians in the tem­po­rary shel­ters are women and young girls. But despite being in the major­ity, they are still the most vul­ner­a­ble and most eas­ily taken advan­tage of. Lamer­cie Charles-Pierre, gen­eral coor­di­na­tor of OFAVA, a Port-au-Prince-based orga­ni­za­tion work­ing to pro­tect the rights of Hait­ian women, says liv­ing con­di­tions in the camps have got­ten worse.

“Women are sub­ject of vio­lence and suf­fer from men­tal prob­lems. Typhoid fever and malaria are widely spread. The lack of work­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties makes things even harder for women to sur­vive,” said Charles-Pierre by phone from Haiti.

Another orga­ni­za­tion, KOFAVIV, works with 33 orga­ni­za­tions around the world to help women con­tact police and access med­ical care. Nearly 300 cases of sex­ual vio­lence and 60 cases of domes­tic vio­lence have been reg­is­tered with KOFAVIV since Jan­u­ary when the earth­quake hit. “Women and girls are forced into pros­ti­tu­tion in order to obtain basic neces­si­ties like food, etc. They are raped on a reg­u­lar basis by mem­bers of the camps com­mit­tee, who are in charge of dis­tri­b­u­tion of food sup­plies in the camps. These com­mit­tees con­sist of men,” said Jocie Philistin, KOFAVIV Project Coor­di­na­tor in a tele­phone inter­view from Haiti.

YOUNG VICTIMS: Young girls are jump­ing the rope in Ter­rain Acra Camp, Port-au-Prince. Women and ado­les­cent girls are a reg­u­lar tar­get of sex­ual vio­lence in the camps of earthquake-devastated Haiti. (Cour­tesy Miguel Samper/American Refugee Committee)

Accord­ing to Diana Duarte, Media Coor­di­na­tor of the New York-based women rights orga­ni­za­tion MADRE, rape is a con­stant threat to Hait­ian women in the camps.

“We have heard sto­ries of women attacked in their tents or attacked as they walk to the bath­rooms at night. Women who face these vio­la­tions often do not have access to nec­es­sary med­ical ser­vices and are treated dis­mis­sively by the police,” says Duarte.

Now MADRE is appeal­ing to the United Nations, the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment, and major aid agen­cies to exert pres­sure to ensure that imme­di­ate mea­sures are taken to improve secu­rity in the camps, such as through installing lighting.

Steps Toward Solutions

SOLIDARITY: Young women attend a ther­apy ses­sion of ‘Box of Grief’ in Haiti. The project encour­ages women who have expe­ri­enced vio­lence in the camps to speak about their expe­ri­ences with each other to help find solu­tions. (Gior­dano Cossu and Benoit Cassegrain/‘Solidar’IT in Haiti’)

Solv­ing the prob­lems faced by women in Haiti requires close col­lab­o­ra­tion between state agen­cies and aid orga­ni­za­tions. Melanie Megevand, Pro­tec­tion Coor­di­na­tor of the Amer­i­can Refugee Com­mit­tee (ARC), is opti­mistic about the role of the gov­ern­ment and believes it is pre­pared to deal with the problems.

Megevand says that the Min­istry of Women’s Affairs, Min­istry of Jus­tice, Min­istry of Pub­lic Health, and the national police are all pre­pared to deal with home vio­lence, sex­ual abuse, or other forms of exploitation.

“The scale of the issue is huge and the coor­di­na­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion need to be con­tin­u­ously dealt with. The ques­tion now is how to respond to the abuses on a wider scale and more effec­tively,” said Megevand by phone from Haiti.

So far ARC has pro­vided shel­ter assis­tance to three camps with a total of 30,000 inhabitants.

ARC also works with men, offer­ing train­ing and edu­ca­tion. “If men are not seen as essen­tial actors in the com­mu­nity to keep women safe, the pre­ven­tion of vio­lence against women will be unsuc­cess­ful,” says Megevand. She reports that there has been a “small but steadily increas­ing num­ber of men” seek­ing help at the women’s centers.

Gior­dano Cossu, an inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist from Italy who focuses on prob­lems typ­i­cally for­got­ten by the inter­na­tional media, sees a more com­pli­cated picture.

“The action of ser­vice is too slow and stays at the level of ideas. What Haitians see is that with all the money that has been donated, basic prob­lems are not tack­led, and the inter­na­tional aid orga­ni­za­tions spend weeks dis­cussing, most of the times with no Haitians present, what should be more appro­pri­ate to do, rather than imple­ment­ing solu­tions quickly and on a large scale in all camps,” says Cossu.

Cossu, together with French web reporter Benoit Cassegrain, runs the Solidar’IT project that aims to give voice to locals in Haiti as well as to show the real­ity of Haiti’s recon­struc­tion. From his obser­va­tions, the prob­lem would not go away even if by magic all tents turned into wooden huts. There are many other causes beyond basic hous­ing that need to be addressed—the lack of light­ing, fam­i­lies that have been sep­a­rated, the lack of infor­ma­tion about whom to con­tact for jus­tice and help, the total lack of inter­est by the police to inves­ti­gate the crimes, and of course, the male culture.

Lift­ing the Lid of Silence: Tes­ti­monies of Victims

DETERMINED: Marie Sofonie is 25 years old and says she is deter­mined to break the silence about sex­ual abuses in Haiti. (Gior­dano Cossu and Benoit Cassegrain/‘Solidar’IT in Haiti’)

Cossu and Cassegrain are watch­ing the sit­u­a­tion in Haiti film­ing every step of the process. They have found two groups in Haiti that are help­ing women speak from the heart about the hid­den violence.

Marie Sofonie works for Ayiti SMS SOS, a project which allows vic­tims or wit­nesses of abuse to send an SMS to a free num­ber. Mes­sages are then mapped geo­graph­i­cally and clas­si­fied based on the type of crime or help request, loca­tion, and so on.

Sofonie tells her own story:

“In the camp, the sit­u­a­tion was really ter­ri­ble; we were exposed to every­thing: sex­ual assaults, thefts, rapes, all that. After a week, peo­ple there began to take the habit, as there was no reply, they were not afraid any­more and they began to steal, rape, I was afraid it could hap­pen to me, and I said to myself, I am going to stay in my house, what­ever hap­pens, die or live, I give up but I will not accept to be raped by some crooks. I was afraid to become BAD, because I don’t think I would have let any­body do what he wanted to me.”

Charles-Pierre from OFAVA started a pro­gram called “Women: The Box of Grief” which con­sists of work­shops that encour­age women to share their expe­ri­ences and find solu­tions to their prob­lems. Since many women are afraid to speak up, Charles-Pierre cre­ated what she called a “box of grief,” a box that she puts in the mid­dle of the work­shop room as a place where women can deposit their sto­ries after writ­ing them down. Every Fri­day she opens the box and reads out the sto­ries to the group.

“The atmos­phere gets rather tense, and face expres­sions reveal the con­cealed anguish. Small weeps and moans are heard dur­ing the read­ing of these ter­ri­ble sto­ries. In the audio port­fo­lio that fol­lows, every­body can lis­ten to the sto­ries and share in this hard but nec­es­sary moment of rev­e­la­tion,” writes Gior­dano Cossu on the web­site of Solidar’IT.

Here are three of the tes­ti­monies from the “box of grief,” which remain anonymous.

“It’s a young girl who after the 12 Jan­u­ary has faced not vio­lence, but finan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties, and how can I say… domes­tic vio­lence, because in the house it was her who did every­thing to find some­thing to eat.”

“This is a young girl who received sex­ual vio­lence from her own father. Every time she tried to say some­thing, her father promised to kill her. She has come to live in the camp.”

“It’s a young girl aged 16. She is an orphan, she has been abused sex­u­ally and so far she has not been allowed to go to the hos­pi­tal. She wants help from us, to get over this rape problem.”

And after the ther­apy is fin­ished, accord­ing to Hait­ian cus­tom, every­body starts to sing and laugh joy­fully, vent­ing away and leav­ing behind every­thing bad.

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