Haiti's Rape Cases
Here’s a very good article that outlines the serious problem of violence vulnerable women in Haiti face in the aftermath of the recent earthquake.
An excerpt from Liesl Gerntholtz‘s article:
In Parc Jean Marie Vincent, some 27,000 people had crammed themselves and their meager belongings into what was formerly a concrete sports park. Squalid shelters are built of sheets and other pieces of material slung over sticks and anything else that might hold them up. I wondered where women washed, changed sanitary pads and fed their babies, as these shelters so obviously provided no privacy. As we parked our car, my first question at least was answered: a young woman, naked from the waist down was trying to wash herself. I was conscious of many young men watching her.
I met “Gentile” in an empty tent that had been left at the camp by one of the humanitarian groups, giving us at least a little privacy. We sat in the oppressive heat, and she quietly described how, a few nights earlier, she had been grabbed by five men and taken into a nearby house. There she was raped, forced to perform oral sex, and brutally beaten. When she finally managed to escape, the men chased her and beat her in the street, where a man finally rescued her and took her to his home. Later that morning, she returned to the streets, as she literally has nowhere else to go.