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"2010 earthquake and aftermath

After the 2010 earthquake, more than a million people moved into tent cities rife with violence.

Over a million people made homeless in the 2010 earthquake in Haiti moved into refugee camps that offered little food, work, or safety.[6] The UN reported that as of October 2012 about 370,000 people were still in the camps and facing poor and insecure living conditions.[6] The earthquake directly preceded a rapid increase in the numbers of sexual violence in Haiti.[67]

Factors contributing to vulnerability after the earthquake include homelessness and losing the protection afforded by a house; losing family members who might have provided protection; and increases in levels of violence due to the stress of living in substandard conditions; and lack of legal recourse to prosecute rapists.[5] The tent cities have little privacy, lighting, or policing.[17]

Young children are also victimized.[68] [48] Women who need to leave their children in search of work, food, or water sometimes have no option but to leave them alone[17] or with strangers; sometimes these children are sexually abused.[5] Human rights group Amnesty International reports that men roam the camps in groups looking for victims, targeting young girls without the protection afforded by schools and safe play areas.[69]

Police stations and courts were destroyed in the earthquake, making access to protection and prosecution of offenders more difficult, and human rights groups have accused the Haitian government of having an insufficient response to sexual violence.[3] The number of sexual abusers who are prosecuted is very small, a fact which has led to more rapes as rapists realize they are unlikely to face consequences.[69]

In October 2010 from human rights group Refugees International reported that sexual violence was on the rise in the refugee camps because UN forces were providing insufficient security.[70] Although the number of rapes is thought by some to be increasing since the earthquake, gathering accurate statistics is difficult.[5] The Port-au-Prince women's group who have been gathering statistics on rape before and after the earthquake didn't see an increase in rape reports in 2010 and after, as opposed to domestic violence reports who were on the rise.[71] A study by a human rights group found that 14% of Haitian households reported having at least one member suffered sexual violence between the January 2010 earthquake and January 2012.[6] In 2012, sexual assaults in Port-au-Prince were reported at a rate 20 times higher in the camps than elsewhere in Haiti.[7]

In some countries victims of pregnancy from rape have access to safe and legal abortions but not in Haiti. In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, not only did sexual violence rise but the birth rate in the camps also spiked dramatically, because many women who became pregnant after being raped had no way to treat their pregnancy, so were forced to give birth. Those who have money can go to a doctor and get safe abortions done secretly, but those who don't turn to medication that has other purposes - for example many women used anti-ulcer medication which can lead to hemorrhaging, infection, and other complications.[19]

Response efforts

Human rights groups have begun holding self-defense classes and issuing women whistles to provide an easy and loud way to call for help in camps.[17] Donations from abroad have helped to fund better lighting in the camps and safety trainings for women, and women in the camps have organized watch groups to ensure each other's security.[72] Grassroots organizations have set up a call center and an emergency response system for sexual violence.[3]

A group of women raped during Cédras's rise to power formed a group to help women victims of rape in Haiti called FAVILEK, which in Creole stands for "Women Victims Get Up Stand Up".[73] People from FAVILEK and other women's rights organizations are living in the camps and organizing to help women, setting up nighttime escorts and security patrols—sometimes at the risk of their own safety due to reprisals by attackers.[67]

Human trafficking

Poverty is extreme in Haiti, with 78% of the population surviving on less than $2 a day—a situation which sets the stage for prostitution, human trafficking, and mass violence.[8] Both national and international crime rings are involved in human trafficking in Haiti.[74] Adults and children are trafficked through, into, and out of Haiti for enslavement including prostitution.[75] Common destinations for Haitians forced into sex trafficking include other parts of the Caribbean, the US, countries in South America, and the bordering Dominican Republic.[75]

Haitian children are trafficked into the Dominican Republic for use as slaves in work including child prostitution;[9] [76] they are sometimes kidnapped, or their families may be swindled into handing them over to traffickers.[76] Haitian children may also be used in sex tourism inside Haiti, forced into prostitution for foreigners.[75] Dominican women have also reportedly been trafficked into Haiti for forced prostitution.[75]

It is rare for human traffickers to be prosecuted in Haiti because the country does not have laws specifically banning the practice, and those laws that could be used against traffickers go unenforced.[75] Efforts to prevent and investigate human trafficking and to protect victims are primarily undertaken by international and nonprofit organizations, not the Haitian government.[75] The UN program UNICEF has funded the Brigade de Protection des Mineurs to find and protect children particularly vulnerable to trafficking.[77]

International groups reported an increase in trafficking of children out of Haiti immediately after the 2010 earthquake, since the chaos and the aid effort made it easier for traffickers to take children out of the country.[78] Government and international officials, busy dealing with the destruction of their infrastructure, were not in a position to protect children, some of whom had lost their families.[9]

Restaveks

A 2009 study reported that up to 225,000 Haitian children are forced to work as domestic servants, and are at grave risk of rape at the hands of their captors.[8] The children, known as restaveks, are traded into other households by their families, exchanging the children's labor for upbringing.[8] [9] A 2012 report placed the number of restaveks in Haiti at between 150,000 and 500,000.[75] Two thirds of restaveks are female, and most of them come from very poor families and are given to better-off ones.[8]

Restaveks who are young and female are particularly likely to be victimized sexually.[10] Female restaveks are sometimes referred to as "la pou sa" which translates to "there for that"—'that' being the sexual pleasure of the males of the family with whom they are staying.[11] Restaveks who become pregnant are often thrown out onto the street.[9] Those who are thrown out or who run away are at risk of becoming homeless or being forced into prostitution.[75]

UN peacekeepers

In 2004 the ouster of then-president Aristide lead the United Nations to establish UN peacekeeping forces in Haiti.[79] [80] As of 2006 there were about 9000 UN peacekeepers in Haiti.[81] Reports have emerged that some of the peacekeepers, there to provide security and humanitarian aid, have raped Haitian civilians.[81] The UN is not able to discipline soldiers itself, rather they are sent back to their home countries, and it is difficult for the UN to follow up to determine what if any punishment they received.[81]

One man says he was raped by six Uruguayan UN peacekeepers on a Port-Salut UN base—video of the event taken by one of the soldiers was circulated widely in the town, sparking outrage.[79] The Uruguayan military prosecuted the soldiers on charges of allowing a civilian onto the base and shirking their duties, and the men also face charges of rape in civilian court.[82] The soldiers' commanding officer was fired as a result of the incident.[80] In September 2011, the president of Uruguay wrote a letter of to the president of Haiti apologizing for the rape.[83]

In March 2012, two UN soldiers from Pakistan were tried in a Pakistani military tribunal in Haiti for the January 2012 rape of a 14-year-old boy; they were each sentenced to one year in prison."