Nadia hushes a crying three-month-old baby into her arms and kisses her gently on the forehead. She was 19 and not ready to be a mother, but the young Haitian’s life changed last year as she walked home through the dusty streets of a gang-controlled area in Haiti’s capital.
She was dragged into a car by several men, who blindfolded her and kidnapped her. For three days, they beat her, starved her, and gang-raped her.
Months later, she found out she was pregnant. In an instant, she dashed her dreams of studying and helping her family financially.
A toxic set of gangs pillage the crisis-stricken Caribbean nation – kidnapping, extorting and displacing civilians who no longer have anything else to give – and increasingly using women’s bodies as weapons in their war for control. Women like Nadia live with the consequences.
“The most difficult thing is that I have nothing to give him,” Nadia said of her daughter. “I’m afraid because as she gets older and asks about her father, I won’t know what to tell her… But I will have to explain to her that I was raped.”
assumed name
The woman only used the name Nadia, which is not her real name, to speak to The Associated Press, which has a policy of not identifying victims of sexual violence.
Long plagued by crisis – natural disasters, political turmoil, extreme poverty and waves of cholera – Haiti plunged into chaos in 2021, after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
Sexual violence has long been used as a tool of war around the world, a barbaric way of terrorizing communities and ensuring control.
“They are running out of tools to control people,” explains Renata Segura, deputy director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the International Crisis Group, an independent organization that works to prevent wars and deadly conflicts.
“They extort, but there is a limit to the money that can be extorted from people who are really poor. This is the only thing they have that they can impose on the population.”
That fear has spread throughout Port-au-Prince. Parents hesitate to send their children to school, fearful that they may be kidnapped or raped by criminal gangs. At night, the bustling streets of the city empty out.
Leaving home is a risk, especially for women. So is fleeing: gangs use the threat of rape to prevent communities from leaving areas they control.
Helen La Lime, the UN special envoy to Haiti, told the Security Council in late January that gangs use sexual violence to “destroy the social fabric of communities,” particularly in areas controlled by rival gangs.
Boys and girls
They rape girls and boys from the age of 10, he said.
What makes that worse is the remarkably low number of reports, making it difficult for any authority to understand the full extent of the damage. The women fear gangs seeking revenge on them and trust the Haitian police as little as they trust the gangs.
The country’s current government, seen by many as illegitimate, declined to comment on what it is doing to address the problem.
The UN documented 2,645 cases of sexual violence in 2022, an increase of 45% over the previous year. That figure is just a fraction of the actual number of assaults.
