UNITED NATIONS – The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Tuesday said that thousands of women and girls displaced by gang violence in Haiti are under threat from a surge in sexual assaults. In a statement, UNFPA said that the women and girls were living in deplorable conditions in makeshift camps.
Women fleeing gang violence in Haiti (File Photo)“The risk of sexual violence for women and girls in displacement sites in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince is rapidly rising owing, in part, to the alarmingly poor living conditions they are facing,” the UNFPA said, adding that women and girls often “face spiralling sexual violence but have nowhere to turn”.
Among the 185,000 people forced to flee their homes in the city, many are living in makeshift camps visited by UN officials.
UNFPA said that in the 14 displacement sites it surveyed, more than half of the latrines and many showers are not separated by gender, several shower doors have no locks and many sites have no nighttime lighting.
“As a result, many women and girls are at risk of sexual violence every time they use a shower or toilet.
“With what I’ve been through, I’d rather have died,” said one mother of seven who was living in a Port-au-Prince shelter and was sexually assaulted while sleeping in a public square.
“When they saw that I didn’t have a man with me, they attacked me while I was four months pregnant. I’m always afraid for my daughter, who’s 11,” she added.
UNFPA said that between March and May this year, the number of cases of sexual and gender-based violence increased by more than 40 per cent, with only a small fraction of total cases reported.
Such cases of violence surged from 250 in January and February to over 1,500 in March and topping 2,000 in April and May, according to UN figures. In total from January to May 2024, some 3,949 cases of gender-based violence, mostly rapes, were reported. Some 61 per cent of victims were displaced persons.
Against this backdrop of insecurity and abuse, the UNFPA has launched an appeal for $28 million in funding “to strengthen and expand access to life-saving reproductive health and gender-based violence services and support in Haiti in 2024.”
Haiti has been without an elected head of state since July 7, 2021, when Jovenel Moise was assassinated at his private residence overlooking Port au Prince.
The United Nations says gang wars have displaced more than 578,000 Haitians, while nearly 5 million – almost half the population of 11.7 million – are facing acute hunger, with 1.6 million of those people at risk of starvation.
Haiti has also benefitted from the deployment of police officers from Kenya under the United Nations sanctioned mission to combat powerful armed gangs that have wreaked turmoil in the Caribbean country.
The head of the Transitional President Council (TPC), in Haiti, Edgard Leblanc Fils, said that he expects presidential and legislative elections to be held by the end of 2025.
