PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — When the young woman needed to use the toilet, she went out into the darkened tent camp and was attacked by three men.
“They grabbed me, put their hands over my mouth and then the three of them took turns,” the slender 21-year-old said, wriggling with discomfort as she nursed her baby girl, born three days before Haiti’s devastating quake.
“I am so ashamed. We’re scared people will find out and shun us,” said the woman, who suffers from abdominal pain and itching, likely from an infection contracted during the attack.
Women and children as young as 2, already traumatized by the loss of homes and loved ones in the Jan. 12 catastrophe, are now falling victim to rapists in the sprawling tent cities that have become home to hundreds of thousands of people.
With no lighting and no security, they are menacing places after sunset. Sexual assaults are daily occurrences in the biggest camps, aid workers say — and most attacks go unreported because of the shame, social stigma and fear of reprisals from attackers.
Rape was a big problem in Haiti even before the earthquake. But the quake that killed an estimated 200,000 people has made women and girls ever more vulnerable. They have lost their homes and are forced to sleep in flimsy tents or tarp-covered lean-tos. They’ve lost male protection with the deaths of husbands, brothers and sons. And they are living in close quarters with strangers.
At the camp on Monday where the young mother was gang-raped, a woman in shorts tried to bathe discreetly. Stripped to her waist, she faced her blue tarp tent, her back to the rows of other shelters.
Nearby, a teenage girl squatted behind a pile of garbage, trying to avoid the stench and clouds of flies around tarp-covered latrines that provide the only privacy, but also are places where women are attacked.
In the hilltop suburb of Petionville a 7-year-old rape victim was being treated Monday in the hospital of a tent camp set up on a golf course. Another child, a 2-year-old, had been raped in the same camp two weeks earlier.
Investigators for Human Rights Watch reported the first three gang rapes to U.N. officials. Then, two weeks later, on Feb. 27, the 21-year-old mother was gang-raped.
Only a week later did U.N. police officers begin patrolling.
“For me it seems completely bizarre that for this one camp that everyone knows is unsafe, it’s taken them three weeks to get a patrol going,” said Liesl Gerntholtz, executive director of the agency’s women’s rights division.
Fritznel Pierre, a human rights advocate who lives at the camp, complained that the U.N. patrols are ineffective. “They only drive their cars down the one road that covers only a small portion of the camp. They never get out of their cars,” he said.
“Women aren’t being protected,” said Alison Thompson, volunteer medical coordinator for a Haitian relief group created by Sean Penn. “So when the lights go down is when the rapes increase, and it’s happening daily in all the camps in Port-au-Prince.”
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