Sexual violence in Haiti is a common phenomenon today, making it a public health problem.https://sciencenow.unaids.org/post/eliminate-gender-inequalities Being raped is considered shameful in Haitian society, and victims may find themselves abandoned by loved ones or with reduced marriageability. Until 2005, rape was not legally considered a serious crime and a rapist could avoid jail by marrying their victim. Reporting a rape to police in Haiti is a difficult and convoluted process, a factor that contributes to underreporting and difficulty in obtaining accurate statistics about sexual violence. Few rapists face any punishment.
Sexual violence potentially augments the risk of HIV infection. A Ministry of Health (Haiti) study reported there was sub-optimal utilization of anti-HIV medications following sexual assault at the largest state hospital in Haiti, L'Hôpital de l'Université d'État d'Haiti. Study findings recommended the prioritization of funding and comprehensive interventions that align sexual violence, HIV and mental health to support the timely uptake to antiretroviral medications following sexual assault.
A UN Security Council study in 2006 reported 35,000 sexual assaults against women and girls between 2004 and 2006. The UN also reported that half of the women living in the capital city Port-au-Prince's slums had been raped. United Nations peacekeepers stationed in Haiti since 2004 have drawn widespread resentment after reports emerged of the soldiers raping Haitian civilians.
The devastating earthquake in 2010 caused over a million Haitians to move to refugee camps where conditions are dangerous and poor. A study by a human rights group found that 14% of Haitian households reported having at least one member suffered sexual violence within two years after the earthquake. In 2012, sexual assaults in Port-au-Prince were reported at a rate 20 times higher in the camps than elsewhere in Haiti.
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. The children, known as restaveks, are traded into other households by their families, exchanging the children's labor for upbringing. Two thirds of restaveks are female, and most of them come from very poor families and are given to better-off ones. Restaveks who are young and female are particularly likely to be victimized sexually. Female restaveks are sometimes referred to as "la pou sa" which translates to "here for this"—'this' being the sexual pleasure of the males of the family with whom they are staying.
Social factors Victim blaming is common in Haiti, which discourages people from reporting assaults against them. Rape victims and their families are stigmatized, and being the victim of a rape is considered shameful. Sometimes family and significant others abandon a victim. Women and girls who have been raped often try to keep the fact a secret since not being a virgin reduces their marriageability. This shame surrounding rape discourages reporting and contributes to the difficulty in garnering accurate statistics on sexual assaults.
Due to the entrenched attitudes about women in the society, law enforcement personnel such as police and judges frequently do not take violence against women and children seriously and do not make great effort to enforce laws against it.
Victims may contract HIV or other sexually transmitted infections or may become pregnant from rape and bear children, potentially an emotional and economic hardship.
Drug dealing and illicit arms trading are widespread in Haiti, which contribute to a rising rate of sexual violence including gang rapes.
Law Until 2005, rape was classified in Haitian law as a "crime against public morals", a lesser crime than assault. Prior to the implementation of the 2005 law, which was brought about after lobbying by survivors and the Haitian Ministry of Women's Affairs, rape per se had not been a punishable offense. A rapist could avoid jail time by agreeing to marry the victim or by paying her family. In addition to increasing legal penalties for rape, the 2005 law mandated that women who have been raped can receive treatment for it for free and no longer had to go only to the main state hospital but could seek it in any health facility. However, abortion is still illegal in Haiti, so those who become pregnant from rape have no legal recourse.
Many women who are raped fear reporting the crime because of potential reprisals from attackers, so finding accurate statistics on sexual violence is complicated. The legal procedure for reporting a sexual assault to police is convoluted and difficult, further diminishing the number of reports made. Critics of Haitian police have called their response to reported rapes inadequate.
History
Spanish Hispaniola (1492–1625)
Sexual violence on the part of Christopher Columbus's soldiers began almost immediately upon their landing on the island. When he established a fortress and left for Spain in 1493, Spanish soldiers he left behind sexually abused the native Taino women and girls. In some cases they held native women and girls as sex slaves. Spanish missionary Bartolomé de las Casas spoke out against the brutality of the Spaniards in a campaign against the enslavement of the Tainos. He quoted one Taino cacique (tribal chief) who said of the Spaniards, "They speak to us of an immortal soul and of their eternal rewards and punishments, and yet they rob our belongings, seduce our women, violate our daughters." In a 1500 letter Columbus wrote of the slave trade in Hispaniola, "…there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand."
Among the things the Spanish sailors brought back to the old world was yaws, a bacterial disease that the Taino women carried and that was transmitted to the soldiers while raping the women. Syphilis in Europe may also have originated in the new world, and a number of Columbus' sailors brought that disease back from the New World as well.
Some women who became pregnant from rape by settlers took medicinal herbs to cause abortion.
French Saint-Domingue (1625–1789) In the 18th century, Haiti was a profitable French colony named Saint-Domingue; its economy was based on plantations that grew sugar for export to Europe and slaves comprised a majority of the population. It was not legal for slaveholders to rape their slaves, but the laws against it were not enforced. Known as the most cruel in the world even for their time, Haitian slavers routinely tortured slaves, mutilating, burning, whipping, and raping them. Like other forms of torture, rape of slaves was commonplace. Sexual torture was also commonplace, including putting gunpowder in the anus and lighting it, and castration and other genital mutilation. Abortion and infanticide became means of resistance for slave women who bore children by whites.
Sex between white male slaveholders and black female slaves was abundant and long-lasting in Haiti in the French colonial period, and always carried with it the violence and coerciveness of the institution of slavery. At the time it was common for white slaveholders to father children with their slaves; typically these men would deny their paternity of these children but they would often free them from slavery and give them land. These mixed-race people were part of a class of Haitians who were referred to as Gens de couleur or "free people of color" who were legally given more privileges than blacks but fewer than whites. Free people of color were not legally entitled to defend their women against rape by whites. By the end of the 1700s there were as many mixed race people who resulted from unions between slaveholders and slaves as there were whites.
Revolutionary period (1789–1804) In 1804, the revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines led a campaign of massacres against the white people. In parallel to the killings, plundering and rape also occurred. Women and children were generally killed last. White women were "often raped or pushed into forced marriages under threat of death."
After the Haitian revolution former slaveholders circulated pamphlets decrying crimes including rape against whites by Haitians in an attempt to pressure their government to re-initiate military hostilities with Haiti. Such propaganda made a large impact in the US, where imagery like "white women being repeatedly raped on the corpses of their husbands and fathers" terrified slaveholders, who began to fear similar uprisings among their slaves.
Harlem Renaissance author Arna Bontemps wrote novels about the Haitian revolution depicting sexual violence as a means of expressing white dominance over slaves. In his 1939 novel Drums at Dusk, about the Haitian revolution, both black and white characters rape and are raped as a means of asserting the manhood and power of the rapist and denying it to the victim.
United States occupation (1915–1934) From 1915 to 1934, the United States occupied Haiti, and rape and murder of Haitian civilians by US soldiers was commonplace. Both officers and enlisted men participated in the sexual violence, raping adult women and young girls, and sometimes holding women as sex slaves. The marines, who administered a group of Haitian gendarmes acting as police, were accused of widespread rapes of women and girls and of trying to use the gendarmes to find them women to use as concubines. Evidence exists that some military higher-ups knew of the sexual violence but did little to punish it, condoning it by denying it, questioning the virtue of Haitian women, and suggesting that raped women had actually consented. A victim blaming mentality existed among the occupiers, who thought of Haitian women as being "of easy virtue"—a mentality which served to justify and even deny the existence of sexual violence.
Resentment grew on the part of Haitians and led to conflict with the occupiers. African-Americans also raised outcry about the marines' sexual violence; one reverend said, "in one night alone in … Port-au-Prince nine little girls from 8 to 12 years old died from the raping of American soldiers." In his 1920 campaign for presidency, Warren G. Harding criticized incumbent Woodrow Wilson, referring to the occupation as the "Rape of Haiti"; however after he won the election he continued the occupation in his own presidency.
François Duvalier (1957–1971)
François "Papa Doc" Duvalier was the President of Haiti from 1957 until his death in 1971. Overseeing a reign of state terrorism, Duvalier would kill large numbers of political enemies, imprison them arbitrarily, and use gang rape as a means of control. Although both men and women were targeted for violence, women in particular were targeted for rape. In some cases Duvalier himself supervised gang rapes and gave orders to the soldiers performing them, in others he had surrogates perform them in his absence.
Duvalier employed an organization of ex-soldiers, criminals, and other loyalists to his regime called Tontons Macoutes. The term is Kreyòl for "Uncle Knapsack", a reference to the bogeyman of Haitian legend who would catch naughty children and kidnap them in his knapsack. Duvalier used the reference to voodoo, as well as violence such as rape and murder by the Tontons Macoutes, to instill fear and repress opposition. The Tontons Macoutes remained active even after the presidency of Papa Doc Duvalier's son Baby Doc ended in 1986.
Jean-Claude Duvalier (1971–1986)