Washington -
In the squalid camps that sprang up in Haiti after last year's quake, women face the constant threat of rape and violence as they struggle to rebuild their shattered lives, a report said on Thursday.
They are women like Guerline, who two months after losing her husband when their home crumbled to the ground in the devastating quake, had to watch as her teenage daughter was raped in a makeshift tarpaulin camp in Port-au-Prince.
“Four men raped her. She is 13 years old,” Guerline told Amnesty International researchers, who compiled the report after interviewing more than 50 women and girls in Haiti's post-quake camps.
“They told me that if I talked about it, they would kill me. They said that if I went to the police, they would shoot me dead.
“I'm scared. There is nowhere safe where I can live, so I had to keep quiet,” said Guerline, who, like all the women interviewed for the report, was given a false name to protect her from reprisals.
Guerline was also raped on the same night as her daughter by hooded men in the tent city. She can't get the events of that terrible night out of her head.
Amnesty says little is being done to help her and other victims of rape and sexual violence, old woes for Haiti that worsened after the mass displacement of people that followed the earthquake, the loss of protective family and community networks, and the camps' precarious living conditions.
Like Guerline, most rape victims are assaulted by armed men and gangs of youths who roam the poorly lit, overcrowded camps after dark.
Some 1 200 such camps still house 1.05 million Haitians whose homes were reduced to rubble by the quake. Most of those displaced by the quake are women.
Few of the rapes are reported to the police or health authorities, either because the victims fear reprisals or because they don't know who to turn to for help.
The women who did go to the authorities to report a rape said they were either told that nothing could be done for them, or were asked to pay the police for inquiries.
As a result, few attackers are ever brought to justice and they continue to prey on women and girls with impunity, the report says.
Myriam was raped when she was 11.
Marie was raped by three men just steps from the main police station in Port-au-Prince.
Suzie was gang-raped in front of her children.
“Women victims of rape should go to hospital, but I didn't go because I didn't have any money,” she told Amnesty.
“I don't know where there is a clinic offering medical treatment for victims of violence,” Suzie said, unaware that the Haitian government runs a programme for victims of rape, mostly free of charge, at Port-au-Prince's general hospital, which is a 15-minute walk away from where she was raped.
Marie said she would have “loved to go to the police but they don't listen to what you are saying”.
And Myriam's aunt, who has been her guardian since the little girl's mother went missing during the quake, didn't take the young victim to hospital “because you need money.”
She didn't go to the police because she didn't know who had raped her niece.
“The only thing I do is go to church and pray,” she said.
The grassroots Commission of Women Victims for Victims, a women's group run by survivors of sexual violence, registered more than 250 cases of rape in several camps in the five months after the quake, but Amnesty believes that number is just the tip of the iceberg. - Sapa-AFP