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Haiti violated... 
"astonishing impunity for decades"

"...It was 7 o’clock in the evening...when [a] gang of men passed through her camp, armed with guns. Her family watched in horror as Rolonda was dragged away, screaming. No one tried to help. They forced Rolonda into an abandoned building and tied her up. At least a dozen men raped her that night, and every day after, for four days.

“I can recognize 10 of the men who raped me,” she says. Sitting in an office at a small law firm in Port-au-Prince, Rolonda speaks at barely a whisper, her almond-shaped eyes locked on the floor. “I wasn’t the only woman in that building,” she says. “I could hear other women screaming.”

When the men finished with her, Rolonda was released. She walked through the horror show that was Port-au-Prince in the weeks following the quake. She didn’t go to the hospital. She was too ashamed. And anyway, the hospitals were crumbling wrecks. She didn’t try to find a doctor. Doctors were amputating people’s limbs in the street. She didn’t go to the police. What police?...

...Strange men have threatened members of her family in recent months. Don’t go to the police, or you will pay. “I feel like God is punishing me,” Rolonda says."...

... “That is the point where most cases stall,” says Annie Gell, a lawyer with the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, a human-rights law firm in Port-au-Prince. Practically speaking, if a woman cannot or will not identify her attacker, she has little recourse. Gell, a young, Columbia University-educated lawyer, sits next to Rolonda in the dim office with cracked walls. The firm, which is backed by the Boston-based non-profit Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, started its Rape Accountability and Prevention Project in June. Since then, Gell and other lawyers have opened more than 60 cases. Six have resulted in an arrest, but none have gone to trial. In each of these cases, the victim identified her attackers or the police captured them during or immediately after the assault.

“Ninety five percent of the time, these kinds of cases do not get solved,” says Sandy François, director for the defense of women’s rights for the Haitian Women’s Ministry. “No justice is done for these women, and if these people don’t find justice, then why should they talk?”


This is not a new problem in Haiti, where it seems as though rape has been committed with astonishing impunity for decades—even becoming a relatively common method of political leverage during the country’s frequent periods of upheaval. Ironically, it was after women finally gained equal suffrage, in the 1950s, that they faced the cruelest state-sanctioned violence. Among his many terror tactics, including murder and torture, the dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his Tonton Macoutes militia used rape to silence opponents of his regime. 

His son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who ruled until 1986, continued this practice. 

Later, during the coup d’états that forced Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from office in 1991, and again in 2004, rape was used by the military, police and the paramilitary group Front pour l’Avancement et le Progrès Haitien, or FRAPH, to intimidate and silence Aristide supporters.
The scenario was always the same: “Armed men, often military or fraph members, burst into the house of a political activist they seek to capture,” a U.N. report reads. “When he is not there and the family cannot say where he is, the intruders attack his wife, sister, daughter or cousin.” 

Former Haitian Supreme Court president André Cherilus said in 1994 that it was “not worthwhile for the victim of rape to go to the police to report the crime….given the extremely high probability of retaliation.”
Haiti, Violated by Clancy Nolan, worldpolicy.org, Spring 2011

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The revolution will be digitized.
(documenting Haiti's rape epidemic)


"Since February, Digital Democracy has been working with KOFAVIV to digitize their data base of rape reports so that statistics from the reports can be generated and data published through Noula, an open-source incident reporting platform for crises in Haiti that translates to “We’re here”. Its goal is to provide a platform where data can be channelled between the general public and the government or international groups who are providing services.

Making quantifiable data accessible is the first step to changing denialist per spectives that impede proper resource allocation. Earlier this year, the lack of data on rapes prompted political blogger Brendan O’Neill to claim that reports of rape in Haiti are “overblown” and “unlikely”. But as Haiti Rewired’s  Alister WmMcintyre pointed out, there is woeful under-reporting that confounds the ability to formally define the problem as “epidemic”....

...Currently,  KOFAVIV’s data base managers are working to transform the paper dossiers that are filed at the centre into digital versions that will be backed up locally, in the cloud, and on an external hard drive. They receive 40–80 dossiers each month, and have already input all the data for January, February, and are working on data from March and the 459 cases reported to the centre in 2010.

It is the hope of all involved with this project that digitising and quantify ing rape reports will help change the culture in Haiti that enables men to rape women with impunity. In the history of the 70 cases KOFAVIV has referred to the IJDH legal team, including a case that prosecuted a 53-year-old man for raping a one-year-old girl, no convictions occurred. 

But seven cases have progressed to the penultimate stage, which ends with either the Judge d’Instruction dismissing the case or referring the case to the Tribunal Criminal for sentencing, according to Annie Gell, a lawyer with IJHD.

In addition to helping with the data base, Digital Democracy has been engaging Haitian women in technical projects involving photography, blogging, and computer training at the WE-LEAD computer resource centre for women, an initiative launched by Heart land Alliance in partnership with KOFAVIV and MADRE. The centre is open to women only, Monday through Friday until 4pm. It has 10 computers, internet access, and everything is free.
Using Tech to Document Haiti's Rape Epidemic by Arikia Milikan, wired.co.uk, April 1, 2011
 


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