Night crawlers

When darkness falls in the sprawling tent cities filling Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas, the camps' most vulnerable earthquake victims worry about a new disaster that threatens each night-rape by fellow tent dwellers.

Since the Jan. 12 earthquake, women and children as young as 2 years old have fallen victim to rapists seizing on the insecurity of acres of tarps and tents now home to as many as 1 million people. The insecurity is worsened for defenseless women and children living without husbands and fathers killed in the quake.

Though there's no official toll of post-quake rapes in Haiti, aid workers and humanitarian groups estimate at least hundreds of attacks. Workers for the Haiti-based Commission of Women Victim-to-Victim (KOFAVIV) said they have tracked 230 cases of rape in 15 camps. "The way you saw the earth shake, that's how our bodies are shaking now," one member of the grassroots group told Beverly Bell, an associate fellow for the Institute for Policy Studies.

A group of Haitian women who survived politically motivated rapes during civil unrest in 2004 founded KOFAVIV to help other rape victims. Their Port-au-Prince offices were destroyed in the quake, as was nearly every worker's home. The group now operates out of a tent, helping rape victims find medical care and recording their stories.

And according to Bell, the stories are gut wrenching: A 24-year-old man raped a 2-year-old girl in one refugee camp. A group of men raped another 2-year-old in a different camp. Four men raped an 18-year-old girl so violently she could not walk the next day.

KOFAVIV head Delva Marie Eramithe told The Associated Press that local police officers are little help in many camps. She learned that firsthand: When an assailant attacked her own 18-year-old daughter near the sprawling downtown tent city on the Champs de Mars plaza, the girl's three sisters fought him off. When Eramithe reported the attack to police and told them where to find the man, she said the officers did nothing. She said one officer "told us to go and get the attacker and bring him to them."

When aid workers in another camp told UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that they were treating a 7-year-old girl raped in the camp he was visiting, Ban promised the UN would "make every effort" to make sure camps are safe. But Fritznel Pierre, a human rights advocate living in the same camp with some 47,000 people, told AP that UN 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."

Aid workers say many women are afraid to report rapes-some are afraid of local police and some are afraid that their communities will shun them. So they suffer silently, waiting to see if their suffering will include infections or disease in a country with the highest HIV rate in the Western Hemisphere.

The suffering is also compounded by personal loss. KOFAVIV recently helped an 18-year-old girl who lost her parents, grandmother, a sister, and three cousins in the quake. After a middle-aged man offered to help her as she roamed the streets alone, he took her to a house where three men raped her.

The girl escaped, but now dreads nightfall. "I have to find somewhere to sleep, near some people who might help me if there's trouble," she told a reporter on a recent mid-afternoon. "It scares me, the way the men look at me, and they know I'm all alone."

Related coverage:

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