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PORT-AU-PRINCE (Haiti), Feb. 13 (AP) — Nadia calms a three-month-old baby who is crying in her swaddle and places a soft kiss on her forehead.
She’s only 19 and not ready to be a mother. But life changed for the young Haitian when she walked home from school on the dusty streets of a gang-controlled area of ​​the Haitian capital last year.
She was dragged into a car by a group of men, blindfolded and kidnapped. For three days, she was beaten, starved and gang-raped.
A few months later, she learned she was pregnant. In an instant, her dreams of studying and raising a family were shattered.
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Haiti’s toxic gangs have increasingly weaponized women’s bodies in their war for control as they continue to pillage the crisis-torn Caribbean country, kidnapping, displacing and extorting civilians for nothing.
Women like Nadia have consequences.
“The hardest part is that I have nothing to give her,” Nadia said of her daughter. “I was terrified because when she grew up and asked about her father, I didn’t know what to tell her. … But I had to explain to her that I was raped.”
The woman provided the AP with only Nadia’s first name, not her real name, and the AP does not identify the survivor of sexual violence.
Haiti has long been beset by crises — natural disasters, political unrest, extreme poverty and waves of cholera — that have been thrown into disarray following the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in 2021.
Sexual violence has long been used as a tool of warfare around the world, a brutal way to sow terror and maintain control in communities.
“They’ve run out of tools to control people,” said Renata Segura, deputy director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the International Crisis Group.
“They extort, but there’s a limit to how much money they can extort from people who are really poor. That’s the only thing they can do to the populace.”
This fear is spreading in Port-au-Prince. Parents are reluctant to send their children to school for fear they will be kidnapped or raped by gangs. As night falls, the noisy streets of the city are deserted.
Especially for women, being outside is a risk. The same goes for fleeing: Gangs use the threat of rape to prevent communities from abandoning areas they control.
Helen La Lime, the UN special envoy for Haiti, told the Security Council in late January that the gangs used sexual violence to “undermine the social fabric of communities,” especially in areas controlled by rival gangs.
She said they raped girls and boys as young as 10.
Significant underreporting makes it difficult for any authority to grasp the full extent of the damage. Women fear gangs will retaliate against them, and trust the Haitian police just as much.
The country’s current government, which many consider illegitimate, has declined to comment on what it is doing to address the problem.
The United Nations recorded 2,645 cases of sexual violence in 2022, a 45% increase from the previous year. This number is only a fraction of the actual number of attacks.
Nadia was one of those not reported.
After learning that she was pregnant, she struggled whether to keep the child, but decided to give her daughter the best life. In Port-au-Prince, a place where opportunities are already scarce and poverty is high, new mothers cannot work or continue their studies.
Meanwhile, doctors like Jovania Michel are trying to fill the void.
Michel works at the only hospital in Cité Soleil, the epicenter of the gang war in Port-au-Prince. There, she saw mothers who were gang-raped after their husbands were killed; survivors of sexual violence living on the streets, unable to return home for fear of it happening again; and survivors with sexually transmitted infections.
“Sexual violence is a way to paralyze people, to scare people. The moment sexual violence increases, everyone stops moving and people don’t go to work because they’re afraid,” Michelle said. “It’s a weapon, it’s a way of delivering a message.”
That was the case for a 36-year-old woman who spoke to The Associated Press wearing a blouse with bright red roses, her hair carefully braided. She requested anonymity for fear of reprisals.
The woman, who used to run a boutique with her husband in the Haitian capital, sent her two daughters and son to school. In July, a group of armed men (members of the G-Pep gang) showed up at their door and told them they needed money for bullets.
Unable to get cash, the man took her husband away at 8pm.
She found his body in the gutter the next day. She fled the neighborhood and dropped off the children with friends and family elsewhere in the city. Meanwhile, she is sleeping alone on the streets, joining at least 155,000 other Haitians who have been forcibly displaced by the violence.
She was raped and beaten when she tried to return home in December.
“I’m a professional and these bandits came out of nowhere…and made me lose everything. I’m not good. I feel bad. It’s all making me so angry. I’m to the point where I want to kill myself,” said the lady.
She stood up straight, her jaw firm, her head thrown back, wiping the tears from her face.
When she tried to report the incident to the police, they told her they don’t deal with gang cases.
One of the things that gives her hope today, sleeping in the park with other forcibly displaced Haitians, is that the children she rarely sees can still have a better life.
But she worries about what Haiti’s deep instability and rising gang control mean.
“I don’t live in a good country,” she said. (Associated Press)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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