A report released Friday by the United Nations revealed that some gangs in Haiti are resorting to sexual violence to strike terror into the population.
“Gangs use sexual violence to instill fear and, alarmingly, the number of cases is increasing by the day as the humanitarian and human rights crisis in Haiti deepens,” the UN said in a statement, citing the interim head of human rights of that organization, Nada Al-Nashif.
The report shows that minors, up to 10 years old, as well as older women “have been subjected to sexual violence, including gang rape for hours in front of their parents or children by more than half a dozen armed elements.”
In a detailed account of today’s complaint, the UN explains how this sexual violence occurs during kidnappings, used to rape women and girls “sometimes over the course of several days or weeks.”
Kidnappers have even used recorded videos of rapes to pressure victims’ families into paying ransoms.
The report data was collected between January and July 2022, based on more than 90 interviews with victims and witnesses of some events in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital.
The UN called for action “properly and quickly” so that “the unbridled use of sexual violence” no longer corrupts the weak social fabric of the nation.
The violence skyrocketed several months ago on the Caribbean island and recently the government announced a rise in fuel prices, which resulted in constant protests in various parts of the country; the gangs – the government has acknowledged – closed the main communication routes and even occupied part of the most important ports.
The United States said this week that is reviewing Haiti’s application of security assistance in the midst of the crisis of violence.
Famine and disease alert
Also on Friday, UN agencies released another report on food insecurity in the country, reporting that nearly half of Haiti’s population, or 4.7 million people, is facing acute famine.
World Food Program (WFP) in Haiti reveals that nearly 1.8 million people have reached emergency levels of hunger and many people cannot find enough to eat on any given day.
WFP country coordinator Jean-Martin Bauer said high inflation rates of 30 percent have caused food prices to rise more than 63 percent from last year’s levels.
Bauer says gang violence has displaced 25,000 people in the urban neighborhood of Cite Soleil in the capital, Port-au-Prince.
The World Health Organization (WHO) puts the number of suspected cholera cases at 357, including 35 confirmed cases and 21 deaths.
Meanwhile, the UN agency for children, UNICEF, reports that 100,000 children under the age of five suffer from severe acute malnutrition. Agency spokesman James Elder has warned that children are especially vulnerable to the cholera outbreak.
“They’re at least three times more likely to die if they get cholera. Those kids who are weak and lack nutritious food, and then they get cholera and then those side effects of diarrhea and vomiting, that’s very close to the death sentence for those kids,” Elder said.
[Con información de la periodista Lisa Schlein, corresponsal de VOA en Ginebra]
Connect with the Voice of America! Subscribe to our channel Youtube and turn on notifications, or follow us on social media: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
