Shocking Amnesty report on Haiti rapes

A disturbing new report has been released on the safety of women and girls in camps housing victims of the Haiti earthquake.

Amnesty International has sounded the alarm bells about growing sexual attacks, often on widowed mothers and their daughters living in precarious conditions.

The human rights group has listed a catalogue of shocking incidents.

Gerardo Ducos from Amnesty International said: “As the report shows, the incidents of sexual violence is widespread. The women and girls are being attacked under their shelters in the camps, dragged by a group of men into another area or into another tent and just being raped there.”

The report says security in the camps is inadequate and complaints to police are not taken seriously.

One woman said she was powerless when her 10-year-old daughter was attacked.

She said: “I was entering my tent and my neighbour saw me and said, ‘I just saw some men raping your daughter and my daughter’. When I got to the scene and talked to the gang, they told me that if I kept talking they would do it to me as well and beat me up. They slapped us and stole our possessions.

Ducos added: “The overcrowding of the camps, the lack of security, the lack of protective measures that prevent or respond to sexual violence … and the lack of capacity for the Haitian police to respond to these reports of sexual violence has all compounded a humanitarian crisis, and women and girls are paying the price for it.”

More than a million people are still living in makeshift camps, one year after the quake that killed 230,000 people.

Amnesty says there were more than 250 cases of rape in several camps in the first five months after the quake.

And every day cases are still being reported.

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