Competing criminal gangs have turned to sexual assault to terrorize Haitians and tighten territorial control, a UN report said Friday.
More than half a dozen armed gangs are engaged in turf wars in Haiti, but fighting in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is particularly intense, making city driving risky and hospitals barely functional.
“Gangs are using sexual violence to incite fear and, alarmingly, the number of cases is increasing by the day,” said Nada Al-Nashif, the acting UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The UN report says collective gang rapes of children as young as 10 and older women have taken place, often in front of horrified family members. Men, women, girls and boys were said to have suffered the sexual assaults.
The armed gangs use rape to “punish, subdue and inflict pain” on citizens and as a coercive tool to force cooperation, it said.
Over the past year, “gang violence” in Haiti’s cities has spiraled out of control, said the report, which found that 60 percent of Port-au-Prince may now be under gang territory, equivalent to at least 1.5 million people.
The report, issued jointly by the UN Office in Haiti and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, says some victims are kidnapped and assaulted “over the course of several days or weeks”.
The motives for the attacks could be varied, it said. Attacks are used to punish Haitians for living in or crossing areas controlled by rival gangs, or to pressure victims’ families to pay a ransom.
Sometimes the assaults are recorded and videos are sent to families to urge them to pay, it said.
In a single-week eruption of violence in July, rival armed gangs sexually assaulted 52 women and girls in the capital’s Cite Soleil district as they fought for control, the report said.
In one case, a 25-year-old pregnant woman, Rose, was beaten and raped by three heavily armed masked men in the presence of her children, sources said.
Virtually all such sexual assaults go unpunished, the report added, partly due to rampant insecurity.
Gang violence in Haiti declined from 2004 to 2017 when UN peacekeepers were in the country, but has since risen.
Gangs fight each other and repress the populace with increasingly sophisticated weapons, including military-grade sniper rifles, belt-mounted machine guns and semi-automatic pistols, the report said.
It called on UN bodies, civil society groups and others to help Haiti strengthen its police, health and judicial systems to fight impunity.
Without action, she added, the wave of rapes “threatening to further disrupt the already deeply fragile social fabric… and could undermine prospects for… lasting stability.”
