Will Female Peacekeepers Keep Haitian Women Safe?

by Whitney Teal · 2010-05-05 06:00:00 UTC
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Almost immediately after news broke of the 7.0 earthquake that devastated the tiny island of Haiti last January, reports surfaced of the vulnerability of Haitian women and girls to rape in the makeshift camps. Now, the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti reports that the United Nations is stepping up in response by dispatching a team of female peacekeepers to patrol the camps, where over one million now-homeless Haitians reside.

Ger­ardo Chau­mont, police com­mis­sioner of the U.N.'s Sta­bi­liza­tion Mis­sion in Haiti, told Women's eNews that the group of Bangladeshi peacekeepers left for Haiti on or around April 29 and that they will "pro­tect and serve as allies to Hait­ian women." And from the sound of things from women's rights groups on the ground in Haiti, the 130-woman force can't arrive fast enough.

“Almost every day we are tak­ing tes­ti­mony of some­one who has been raped,” said Marie Eramithe Delva, a women's empowerment organizer whose own daughter was nearly the victim of rape in the 50,000-person Champ-de-Mars camp. “Every day in the hos­pi­tal we find some­one who has been raped.” According to Delva and other sources, the rapes are not only frequent enough to prompt some women to sleep with weapons under their pillows, but reports are treated as hilarious, business-as-usual accounts by local police. She reported law enforcement laughing at her attempts to report her daughter's attempted rape.

"It’s a whole world of dif­fer­ence for women who have been vic­tim­ized to see women police, and we see the report­ing of cases of gender-based sex­ual crimes increase when they are there,” said Lea Angela Bia­son, a gen­der affairs asso­ciate for the U.N. Depart­ment of Peace­keep­ing, of female peacekeepers. I hope that the arrival of the peacekeepers will not only send a message to rapists that violence against women is not to be tolerated in the rebuilding nation, but also encourage women to continue to report these crimes and support survivors.

Photo credit: Lee Cohen

Whitney Teal Whitney is a freelance writer based in the suburbs of Washington, D.C and is a frequent contributor to a variety of national and regional publications and websites. She regularly writes about women's rights.
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