Women and girls are the backbone of Haitian society and local economy. Nearly half of Haitian households are women-led. Women are also pillars of economic life, as they form the majority of street vendors and support agricultural supply chains. However, women and girls continue to be affected by severe inequality, and genderbased violence (GBV).

Among women in Haiti, there are a number of factors, including intimate partner violence (IPV), childhood sexual abuse, and alcohol abuse that lead to increased vulnerability to STI/HIV and its sequelae. This study examined the factors associated with IPV and the associations between IPV and HIV in a sample of adult Haitian women.

This joint report by human rights organisations Redress and the Child Rights International Network examines the success of litigation in pursuing justice for child victims of  sexual abuse by peacekeepers looking at cases in which victims and their representatives have turned to the courts to seek accountability and redress. It concludes that child sexual abuse usually goes unpunished and few victims secure reparations.

In the wake of Haiti’s disastrous earthquake, international organizations have begun to recognize gender-based violence as a significant area of concern, particularly within Port-au-Prince’s internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. Other forms of gender-based violence include not only rape, but also sexual abuse. Sexual violence is often underreported or not reported at all. This lack of data can prevent accurate assessments of rates of violence or trends.

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is highly prevalent in Haiti and constitutes a serious public health problem. Social norms promoting power imbalance between women and men and condoning VAWG are also wide- spread. Changing these norms and curbing the cycle of VAWG in Haiti is an important step toward ensuring health- ier, more productive, and safer communities in Haiti. This report documents the lessons learned from a review of the planning, implementation, and evaluation of community mobilization interventions concerning VAWG in Haiti, namely the SASA!

Thirsting for sensational stories about hunger, suffering, and violence, the world’s most prestigious news agencies—the Associated Press (AP), Agence France-Presse (AFP), Reuters, CNN, CBS, The Guardian—have for decades uncritically repeated anything NGOs, UN agencies, or pseudo-researchers claim about Haiti. No vetting of data. No critical review.

The migration of Haitian women to the Dominican Republic is part of the so-called “feminization of migrations” caused by changes in labour markets as well as the precarious situation of women and their families in the neighbouring country of origin. The sequel to the earthquake in Haiti on January 12, 2010 has aggravated gender violence, in the makeshift camps in which hundreds of thousands of displaced persons are still living a year later, according to the reporting of human rights organizations, international organizations, women’s organizations and ordinary citizens.

This paper describes the application of Killworth et al. (2006) Scaling-Up technique to estimate the number of rape victims in metropolitan Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in the three years following the 2010 earthquake. The data comes from a 1,600 household random survey of the communes of Leogane and Carrefour, two communes (counties) near to Port-au-Prince that were among those most heavily impacted by the January 12th 2010 earthquake. The work was financed by Care International.

In this article I begin with the rape epidemic that supposedly shook Haiti following the 2010 earthquake and then trace back in time the role of international aid agencies, activists, foreign governments, Haitian politicians and Haitian opportunist aid entrepreneurs in creating what has become an industry of being “viktim.”

Crossing the Dominican–Haitian border in greater numbers than previously, Haitian women and girls, many of whom have been forcibly displaced by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, make multiple decisions about where to go and whom to trust. Thus they are in contact with informal scouts and other agents, while seeking employment as vendors in the frontier market, domestic workers in private homes, and sex workers in brothels in the Dominican Republic.