A related issue is the epidemic of rapes.
Under Haitian law, if a raped woman is to have justice, within 3 days of being assaulted, she has to have a certificate by a Doctor that she was raped, and the Doctor must be certified with the Haitian government as being qualified to make this assertion. Due to the Jan 12 quake, is is commonplace for patients to have to wait days before getting any kind of medical treatment. There have been multiple cases of a judge throwing out a doctor's certification that a woman was raped, and thus no charge against the named suspect, because either the doctor's certification was more than 72 hours after the attack, or the medical professional did not have the right government credentials to make this expert testimony.
In my opinion, this Haitian law needs amending, to reflect the reality that comes after a disaster like the latest.
In my opinion, a woman should be able to walk naked down a street without a horde of men trying to attack her, but the reality is that in today's "civilization", women need all kinds of protection against their fellow men. A tent or tarpaulin, with occasional police patrols, does not cut it.
Thanks to all kinds of pressures in the UN NGO community, the UN military, and Haitian National Police, began patrols of the camps, and in their daily reports, which I have been downloading, they used terminology like "alleged rapes" and "reportedly high incidence of rapes" to explain why they were doing these patrols. These same reports also included stories of kidnappings, traffic congestion, murders, etc. which were not preceded by qualifiers like "alleged traffic congestion" or "reported killings" but stated as actual events.
Prior to the start of these security patrols, I was seeing assessments by various UN NGO clusters, and downloading some of them. It was not unusual for 20% or more of the camps to be reporting a problem with sexual assaults. There are now over 1300 camps. The assessments pick questions to ask, and after a short time stopped including such assaults in their statistics gathering. But stories of the epidemic of rapes continued to percolate through many cluster reports.
A delegation of U.S. lawyers, health professionals, and community activists, has been looking into the reports of the rate of rapes. They found:
* women face a grave lack of security necessary to prevent and respond to the sexual violence crisis;
* the assaults mainly occur in dead of night when women want to be sleeping, not thanks to any promiscuity;
* some assaults occur when women try to use the inadequate toilet facilities, where men wait to ambush them in the dark stalls;
* many assaults are perpetrated by groups of armed, unknown assailants who often beat the women in the course of the attack, and threatened them with further violence if they reported the rape;
* medical services are overwhelmed and unable to meet women's health care needs stemming from the assaults;
* rape victims are treated by medical professionals in a very incompetent and unprofessional manner;
* some Haitian government officials claim that survivors are somehow to blame for the rapes;
* women who report rapes to the police describe being turned away, not taken seriously, or told to notify the police if they see the rapists again;
Other discussion in this thread that I started, on actions that shock our consciences, included:
· Scale of evictions with little notice (10's of thousands)
· Scale of not yet victimized this way (millions)
· Who's in charge (it is anarchy)
· What reactions are effective (none yet)
· Why do Churches do this (because they can, and see nothing wrong with it)
· Rights of private land owners (there should be a balance)
· What are reasonable people to believe (this is not a reasonable situation)
· Where is the justice system (not invented yet in Haiti)
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