By Erica Laster  

Impunity Watch Reporter, North America

PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti – Displaced by environmental disaster and ensuing poverty, Haitian women are at risk for rape, sexual slavery, prostitution or worse according to Mesadieu Guylande, a Haitian expert with the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women-Latin America and the Caribbean.  In the 2 months after the earthquake around 230 incidents of rape were tracked among 15 camps in Port Au Prince. 

Human trafficking is defined by the United Nations as “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring, or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.” 

Smuggling itself yields a profit of around $1.3 billion annually and will only worsen without the necessary protections.  The United Nations mission in Haiti and Haiti’s current President have been widely criticized for their inability to provide camp security and electricity to decrease the incidents of rape and abduction of young girls and women.   

The young are extremely vulnerable indicates Stephanie Henry, a 28 year old worker in a grassroots women’s group working out of Cersal camp.  “Some of them lost their parents in the earthquake. They have to sell their bodies to get some money to live. It is very sad,” she says in an interview with International Press Service.

Despite training by women in Haitian camps who teach young teens how to defend themselves against attack, these women and young girls will become part of the estimated 250,000 victims falling prey to trafficking each year in Latin America.

Photo Courtesy of (blog.dressingvintage.com) For More Information Please See:

International Press Service – Five Million Women Have Fallen Prey To Trafficking Networks – 22 September 2010

International Press Service – Haitian Women At Increased Risk For Trafficking – 24 September 2010

Washington Post – UN Launches Anti-Rape Campaign In Haiti – 13 September 2010

International Press Service – Haitian Women Struggle To Keep Hope Alive – 20 September 2010