Slayings of deaf women show perils for disabled
LEVEQUE, Haiti — The three friends had spent the day stocking up on food in the Haitian capital when they left for their village, setting off on the 20-mile trip home by foot because the minibuses known as tap-taps weren’t running after a bridge collapse.
Their bodies were found the next morning in a ditch along the route. They had been beaten, stabbed and burned, and relatives who identified them in a morgue said their tongues were cut out in an apparent act of ritualistic savagery.
The women’s family and friends suspect they were targeted because they were deaf in a country where experts say a pervasive stigma isolates people with disabilities such as deafness and can spark superstitions leading to horrific cruelty. Disabled women and girls are particularly vulnerable.
Due to cultural prejudices and the weakness of the justice system, past crimes against disabled citizens have been largely ignored. But the slayings of Jesula Gelin, Vanessa Previl and Monique Vincent have galvanized Haitians with disabilities and prompted rare public protests by their advocacy groups.
Outrage is particularly acute in the village of Leveque, where the women lived in a community of 168 homes established by U.S. religious organizations for deaf people displaced by the 2010 earthquake. Gelin’s husband, Micheler Castor, now struggles there to raise their six children alone.
“I can’t understand it,” Castor, also deaf, said in sign language of his 29year-old wife’s killing. “She served the Lord and was a good wife and mother.”
Advocates for the disabled in Haiti say they hope what happened can chip away at the obstacles to justice and social inclusion faced by these most vulnerable citizens of the hemisphere’s poorest nation.
Around the globe, treatment of the disabled varies widely from country to country, but discrimination and barriers to inclusion are commonplace. Those problems are most severe in the developing world, where the World Health Organization says 80 percent of disabled people live.
“This case is very important. The disabled have made advances in Haiti, but there’s still far, far too much stigma and impunity,” said Michel Pean, a blind activist who was Haiti’s first secretary of state for the integration of disabled people.
With pressure from that government agency, police have arrested three members of a family suspected of murdering the deaf women. Investigators say two women and a man are in custody, while the two men who are the main suspects are still being sought.
“We won’t rest until we get them all,” said Jentullon Joel, police commander in Cabaret, where the women were killed in a cinderblock house off the main road.
The three women often prayed together, sold rice and popcorn in their community and regularly went to Port-au-Prince to buy supplies. Gelin and her two unmarried neighbors, both in their 20s, might have stayed overnight in the capital if they had known the bridge was out. But as darkness fell, they tried walking home instead.
Advocates estimate that roughly 10 percent of Haiti’s population, or about 1 million people, have some disability.