Battle for control of Haiti’s capital targets women’s bodies
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Nadia hushes the crying 3-month-old baby swaddled in her arms, gently planting kisses on her forehead.
She was 19, not ready to be a mother. But the young Haitian’s life changed when she was walking home from class on the dusty streets of a gangcontrolled area of Haiti’s capital last year.
She was dragged into a car by a group of men, blindfolded and kidnapped. For three days, she was beaten, starved and gang-raped.
Months later, she learned she was pregnant. In an instant, her dreams of studying and economically lifting her family dissolved.
As Haiti’s toxic slate of gangs continue to plunder the crisis-stricken Caribbean nation, kidnapping, displacing and extorting civilians with nothing left to give, they are increasingly weaponizing women’s bodies in their war for control.
Women like Nadia live with the consequences.
“The most difficult part is that I have nothing to give her,” Nadia said of her daughter. “I’m scared because as she gets older to ask about her father, I won’t know what to tell her. … But I will have to explain to her that I was raped.”
The woman offered only the name of Nadia, which is not her real one, to The Associated Press, which does not identify survivors of sexual violence.
Long plagued by crisis — natural disasters, political turmoil, deep poverty and waves of cholera — Haiti spiraled into chaos after the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
Sexual violence has long been used as an instrument of war around the world, a barbaric way to sow terror in communities and assert control.
“They’re running out of tools to control people,” said Renata Segura, deputy director for Latin America and the Caribbean for International Crisis Group. “They extort, but there’s only so much money that can be extorted from people that are really poor. This is the one thing they have they can inflict on the population.”