Yet a new way the Clinton Foundation is MIA on Haiti: Women and girls at risk (HRW)

[EFerrari]

Human Rights Watch Report Says World is Failing to Protect Women and Girls in Haiti

By Roger Annis

Human Rights Watch has issued a disturbing study on the conditions for women and girls in post-earthquake Haiti. The 78-page report titled Nobody Remembers Us looks at the conditions of life for women and girls in Haiti since January 12, 2010. It was published on August 30, 2011.

In a Los Angles Times article reporting on the study, Terry Wilkinson writes, “Nearly 20 months after Haiti’s devastating earthquake, women and girls have been badly neglected in recovery efforts, subjected to sexual violence and left without access to obstetric care even as they give birth to scores of babies in squalid tent cities, human rights activists say.”

Among the findings of the report are the following:

* At the time of the earthquake, there were app. 63,000 pregnant women and 114,000 lactating mothers among the 3 million people directly affected.
* Half of the women giving birth are doing so without medical assistance, often in unsafe and unsanitary conditions.
* Based on the study’s interviews, many women survivors in the camps are engaging in sex to obtain food or other basic necessities. The study uses the term “survival sex” to describe this reality.
* Teenagers in the survivor camps are particularly vulnerable to sexual violence or to unplanned pregnancy due to the absence of security and the weakening of traditional forms of family and societal protection.
* An October, 2010 study cited in the report found a pregnancy rate of 12 percent in the camps, three times the average urban rate prior to the earthquake. Two thirds of those pregnancies were unplanned and unwanted.
* Many women and girls told Human Rights Watch researchers that there is no family planning information in the camps where they reside.

"It is inconceivable that, 18 months after the quake, with so much money pledged … that women and girls are giving birth in muddy tents," Amanda Klasing, the report's main author and a fellow in the group's women's rights division, told the LA Times in a telephone interview from Port-au-Prince.

http://canadahaitiaction.ca/content/human-rights-watch-report-says-world-failing-protect-women-and-girls-haiti

[Bacchus39]

1. on going tragedy. I recall hearing from some that security was not an issue

and that US troops were not necessary initially. and also that moving people from the tent camps to planned constructed communities where they would have job would be exploitive.

[EFerrari]

2. Oh, yeah, American troops would lower the birth rate

just as they do everywhere they're stationed.

[Bacchus39]

3. is that the issue? the birth rate

I read it as rape and exploitation of the women. what's your solution? get the UN troops out too??

[EFerrari]

4. The article in the OP is largely about unwanted pregnancies

and the lack of health care delivery.

Yes, the UN troops should leave, too. Their abuses around the world have been documented now by cablegate.

[Bacchus39]

5. ok, well they should start giving out birth control then to the girls

I don't see how that is going to stop the sexual violence and sexual exploitation though.

[naaman fletcher]

6. My question is, to what degree is this true?

It's a common thing to paint poor people, particularly black ones, as mass rapists. It occurred in the days following the earth quake, and turned out basically not to be true. It even occurred after Katrina.

I go to Africa quite a bit and apparently there, too, men can't stop raping women, but outside the DR Congo it does not appear to be true to me.