While the world has become sadly familiar with the rampant murders, kidnappings and hijackings that gangs have inflicted on Haiti in recent years, rights groups warn another form of terror is escalating there: sexual violence.
This week the international nonprofit Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report on what it calls the “horrific sexual abuse” that Haiti’s women and girls are suffering at the hands of the powerful criminal gangs that control much of the country today.
It says some 4,000 women and girls have reported being raped by gang members just this year.
And those victims, it adds, have little if any police protection or medical and social services to turn to — especially now that the gang violence has all but overwhelmed police forces there and forced international aid workers and health volunteers to leave the country.
In the HRW report, a 25-year-old Haitian mother of four tells of being gang-raped in Port-au-Prince's Cité Soleil district by four men she said were from the G-Pèp gang.
"They didn't use to do this," she told HRW investigators, "But now they do whatever they want" to women and girls there.
An especially disturbing point in the report is that, according to the U.N., sexual violence cases involving minors has increased 1,000% this year.
HRW calls on the international community to commit more funding to the crisis. But it acknowledges there is too little security or service infrastructure there to use it.
READ MORE: In Haiti, a grim barometer: even United Nations workers are fleeing
The Kenya-led, U.N.-authorized multinational security support mission sent to assist Haiti's beleaguered national police has so far been overwhelmed by the gangs it was expected to confront if not neutralize.
And the gangs have now forced even the U.N., as well as the international medical nonprofit Doctors Without Borders, to withdraw their personnel from Haiti this week.
Haiti's government, meanwhile, is in even more disarray after the Transitional Presidential Council fired interim Prime Minister Garry Conille this month. He has been replaced by Haitian businessman Alix Didier Fils-Aimé.
Haiti's gangs have exploited that chaos to mount new offensives and gain more turf.
They've also become more brazen — firing at commercial U.S. flights trying to land at Port-au-Prince's Toussaint Louverture International Airport. At least three airliners were hit by bullets earlier this month, including a Spirit Airlines flight from Fort Lauderdale. (A flight attendant was injured in that incident.)
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has banned U.S. flights to Haiti until at least next month. Toussaint Louverture remains closed, though airports in northern Haiti re-opened this week.
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