Gang sexual violence in Haiti has reached horrifying levels — and the organization that had been doing perhaps the most to treat the victims is operating there again, this time with a new effort to raise global awareness.
Doctors Without Borders (aka Médecins Sans Frontières) has produced a new animated video, created by Haitian-American artist Lyne Lucien, which recounts the case of a young woman raped by the armed gangs that control much of Haiti today.
She was one of more than 4,000 Haitian women and girls who were victims of gang sexual violence last year — an almost 140% increase since 2022.
READ MORE: As Haiti's gangs take control, another plague erupts: sexual violence
“We hope that through this type of animation we can bring attention to the challenges that sexual violence survivors go through in Haiti," Diana Manilla Arroyo, the Doctors Without Borders head of mission in Haiti, told WLRN from Port-au-Prince.
Manilla and the mission’s staff were only recently able to restore services at their Port-au-Prince medical and mental health clinic for sexual violence victims, called Pran Men’m, which means “take my hand.”
In November, Haiti's violent chaos — including the killings of two Doctors Without Borders patients — had driven them and other international organizations, including U.S. and U.N. personnel, to suspend activities in the country.
“These are [Doctors Without Borders] teams that listen to stories of sexual violence every day — on average 240 patients per month, 20% of them under the age of 18," Manilla said.
"So suspending provision of care for sexual violence survivors [during that time] was heartbreaking.”

Shortly after the Doctors Without Borders mission had to suspend service in Haiti, the international nonprofit Human Rights Watch released a report on what it called "the horrific sexual abuse" gangs were visiting on the country's women and girls.
Because Doctors Without Borders cares for so many of Haiti’s gang sexual violence victims, Manilla says the group decided a new multimedia effort was needed.
The goal, as she put it, is to get the international community to "step up their response, considering the significant increase in the number of survivors that we are seeing.”
Manilla says "stepping up their response" means funding more survivor care like shelter, which is hard to come by in Haiti for sexual abuse patients.
“We see again and again that survivors cannot return safely to their regular lives, they often have no safe space to go to," she pointed out.
"So emergency shelter or safe houses is the biggest need cited by survivors of sexual violence.”
The Doctors Without Borders video emphasizes increased psychological care as part of that sheltering.
Manilla added that the other priority, of course, has to be protecting Haitian women and girls from gang sexual violence in the first place.
Toward that end, more international security forces, including more than 200 Kenyan officers, arrived in Haiti last week to assist the country’s overwhelmed police.
Haiti's heavily armed gangs, many of which last year banded together under a criminal confederation they call Viv Ansam, or Live Together, was responsible more than 5,600 murders last year, according to the United Nations.
Their violence — which also includes ransom kidnappings and hijackings of food, fuel, medicine and other goods — has also left more than 1 million Haitians homeless.
CORRECTION: An earlier text version of this report said two Doctors Without Borders patients in Haiti had been killed in November by gang members. They were in fact killed by police and vigilante group members, according to the organization.
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