Survivors of January's massive earthquake in Haiti are facing a growing tide of violent crime, especially in the tent cities that shelter the tens of thousands made homeless by the disaster.

Violent crime was a problem in Haiti even before January's earthquake, but since then Haitian officials say there has been an increase in shootings and sexual assaults.

In some neighbourhoods residents have formed special brigades to try and ensure security.

Al Jazeera's Sebastian Walker reports.

Yes, I hear from Haitians here it is very bad. Interesting that the likes of CNN have now blanked out reports from Haiti.
I suppose reports from Haiti do not sell SUV's.
S.

A good friend of mine was in Haiti recently. Two weeks ago he crossed the border and is now in DR. He was in Haiti for three weeks serving meals, he's a chef by profession, and what he describes is pretty sad, indeed. The level of violence and sexual crimes are scary.

In Haiti, Mental Health System Is in Collapse


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/20/world/americas/20haiti.html?src=me&ref=world
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Cassavie Sauver, one of the patients determined too violent or unstable to mingle with the general population, is housed in a tiny, barred isolation cell at the Mars and Kline Psychiatric Center.

By DEBORAH SONTAG
Published: March 19, 2010

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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Inside this city’s earthquake-cracked psychiatric hospital, a schizophrenic man lay naked on a concrete floor, caked in dust. Other patients, padlocked in tiny concrete cells, clutched the bars and howled for attention. Feces clotted the gutter outside a ward where urine pooled under metal cots without mattresses.
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Haiti: A Cracked System, a Shaken Psyche
Walking through the dilapidated public hospital, Dr. Franklin Normil, the acting director, who has worked there for five months without pay, shook his head in despair.

“I want you to bear witness,” he told a reporter. “Clearly, mental health has never been a priority in this country. We have the desire and the ability, but they do not give us the means to be professional and humane.”

As disasters often do in poor countries, Haiti’s earthquake has exposed the extreme inadequacies of its mental health services just at the moment when they are most needed. Appalled by the Mars and Kline Psychiatric Center, the country’s only hospital for acute mental illness, foreign psychiatrists here have vowed to help the Haitian government create a mental health care system that is more than just an underfinanced institution in the capital city.

“Conditions at Mars and Kline are particularly bad, although this kind of place is not unique to Haiti,” said Dr. Giuseppe Raviola, director of mental health and psychosocial services for the Boston-based Partners in Health, which runs 10 hospitals in Haiti. “Still, now that we’ve seen the hospital in the capital city, it is clear that that we have to treat people in their communities.”

Ultimately, international experts are encouraging the Haitian Health Ministry, which they say is receptive and eager for help, to incorporate mental health care into the primary health care system and to make it available throughout the country.

Right now, though, the need for psychological first aid and emergency psychiatric treatment is so acute that foreign psychiatrists are seeing patients, setting up programs and rapidly training Haitian doctors, nurses and community workers in everything from psychopharmacology to group relaxation techniques. (Before the quake, there were only about 15 psychiatrists in all of Haiti.)

The foreign psychiatrists emphasize that they have found Haitians to be impressively resilient, but the disaster has nonetheless set off reactions ranging from anxiety through psychosis. Most worrisome are cases like that of Guerda Joseph, a 41-year-old woman who tumbled into a catatonic depression shortly after she was pulled from the rubble of her home. Mute and nearly immobilized ever since, she lies on floral sheets at the General Hospital, her Bible tucked beside her pillow, her 25-year-old adopted son by her side day and night.

More common, though, is what Dr. Lynne Jones, a child psychiatrist and disaster expert with the International Medical Corps, calls “earthquake shock,” a persistent sensation that the earth is still shaking, which makes the heart race and causes chest pain.

“This is an understandable response, and it’s important to let people know, ‘You are not crazy,’ ” Dr. Jones said. “I use a kind of metaphor: ‘Your body has a very effective fire alarm. One of the reasons you’re alive today is that it went off during the earthquake. You ran out of that building. Great, you survived. Unfortunately, the fire alarm is now sensitive and goes off when you don’t want it to, or maybe it never shut off.’ ”

For those with a history of mental illness, the earthquake has been especially destabilizing. Many lost homes, caretakers and medication supplies, and the institutionalized were displaced, too.

Mars and Kline, partly damaged, evacuated most of its 100 acutely ill patients; only some have returned. And the sole hospital for chronic mental diseases, Défilé de Beudet in Croix-des-Bouquets, seriously damaged, shifted scores of patients to the grass outside.

Inside Mars and Kline’s walls, neighbors have established a tent city, festooning the 52-year-old psychiatric hospital’s facade with laundry. Their presence has created a security nightmare for the institution’s guards, said Louisner Aubin, the administrator, given that patients have returned from the earthquake especially agitated and sometimes violent.

“We have to lock up the worst cases to keep the worst from happening,” Mr. Aubin said.

Also in the courtyard are two psychiatric triage tents where more than 100 people are showing up daily, reporting extreme stress and post-traumatic symptoms of nightmares, memory lapses, sleep disturbances and loss of appetite, Dr. Normil said. Some, with psychoses, have been admitted, and more will arrive needing admittance, he said.

“We’re in a crisis situation,” he said. “Even before the earthquake, we did not get the resources to feed or clothe our patients properly. We had barely any staff, and these are patients who could be rehabilitated if we had the means.”

Leaving Mars and Kline to walk to the nearby General Hospital, Nicholas Rose, a psychiatrist from England, said, “It’s straight out of Hogarth, really,” referring to the 18th century engravings of an insane asylum by the artist William Hogarth.

In and around the two hospitals, apparently mentally ill men wander the streets, ragged and filthy. One sits naked atop a pile of rubble, another wears caked mud.

(Page 2 of 2)

At the General Hospital, foreign psychiatrists say that they are seeing several new cases daily of psychosis, severe depression and other disorders. Guerline Présumé, a formerly mild-mannered young mother, was admitted a few weeks ago for what was diagnosed as a manic disorder. On the day of the earthquake, she ran from a collapsing house that killed her older sister and disappeared, screaming, into the streets. It took her husband a month to find her; when he did she was muttering and spitting obscenities.
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Haiti: A Cracked System, a Shaken Psyche
“The earthquake drove her crazy; it’s that simple,” her husband, Wilkinson Charles, said, adding that he feared she had been “taken advantage of” while living without him on the streets.

Many with less severe issues are seeking help at the medical clinics in the big tent cities, like the one in Pétionville, where Dr. Jones and a psychiatric colleague, Peter Hughes, ran a mental health clinic one day last week while simultaneously training a Haitian internist.

“Remember, these are not our patients, these are your patients,” Dr. Jones said to Dr. Charles Samuel, the internist. “We are going to teach you so that you can carry on.”

The doctors saw Jean Pierre Francillon, shy and smiling, who was suffering high blood pressure and complained of trembling and heart palpitations; Ketie Kledano, 52, who said she was anxious, plagued by headaches and could not sleep or eat; and Naomi Joseph, 8, who wore a pink camouflage “USMC Cutie on Duty” T-shirt and, according to her mother, “spits, spits, spits” all day long.

There were some cultural and linguistic barriers. After Dr. Samuel said of Mr. Francillon, “The truth is what he’s talking about is not serious. It’s a reality that goes along with being Haitian,” Dr. Hughes tried another approach. He explained the theory of the bodily fire alarm and told Mr. Francillon, “You’re not mad,” which the Creole interpreter delivered as, “You’re not angry.”

Leading Mr. Francillon to a cot, where he slipped off his mud-caked black loafers, Dr. Jones guided him through a relaxation exercise. Trying to get him to visualize a calming moment, she asked, “Have you ever sat in the ocean and had the water wash over you?”

“Not often,” he said.

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Survivors of January's massive earthquake in Haiti are facing a growing tide of violent crime, especially in the tent cities that shelter the tens of thousands made homeless by the disaster.

Violent crime was a problem in Haiti even before January's earthquake, but since then Haitian officials say there has been an increase in shootings and sexual assaults.

In some neighbourhoods residents have formed special brigades to try and ensure security.

Al Jazeera's Sebastian Walker reports.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, I hear from Haitians here it is very bad. Interesting that the likes of CNN have now blanked out reports from Haiti.
I suppose reports from Haiti do not sell SUV's.
S.

[/QUOTE]

[/QUOTE]Women, girls rape victims in Haiti quake aftermath


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AP – In this photo taken March 14, 2010, women wait to receive medical attention for them and their children …

Slideshow:Haiti Earthquake

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By MICHELLE FAUL, Associated Press Writer – Tue Mar 16, 8:43 pm ET

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – When the young woman needed to use the toilet, she went out into the darkened tent camp and was attacked by three men.
"They grabbed me, put their hands over my mouth and then the three of them took turns," the slender 21-year-old said, wriggling with discomfort as she nursed her baby girl, born three days before Haiti's devastating quake.
"I am so ashamed. We're scared people will find out and shun us," said the woman, who suffers from abdominal pain and itching, likely from an infection contracted during the attack.
Women and children as young as 2, already traumatized by the loss of homes and loved ones in the Jan. 12 catastrophe, are now falling victim to rapists in the sprawling tent cities that have become home to hundreds of thousands of people.
With no lighting and no security, they are menacing places after sunset. Sexual assaults are daily occurrences in the biggest camps, aid workers say — and most attacks go unreported because of the shame, social stigma and fear of reprisals from attackers.
Rape was a big problem in Haiti even before the earthquake and frequently was used as a political weapon in times of upheaval. Both times the first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was ousted, his enemies assassinated his male supporters and raped their wives and daughters.
But the quake that killed an estimated 200,000 people has made women and girls ever more vulnerable. They have lost their homes and are forced to sleep in flimsy tents or tarp-covered lean-tos. They've lost male protection with the deaths of husbands, brothers and sons. And they are living in close quarters with strangers.
The 21-year-old said her family has received no food aid because the Haitian men handing out coupons for food distribution demand sexual favors.
Sex-for-food is not uncommon in the camps, said a report issued Tuesday by the Interuniversity Institute for Research and Development in Haiti. "In particular, young girls have to negotiate sexually in order to get shelter from the rains and access to food aid."
At the camp on Monday where the young mother was gang-raped, a woman in shorts tried to bathe discreetly. Stripped to her waist, she faced her blue tarp tent, her back to the rows of other shelters.
Nearby, a teenage girl squatted behind a pile of garbage, trying to avoid the stench and clouds of flies around tarp-covered latrines that provide the only privacy, but also are places where women are attacked.
In this camp, some 47,000 people live crowded into what used to be a sports ground in a neighborhood that always has been dangerous. Residents include a dozen escaped prisoners, among them a man accused of a notorious murder, according to Fritznel Pierre, a human rights advocate who lives at the camp.
"But nobody says anything because they're scared, scared of the criminals and scared of the police," he said.
Pierre has documented three other gang rapes in the camp, including of a 17-year-old who says she was a virgin before six men attacked her and raped her repeatedly.
"I really worry about the teenager because she has no one to look out for her. She says she sees her attackers but is afraid to report them because she would then have to leave the camp and she has nowhere to go," Pierre said.
Investigators for Human Rights Watch reported the first three gang rapes to U.N. officials. Then, two weeks later, on Feb. 27, the 21-year-old mother was gang-raped.
Only a week later did U.N. police officers begin patrolling.
"For me it seems completely bizarre that for this one camp that everyone knows is unsafe, it's taken them three weeks to get a patrol going," said Liesl Gerntholtz, executive director of the agency's women's rights division. "It's unrealistic to expect patrols in camps all the time, but I think they can identify hotspots and provide security to those spots."
Pierre complained that the U.N. patrols are ineffective. "They only drive their cars down the one road that covers only a small portion of the camp. They never get out of their cars," he said.
In the hilltop suburb of Petionville, where plush mansions look out over slums on hillsides and in ravines, a 7-year-old rape victim was being treated Monday in the hospital of a tent camp set up on a golf course. Another child, a 2-year-old, had been raped in the same camp two weeks earlier.
The toddler is taking antibiotics for a gonorrhea infection of the mouth, according to Alison Thompson, who is the volunteer medical coordinator for a Haitian relief group created by Sean Penn. She helped treat both children.
"Women aren't being protected," Thompson said. "So when the lights go down is when the rapes increase, and it's happening daily in all the camps in Port-au-Prince."
Besides sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy, victims face possible HIV infection. Haiti has the highest infection rate for the virus that causes AIDS in the Western hemisphere, with one in 50 people infected.
Among the many rape victims is an 18-year-old girl who lost her parents, grandmother, a sister and three cousins to the quake. She was roaming the streets distraught when a man approached her, promising her his wife would look after her, she said.
The middle-aged man took her to a house, then left and came back with two men. The three raped her repeatedly until she managed to escape.
The teen is among dozens of rape victims who have sought help from KOFAVIV, a group of Haitian women who survived political rapes in 2004. Their offices were destroyed in the quake and they now operate from a tent.

They brought the victims to American volunteer lawyers who came to Port-au-Prince a week ago to identify Haitians who may qualify for humanitarian parole to live in the United States.

"I've been here five days and have spoken to 30 (rape) survivors including a dozen under 18. Their stories are horrific. I would be catatonic," said San Francisco lawyer Jayne Fleming.

Few rapes are reported because women often face humiliating scrutiny from police officers who suggest they invited the attacks and even nurses who contend young girls were "too hot" in their dress style, according to Delva Marie Eramithe, a KOFAVIV leader.

Her own 18-year-old daughter was saved from an attacker who dragged the girl into a dark alley between tents at the downtown camp sprawling across Champs de Mars plaza. The assailant did not see the teen's three sisters, who had been walking behind her, and all four of them managed to beat him and run him off.

Soon after, he returned to their tent with three other men and a gun, Eramithe said.
While a male neighbor argued with the men, Eramithe and her daughters went to a nearby police station to report the attempted rape.

"We told them the man who attacked her was right there at our tent, just two blocks away," Eramithe said. "But one policeman said they had received reports of nothing but raping, thefts and domestic beatings all day and there's nothing they can do. The other police officer said the only person who can do anything is President (Rene) Preval."

When she insisted, they gave her the license plate of a police van patrolling the camp perimeter. Eventually she found the patrol car but that officer "told us to go and get the attacker and bring him to them."

Police spokesman Gary Desrosiers said only 24 rapes have been reported to Haitian authorities this year. Several suspects were detained, but many escaped when prisons collapsed in the quake, he said.

Police Chief Mario Andresol blamed the attacks on the more than 7,000 prisoners who escaped. "Bandits are taking advantage to harass and rape women and young girls under the tents," he told reporters two weeks after the quake.

"We are aware of problem ... but it's not a priority," Information Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue said last month.

Haitian police officers with stations minutes from some of the largest camps do not patrol — a fact that spokesman Desrosiers blames on the loss of dozens of officers killed in the quake, as well as scores who remain missing and more than 250 who were injured.

Still, that leaves some 9,600 Haitian police officers and 2,000 U.N. police officers.
The first signs of action came when U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon arrived Sunday, and a contingent of female U.N. and Haitian police officers set up a tent at the camp.

Ban promised the camps will be "safe and secure."

He praised the security offered by Haitian and U.N. police and told the women officers: "We must protect these women and girls. ... If they are sexually abused and attacked and raped, that is totally unacceptable and intolerable, and we must stop it."

On Monday, a man with a bullhorn was at the camp during a food distribution, saying "We don't want men raping women, do we?"

No, the women waiting in line yelled back.

Still, the fear was palpable among the most vulnerable. The 18-year-old orphaned rape victim was nervous about the time, even though it was only mid-afternoon.

"I have to find somewhere to sleep, near some people who might help me if there's trouble," she said.
"It scares me, the way the men look at me, and they know I'm all alone."
___
Associated Press Television News reporter Pierre Richard Luxama contributed to this report.

UN: Kidnappers release Belgian taken in Haiti


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By MIKE MELIA, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 57 mins ago

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Kidnappers have released a Belgian businessman who was grabbed as he drove through Haiti's capital, a U.N. police official said Friday.

Philippe Van Reybrouck, a longtime Haiti resident, had been in captivity for about 24 hours and was freed in good condition Thursday after a ransom was paid, said Michel Martin, the Canadian chief of the U.N.'s criminal intelligence unit in Haiti.

"The victim was released without any bodily harm," Martin said. "There was some stress and shock."
A lull in crime that followed Haiti's devastating Jan. 12 earthquake is giving way to signs of growing insecurity. Eight kidnappings have been reported so far this month, up from two in all of February, according to U.N. statistics.

Aid groups that flocked to Haiti following the quake imposed dusk curfews following the kidnapping earlier this month of two European aid workers for Doctors Without Borders. The two women were released after five days.

Haitian police have also been targeted, with at least four officers killed since the quake that allowed more than 5,000 prisoners to escape from collapsed or damaged jails.

Morgue records at the General Hospital show a dramatic increase in fatal shootings across Port-au-Prince since last month. But authorities say the situation is under control.

"It's too early to say that it's going to get worse," said Gary Desrosiers, a spokesman for Haiti's national police.
In the most recent kidnapping, assailants grabbed Van Reybrouck and contacted his family with a ransom demand. Martin said Haitian police were handling the investigation.

Once rare in Haiti, kidnappings soared in the chaos that followed the 2004 ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The bandits often targeted foreigners, but Haitians were taken in much larger numbers.
By the time of the earthquake, crackdowns by U.N. and Haitian police had dramatically curbed the number of kidnappings. The crime is still below pre-disaster levels. The eight kidnappings reported this month by the U.N. compare with 13 last March.

Some aid groups say desperation is to blame for the rising violence, with hundreds of thousands of Haitians still homeless more than two months after the quake.

"If we don't provide adequate shelter and food and sanitation for people and allow them to start focusing on their livelihoods, the security situation is going to worsen," said Joia Mukherjee, medical director for the nonprofit Partners in Health.