Global Development: Views from the Center

 

Mind the Girls: How to Take Care of the Adolescent Girls in Haiti during the Resettlement

January 25, 2010


Even before the earthquake, it was hard to be young and female in Haiti. It’s estimated that more than 35,000 women and girls have been the victims of sexual violence in Haiti since 2004. Gender inequality, poverty and economic vulnerability, along with cultural factors have put girls and women at heightened risk of sexual assault in recent years in Haiti. Rape, particularly gang rape, is used as a means of social control.

About half of the rapes in the country are among girls below the age of 18 and first sexual experiences are often forced. In a sample of Haitian girls in a GHESKIO study, one-third reported that they had been persuaded, tricked or forced into having sex the first time. There is also systematic and widespread violence against “restavek” domestic workers—children, generally young girls, whose families are unable to support them and who have been sent to work for other families who provide them with food and shelter.

As more than half a million people made homeless by Haiti’s earthquake are resettled temporarily into tented villages, those coordinating the relief efforts should be keenly aware of these underlying risks, amplified by the difficult circumstances that now prevail. They can and must take protect girls and young women. If they fail to do so, we will be reading stories of avoidable tragedies, as we have in other refugee situations: the teenage girls who, left unattended by both their families and official agencies, experience unimaginable physical and psychological trauma in temporary settlements after natural disasters or during conflict.

What’s to be done?  Start with this:

  • In each settlement, create a “safe space” to which adolescent girls can go at any hour of the day or night for protection, and publicize it widely. Get older women to keep things organized, but make sure it’s a girls- and women-only area.
  • Make sure that the Minimum Initial Service Package of reproductive health care is part of the health services provided through relief agencies, and make them available to adolescent girls, regardless of marital status. All women, including girls, continue to have a range of reproductive health needs during times of complex humanitarian emergencies, and ignoring those will only make a bad situation worse.
  • Plan footpaths for water, food and other necessities with the safety of girls in mind. Teenage girls are often the family members sent to collect coal or wood, get water and do other types of daily errands. Those trips, sometimes to dark or remote areas, expose girls to danger. The risks can be lessened with temporary streetlights and ensuring that the routes are not isolated. Organizing girls into groups can also reduce opportunities for victimization.
  • Involve girls and young women in helping to solve the community’s problems. Girls and young women represent tremendous community resources, and can be brought into activities such as planning, construction, food and water distribution and many other tasks that are needed to support life in the tented villages.

This is just the beginning of what can be done to ensure the safety and health of the teenage girls in Haiti’s new tented villages. To find the motivation to follow through with these tasks and to expand upon them, those leading and implementing the relief effort need to answer just one simple question: “What if it were your daughter?”

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6 Responses to “Mind the Girls: How to Take Care of the Adolescent Girls in Haiti during the Resettlement”

  1. L A W :
    January 25th, 2010 at 11:09 pm

    Very astute points, Ruth. Do you know whether any women’s charities or int’l advocacy groups (UNFPA, for example) have a presence on the ground in Haiti to help see these kinds of recommendations through? Who, in the current relief efforts, is most likely to be looking out for girls and young women?

  2. Ruth Levine :
    January 26th, 2010 at 2:49 pm

    LAW: Good question, which I probably should have included in the original post. As it happens, I just got a press release from the Hewlett Foundation, indicating that they’ve given an emergency grant to IPPF, which would have been top on my list.

    Here’s the press release:

    International Planned Parenthood Federation Receives $500,000 to Provide Basic Health Services

    MENLO PARK, Calif. – The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation announced today that it has made a $500,000 emergency grant to the Western Hemisphere Regional Office of International Planned Parenthood Federation for it to provide reproductive and basic primary health care to Haitians affected by the recent earthquake.

    The Federation will work through its partner Association pour la Promotion de la Famille Haïtienne (Haiti Family Planning Association, or PROFAMIL), which has critical on-the-ground capacity to provide key services, such as basic trauma care, and to help fulfill sexual and reproductive health needs now and in the coming months.

    The effects of the earthquake hitting Haiti have been devastating, leaving one-third of the country’s 9 million inhabitants in urgent need of food, water, and medical care. Following such natural disasters, previous experience suggests that women and girls will be hit especially hard, family planning experts say. There is an increased risk of sexual violence, sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancies, and unsafe abortions.

    “Haiti suffers from chronic shortages of reproductive health care in the best of times,” said Sara Seims, director of the Population Program at the Hewlett Foundation. “It’s no surprise that the current crisis has greatly exacerbated that situation. We’re lucky to be able to support an organization that has deep experience in the field, so it can immediately make a difference and ease the suffering.”

    PROFAMIL lost two of its clinics in the earthquake but, in partnership with other organizations, will be able to offer primary health care and sexual and reproductive health services through mobile units in the cities of Port-au-Prince and Jacmel as it rebuilds capacity.

    According to International Planned Parenthood Federation, there are 750,000 women of reproductive age in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area and another 15,000 in the city of Jacmel, which also was hard hit by the earthquake. These women currently have very limited access to reproductive health services, including emergency obstetric care.

    PROFAMIL will work with its counterpart in the Dominican Republic, which has been coordinating with the United Nations and other Dominican nongovernmental relief agencies, to deploy mobile health unit teams across the border to conduct an initial assessment of key areas of need and begin providing services.

    These teams have extensive experience working with Haitian immigrants living in the Dominican Republic. They have been targeting service provision to these key areas, working intensively over a three- to five-day period and then returning to the Dominican Republic to restock with essential medical supplies.

    PROFAMIL has created a task force to determine the duration and intensity of needs in terms of staff, services, and supplies over the short term. Its staff and community health promoters in the two cities will organize the mobile health units to bring primary health care, obstetric care, family planning, and HIV prevention services to tent cities and other temporary shelters that are being established in and around both cities. These efforts will be carried out in coordination with the Haitian government, the national health commission, and the UN’s health response teams.

    “It means a world of difference,” Dr. Carmen Barroso, director of the Western Hemisphere Regional Office of International Planned Parenthood Federation, said of the Hewlett grant. “We’ve already put people on a plane to the Dominican Republic. They’ll drive to Haiti this week to begin to assess immediate needs.”

  3. Pat Kuta :
    January 26th, 2010 at 7:57 pm

    I’m also aware the VDay.org (a charity supported by the Vagina Monologues) supports a women’s safe house in Port Au Prince and women’s rights in the nation. here is an excerpt from their website:
    Donate To V-Day’s Haiti Rescue Fund

    V-Day is initiating a Haiti Rescue Fund immediately to be ready with funds for the V-Day Haiti Sorority Safe House in Port Au Prince, that provides shelter to women survivors of violence and their children, as well as psychological, legal and medical support.
    We urge you to support this effort, we cannot forget the women and girls of Haiti who already suffer some of the worst poverty in the world and the most violent conditions for women.
    To donate by check, please mail to:
    V-Day, Haiti
    303 Park Ave South, Suite # 1184
    New York, NY 10010-3657

    Or donate on their website VDay.org

  4. L A W :
    January 26th, 2010 at 11:26 pm

    IPPF does some fantastic work. Thanks for the follow-up.

  5. Caroline Hyde-Price :
    January 27th, 2010 at 5:45 am

    One organisation involved in supporting young girls following resettlement is the Association Nationale des Guides d’Haiti (Girl Guides Association of Haiti). Although current membership is small across Haiti – membership provides the opportunity of a girl only space. The World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts http://www.wagggsworld.org is including Haiti in five countries girls guides and girl scouts are being encouraged to think how poverty and hunger can be challenged http://www.worldthinkingday.or.....Fund/Haiti

  6. Marian Hodgkin :
    January 29th, 2010 at 6:17 am

    Hello – thank you so much for this post. We will be sharing this with our 4,000 members in an upcoming messages about the Education response in Haiti. With your permission, we would also like to re-post this on our blog. Thanks again,

    Marian
    Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies

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