I found an article on CNN about Haiti. It has been two years since the earthquake and there are still around 370,000 people living in the displacement camps. The displacement camps are basically like campsites with a TON of flimsy tents. The camps have no electricity and the people have to put up with long walks to the bathrooms. There has also been an alarming amount of rapes over Haiti. In a study discussed in the article, fourteen percent of households have reported that one person in the household has been raped; although, this is only families that WOULD report rapes.
I was really awestruck about some of
the stories of the rape victims that they shared in the article. One woman said
that one night, several men fired gunshots around nine o’clock and took her
nineteen year old daughter. She was raped by those several men and released
around two o’clock in the morning. Another woman was raped and told that if she
went to the police to report it she would be shot dead. When you have no safe
place to go, threats like that can be especially terrifying.
Because of all of the poverty in
Haiti, many women are subjecting themselves to prostitution and also what they
call "transactional sex" which is sex in exchange for food and
shelter. I believe that women have to hit a significant low to actually do this
which makes me think that the poverty and camps and rapes in Haiti are
particularly bad.
The
situation becomes even scarier when many of these women that were raped or start
prostitution become pregnant. Haiti is supposedly the worst place to have a
child in the western hemisphere because one in forty-seven women die during
childbirth.
When
I read things like this I am just really glad I live in the United States and
don’t really have to deal with this stuff on an everyday basis. I don’t really
know what we could do that would remedy this but I think that something needs
to be done soon. (345)
No comments:
Post a Comment