By Don Lajoie
National Post
December 14, 2009
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2336440
HAITI -- He was 16, and like most Haitian teens, surviving on street smarts.
One day, he accepted a job helping a humanitarian aid worker carry supplies to his home.
"After I finished he asked me to come back for a talk," recalled the man, now 23, speaking Creole through an interpreter.
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| A school girl walks to church in Labadie, Haiti
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The aid worker offered him money for sex, the man alleges, and a relationship began.
"It was to pay for school for me. That was the main reason. If you do it for me I pay for school."
When his family found out, they were furious at their son and his sex-for-pay partner. But they were reluctant to walk away from a precious income stream. Unemployment exceeds 75% in his tiny village.
"They wanted me to stop. But they felt, if I stop, the money would be cut off."
Hanging his head and kneading his brow, the slightly built young man, now a father himself, and a second alleged victim, now 19, recalled their relationships with the Canadian aid worker in interviews arranged by their town elders. Caribbean cultures, heavily influenced by the Roman Catholic Church, frown upon homosexuality, and one of the men said he was shunned.
"A lot of people knew," said the 23-year-old. "People were really mad, but they were afraid money would be cut off. . . . I'm not alone because other people were abused that way," he said.
The 19-year-old, tall with a swimmer's physique, said his sexual relationship began at 13, at a school where the aid worker volunteered.
"I was a kid," he said. "I didn't know good or bad. I needed the help for school, food, family and everything. He said you do it with me. If I don't do that I couldn't go to school. My family has no job. I don't like it. I know it was not good for Haitian [society]. I feel shame. I never told [him] how I felt. I thought it would not be good for me."
Mission sex -- it's Haiti's dirty little secret.
The western world's poorest country is, according to one aid worker, a "perfect storm" of socio-economic conditions for abuse by visiting humanitarians. It's tropical temperatures and breathtaking natural beauty are easily, and cheaply, accessible from North America. Heavily dependent on foreign aid and with virtually no regulation of its schools and orphanages, Haiti's justice system is ill-equipped to deal with a rising tide of sex tourism.
Peacekeeping troops, aid workers, non-governmental organization employees, priests and missionaries engage in sexual exploitation with arrogant impunity, according to Save the Children, the world's largest children's rights organization.
And, sadly, they say, when dollars are dangled as bait, many Haitians will turn a blind eye.
"All those who come here know this is a very poor country, that there are few opportunities for youth," said Margarett Lubin, Save the Children's local child protection manager. "When financial opportunities are offered, the children enter relationships. . . . Do their communities see it as exploitation or do they see it as opportunity?"
Haiti has neither adequate sex-offender laws nor the police to enforce them.
That helps explain why sex-tourist exporters such as Canada and the U.S. are doing the job themselves, using provisions in their criminal codes.
Consider:
• Windsor, Ont., Priest Rev. John Duarte faces nine counts of sexually exploiting adolescent boys in Port-au-Prince and the northern village of Labadie, where he ran a mission, following a two-year investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police and RCMP.
• American missionary Douglas Perlitz faces nearly identical charges in nearby Cap-Haitien for allegedly abusing nine boys at the school he founded for poor children. That case is before the courts in the U.S.
• Quebec humanitarian workers Armand Huard and Denis Rochefort were sentenced in 2008 to prison terms on multiple counts of sexually touching boys between the ages of 13 and 16 at a Haitian orphanage in Les Cayes. Before his arrest Huard, 65, had been hailed by supporters as a "veritable Quebecois Mother Teresa."
• The entire 950-member peace keeping force from Sri Lanka was expelled from Haiti in 2007 in the wake of sex crimes against Haitian nationals, including alleged sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of minors, prostitution and rape.
Andrew Thomson, Haiti campaign manager for Amnesty International Canada, said the problem is probably much larger than official data suggest because Haiti creates a "perfect storm" for such crimes to flourish.
"There's a level of impunity in Haiti because of its largely dysfunctional justice system," he said. "The victims do not have access to the courts and the police are woefully under-resourced. . . . Though many of them are committed you're also dealing with rogue lawyers, judges and police. The international community is trying to strengthen the justice system but corruption is widespread."
An estimated three million Haitian children live in vulnerable and impoverished conditions, and the UN says 47% of sexual assaults reported in Haiti involve minors. Yet the Haitian National Police's child-protection brigade is understaffed. Its $20,000 US annual budget is enough to conduct four to six investigations, said Commissioner Renel Costume.
The unit requires 10 times the 75 officers it now deploys across the country, Costume said.
While Save the Children is quick to point out that humanitarian workers engaging in sexual exploitation are in the minority, a May 2008 study commissioned by the organization showed such abuse is vastly under-reported.
The authors interviewed children in shelters across the country, and their stories were harrowing.
A young street girl was paid $1 and then violently raped by a man working for an NG0. "He gave her one American dollar and the little girl was happy to see the money," a witness said. "It was two in the morning. The man took her and raped her. In the morning the little girl could not walk."
Asked by researchers why abuse is not reported to authorities representing the aid organizations, orphanages or missions, one Haitian girl said: "The people who are raping us and the people in the office are the same people."
In interviews arranged by Save the Children, five Port-au-Prince prostitutes nodded in agreement, while a sixth told of abuse at the hands of United Nations peacekeepers.
It was after 11 p.m. she said, around Carnival time, and the downtown Port-au-Prince streets where she had been turning tricks since she was 12 were dark, save for the National Palace lights in the distance. The vehicle approached slowly and one of the soldiers called her over.
She could not identify which international peacekeeping contingent they belonged to. They were only shadows in the pitch black night. But, she remembered, there were two in front and one in the rear.
"They pulled me in the back," she said through an interpreter. "I had sex with all of them. When I held out my hand to be paid, he pointed a gun at me and said get out. They left me there."
Jean-Marie Roger, project co-ordinator for Save the Children in Port-au-Prince, said prostitutes tell him that much of the abuse from customers comes from UN troops, "because they have the means to force them." He acknowledged the woman was a prostitute, an orphan who had been on the streets for more than 10 years, and unlikely to garner the same sympathy as an abused child.
"The very poor will accept," said Albert Meme, a village elder in the fishing community of Labadie. "They need money to survive. . . . But when I was 15 things like that did not happen in the village. It did not happen 10 years before. Now it has changed."
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