One Day in Port-au-Prince -
THE SEX WORKER:
'God didn't give me a body
to sell'
By Tim Large | Wed., January 5, 4:35 PM | Comments ( 2 )
GO HERE TO VIEW MULTIMEDIA DOCUMENTARY
Photo by Tim Large
Evelyne Pierre features in One Day in Port-au-Prince, a multimedia documentary.
PORT-AU-PRINCE (AlertNet) - We “picked up” Evelyne outside a bar in downtown Port-au-Prince, where she was milling around with five or six other girls, propositioning passers-by.
Peter, our Haitian cameraman, explained to her about our documentary, then walked her to the hotel around the corner for the interview. He didn’t want her to be seen driving off with foreigners. Her pimps might expect her to come back with a lot of cash.
Evelyne Pierre, 23, was adamant that she wanted to appear on camera. No hiding her identity. She wanted the world to know that young women like her only sell their bodies because they have to. After the quake, it’s the only way to survive.
“There is no one to help us, to talk about the crisis,” she said. “Since January 12, we are malnourished. We don’t eat well and we don’t sleep well.”
She took out a coin and started rubbing it between two fingers, like a lucky talisman.
“I’ve lost my mother,” she said. “The house collapsed on her. I threw my hands in the air. I screamed. Nobody answered. I have a baby with me, and I was forced to live in the street.”
Outside, torrential rain was slamming against the windows.
“Right now, while it’s raining, nobody can sleep under the tents, because when it rains a lot the water gets into the tents and you can’t sleep,” she said.
“Only after the rain stops can we go back to the tents. You have to spread a sheet on the floor with your child. The cold weather is not good, and then you’re forced to go to somebody’s house. You ask someone for a place to sleep with your child until the morning.”
Evelyne’s son is 1. The boy’s father was killed in the earthquake. Tonight, her son was being looked after by a friend in one of the sprawling camps in downtown Port-au-Prince, where more than 1.2 million people still live under canvas.
“I’m the mother, I’m the father,” she said. “I provide for myself. Nobody provides for me… I can’t find work in this country. You finish school but you can’t find work. You have a trade but you can’t find work.”
Before the disaster, Evelyne was a beautician in the southeastern town of Fond des Blancs with a diploma in cosmetics and hairdressing.
Today, she touts for business along the Rue du Centre, conspicuous in shorts and a sparkling pink top. She has tattoos on her wrists and thighs, including a couple of love hearts pierced with arrows.
“I shouldn’t be here, because God didn’t give me a body to sell it through prostitution,” she said. “I don’t have a choice. There is no prayer, no Amen. I may be suffering today, but if God wants, he can free me tomorrow. We never know in life.
“If I could find work, I would never be in this dirty prostitution game. We’re going through a lot of humiliation. People drive by in a car and we’re standing, it’s raining, and they just pass in the street and splash us with dirty water. They don’t even treat us like dogs.”
Prostitution is not illegal in Haiti, but that doesn’t mean sex workers aren’t harassed by the police.
“The police are frightening us, arresting us,” she said. “If they see that you have a child, they let you go. If you don’t have a child, they keep you and let you go the next morning, God willing.”
Listening to her story, you’d expect Evelyn to feel bitterness towards the men she says humiliate her by shouting: “Look at that whore calling to me!” In fact, she’s remarkably fatalistic.
“In spite of the humiliation, we are not discouraged,” she said. “We leave it all to Jesus. Today they might be better off, and tomorrow, God willing, we might be better off. It’s no problem.”
By the time the interview was over, it had stopped raining. Evelyne walked back into the thick air of the Haitian night to return to the pimps and sex workers by the cafe.
“My friends may have thought I’d been abducted,” she said, and was gone.
Want to send Evelyne a message? We’d be happy to translate and deliver it. Please leave a comment below.
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People getting aid at risk of sexual abuse by aid workers - study
08 Dec 2010
Haitians carry water for cooking in a camp for internally displaced in Port-au-Prince, November 26, 2010. REUTERS/ Eduardo Munoz
LONDON (AlertNet) - People receiving aid in Haiti, Kenya and Thailand say they feel at risk of sexual exploitation by humanitarian workers who are meant to help them, according to a report published this week.
The study, commissioned by the Geneva-based Human Accountability Partnership (HAP), said reported sexual incidents involved paid international and national aid workers as well as volunteers.
Researchers for HAP, the humanitarian sector's first international self-regulatory body, spoke to 732 recipients of aid - 411 female and 321 male - in the three countries between July and October this year.
The report gave the example of Haiti, whose capital Port-au-Prince is awash with aid workers helping more than 1.3 million homeless survivors of the January earthquake.
“The person in charge of making the list of people eligible for the cash-for-work schemes will put your name on the list in exchange for sex,” the researchers quoted a women’s group in Haiti as saying.
One of the aims of the study was to gauge the success of initiatives to combat sexual exploitation that were introduced after a 2002 report highlighted the abuse of vulnerable people by aid workers in West Africa.
The new study said the most common complaint from the people surveyed was that humanitarian organisations had not discussed the risk of sexual exploitation and abuse with them, and that little had been agreed to prevent it from taking place.
"Under-reporting is still a major issue. Most beneficiaries say they would report SEA (sexual exploitation and abuse) by humanitarian workers, but the actual number of reported cases does not appear to bear this out," the authors noted.
Another problem, they said, was the fact that people in Kenya for example did not perceive the complaints boxes to be confidential so they weren't using them.
"Reporting also depends on whether or not beneficiaries see the incident as exploitative - consensual sex between humanitarian workers and beneficiaries may not necessarily be considered exploitative - and whether beneficiaries feel they have enough evidence to make a report," the study added.
The report also focused on extensive sexual violations by other people, such as camp residents, describing abuse by aid staff as “just the tip of the iceberg when seen in the broader context”.
In a number of camps in Haiti, it said, some residents volunteered to give away food in exchange for sex and women offered sex for something to eat.
“The risk of SEA by humanitarian aid workers is still significant, but is part of a bigger picture of abuse and exploitation taking place more generally,” the report said.
HAP was set up in 2003, partly in response to the longstanding debate about whether humanitarian resources were being efficiently and effectively managed.
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