Haitian rape survivors begin new lives in Canada and the US

MONTREAL — There are no Haitians in the Montreal neighborhood where Lovely lives. “There are mostly whites. It’s very rare to find a black person, let alone a Haitian,” she says.

In the 11 months since Lovely left Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to live in Montreal, she hasn’t made friends at school; she is still learning to speak French, and for many reasons she prefers to stick to herself, she said. There are people she misses in Haiti — her grandmother, her school friends — but she does not miss the place. She much prefers living among the “blans,” the whites, than her own people. “I know Haiti is my home, but I do not miss it at all,” she says. “I feel safer where I am now.” 

Lovely was raped in February 2011, when she was just 13. In addition to the trauma of being raped, she suffered the stigma that came with it, because there was proof of the rape in the form of a baby. Like thousands of other Haitians who were displaced after the January 2010 earthquake, she was living in a tent with her family in a camp for internally displaced people. The camps were unsafe — cloth and tarp structures did nothing to keep armed gangs out — and since the earthquake, hundreds of women and girls have been raped. 

As part of a program run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in conjunction with lawyers, Haitian grass-roots organizations and other NGOs, some rape survivors have been relocated to Canada, where they have been granted permanent residence. Lawyers have also successfully petitioned for some women to relocate to the U.S. on humanitarian parole, which, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, is “used sparingly to bring someone who is otherwise inadmissible into the United States for a temporary period of time due to a compelling emergency.”

As of the end of 2013, the UNHCR had relocated 40 rape survivors and their dependents to Canada — a total of 145 people. The women were selected in part because of the level of trauma they suffered — some were minors, others had been gang-raped or raped more than once — and applications focused on their need for psychological treatment. Lawyers working on the applications selected the most dire cases.

“Many of the women we interviewed had classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder — constantly anxious and unsettled, hypervigilant and on alert beyond a reasonable level, poor, limited sleep with graphic nightmares throughout,” said psychiatrist Dr. Daryn Reicherter, who evaluated rape survivors and consulted with lawyers working on the women’s applications, in an email. “The women we interviewed continued to live in deplorable conditions with a constant threat of violence and/or rape.”

Some, like Lovely, had taken legal action against their perpetrators and were therefore in danger of retaliatory attacks. “We’re talking about people that … are taking serious risks for their life and the lives of their families,” says Corinne Raess, a former associate protection officer at the UNHCR for Haiti. “They could be stigmatized and have no future in their own country.”

The road to resettlement is a long one. Most of the women do not have passports, and some do not even have birth certificates, which means that the UNHCR has to assist in getting them. “In remote areas, it means maybe two days to access by car, and it takes time. There may be no registration office. There may be no records,” says Raess.

The women who were resettled in Canada had to meet strict criteria. “The beneficiary had to be an IDP [internally displaced person] who was raped after the quake and met other vulnerability factors (e.g., medical issues, disability, elder, orphans and vulnerable children, widows). If they were raped post-quake but were not an IDP, they did not qualify,” writes lawyer Jayne Fleming, who runs safe houses in Haiti and had 13 women granted permanent residence in Canada.

Even when the women get to Canada, however, they face challenges. “Immigration to a new area or new country has its own risks for the stress of acculturation,” Reicherter explains, “but these risks are minor compared to a constant risk or retraumatization by repeated gang rape.”

The women receive some financial and other support after they relocate but still struggle to become self-sufficient. “They’re not literate and have no skill sets that are transferable to employment here,” Fleming says. “They’re also traumatized and have a difficult time adjusting to the move from deep poverty to circumstances that are very comfortable, especially when they left so many of their family and friends behind in circumstances of deprivation.”

Though the women were selected for the relocation program precisely because of their need for psychological care, many women do not want to attend therapy. “Everyone knew they were coming for medical care, psychosocial and psychiatric support, but none of my clients wanted to pursue ongoing therapy, as it is stigmatized in Haiti,” says Fleming. “It’s also opening doors to dark histories that they would rather keep closed. The idea is, ‘I’m no longer in Haiti, I am moving on.’”

Lovely says she is simply tired of having to tell her story — to the police, to lawyers, to therapists. “Everything that happened [in Haiti], I would just like to forget,” she says.

The women who went to the U.S. faced an additional challenge, since applicants for humanitarian parole must have sponsors who will agree to provide housing and support them and their families financially. They were allowed to stay in the U.S. for only a year and had to apply for asylum if they wanted to remain in the country permanently.

In order to be granted asylum, applicants need to show that they have been persecuted because of their race, religion or membership in a particular social group. Fleming has three clients who have been granted asylum in the U.S. “We argued the clients were raped because they were Haitian women living in extreme poverty and the Haitian government would not protect them. Thus they were persecuted on account of their membership in a particular social group and met the refugee definition,” she explains.

Lovely says it is this fear of persecution that will prevent her from ever returning to Haiti, even to visit. She says matter-of-factly, “I was happy — not super-excited, jumping up and down — when I found out we were going to Canada. It was hard to be excited because I still had my mind on John, always wondering if he would find a way out of prison to hurt me and my family.”

She and her family live in a house paid for by a Canadian agency, and she receives free psychological counseling. Through working with a psychologist, Lovely says, her relationship with her daughter, who is now 2, is better. “Still, I will never forget what she represents,” she says.