Haiti, Violated

Port-au-Prince—When the earthquake struck Haiti last January, a lanky 26-year-old woman, who asked to be called Rolonda, gathered her belongings and moved with her mother, her brother and her five-year-old daughter into a field where they would be safe from the aftershocks and falling debris of the capital's crumbling buildings. Rolonda strung up a pair of bed sheets for shelter.

It was 7 o'clock in the evening, two days later, when the gang of men passed through her camp, armed with guns. Her family watched in horror as Rolonda was dragged away, screaming. No one tried to help. They forced Rolonda into an abandoned building and tied her up. At least a dozen men raped her that night, and every day after, for four days.

"I can recognize 10 of the men who raped me," she says. Sitting in an office at a small law firm in Port-au-Prince, Rolonda speaks at barely a whisper, her almond-shaped eyes locked on the floor. "I wasn't the only woman in that building," she says. "I could hear other women screaming."

When the men finished with her, Rolonda was released. She walked through the horror show that was Port-au-Prince in the weeks following the quake. She didn't go to the hospital. She was too ashamed. And anyway, the hospitals were crumbling wrecks. She didn't try to find a doctor. Doctors were amputating people's limbs in the street. She didn't go to the police. What police? The men who raped her bragged about escaping prison when the walls started to shake. She had no place to go but the very same camp she had been taken from four days earlier, where she now found herself a spectacle. People pointed as she walked past.

By December, almost a year later, Rolonda and her daughter had settled into a small home in Grand Ravine, one of the hillside slums on the south side of Port-au-Prince, in an area known as Martissant. Life was getting better, she says. A week before Christmas, Rolonda's boyfriend brought food and money to help with their daughter's care. While he played inside with their daughter, Rolonda stepped out to shower. She threw a towel over her shoulder, grabbed a bucket of water, and headed outside. It was dark, so it took a moment to notice the two men standing on either side of the front gate. She assumed they were from one of the gangs that operate with impunity inside Grand Ravine. She didn't run. If she fled, she reasoned, they might think she was hiding a rival gang member. Rolonda asked quietly if she could pass.

"Yeah, it's okay," said one of the men. "Go ahead."

She walked to the spot where she usually bathes, in a secluded area behind a nearby staircase. She quickly poured a few cups of water from the bucket over her body, but she was nervous and picked up her bucket to go home. She realized the men were still lurking around the corner. Then she noticed a third man. One grabbed her by her panties, and stuck a gun into her waist.

"If you scream, I will shoot you," he said.

"The whole time he was holding me with the gun, he was touching me, sticking his fingers inside me," Rolonda says. "They didn't wait to reach my house before they started using me for sex."

The men took turns raping her. Then they forced their way inside her house, ordering the small family onto the ground. They ransacked the place, stealing everything of value: cell phones, a portable DVD player, and the odds and ends Rolonda peddled for a living.

She doesn't know how long she laid facedown on the floor. Her daughter eventually fell asleep next to her.

Afterward, she sought help. She went to a hospital, where she received a course of antibiotics and an HIV prophylactic. There's no DNA database in Haiti, no rape kit. But Rolonda asked for a medical certificate. Signed by a...