“Haiti: Child Rape, an Analyst’s Interventions”
Gil Kliman, MD, a child analyst based in San Francisco who trained at NYPSI, has been working with Haitian colleagues since September 2012 to combat the prevalence of child rape in the tent camps that have existed since Haiti’s earthquake.
–Nathan Szajnberg, M.D., Managing Editor
HAITI CHILD RAPE PREVENTION PROJECT Medical Director’s Log January 9, 2013
We started our child-rape prevention project in Haitii September 2012, at the invitation of Frandy Daniel, MA, a Haitian psychologist who reached out from a tiny Haitian nonprofit called UNEV to our tiny San Francisconon profit agency. He did so because of our agency’s Creole language guided activity
workbook for survivors of the January 2010 earthquake. Dr. Daniel thought ours was the only meaningful mental health resource produced so far for the huge tasks, and was asking for help with a particular aspect of survivorship traumas. Could we as an agency, could I as an individual, help his own agency to develop a preventive and treatment project for the six thousand raped girls he and his nine colleagues had found in the seven refugee camps he had studied? No one was prosecuting the rapists, who were repeatedly raping the same and more girls, to the despair of the children and parents. No one was psychologically supporting the raped girls, or attending to the psychological needs of their four hundred unintended babies and toddlers. I was staggered by the faith he had in me, the magnitude of the tasks, and how well this invitation to partner in a trauma project might fit with my life plans.
Frandy was a hero. He survived the earthquake deaths of his brother, mother and father, and was not deterred by threats of rapists. He had found me at the peak of my forensic as well as clinical and investigative career. I was possibly a good match for what he needed, and each of us had what the other lacked. He did not know how to write grants or administer complex projects. I was familiar and skilled in both tasks. While he sought help after heroically finding a great need (more about how he found out will appear in later logs), I was simultaneously having difficulty seeking those who knew they needed me. I was at a time of self-scrutiny about what little more I could achieve at a still lively and cognitively functional age 83. Experience was constantly confirming how impractically slow and hard it was to gain invitations and funds for major child psychiatry projects concerning traumatized young children. Some evidence-based techniques and interventional strategies had been gestating in my mind and some in reality for decades. For over 70 years my heroes had been public health pioneers, Lister, Koch, Pasteur, Semmelweiss.; I had founded the Center for Preventive Psychiatry 49 years ago with those childhood heroes still guiding me.
Frandy had an open and highly needy field in which to work. In contrast, I found my United States locations increasingly hard to open, unwilling to face children’s interpersonal needs, bureaucratized, resistant to preventive and early interventions, pharmacologically hell-bent. They were unlikely to accept any major proposals about large scale relational aspects of prevention. Frandy on the other hand knew that the U.N. was trying to get him to make multi-million dollar proposals to remedy or at least reduce the child-raping they believed was going on massively in earthquake refugee camps. Could I help harness that desire of the U.N.to assist Frandy Daniel? You could be sure I would try.
Returning to the physical journey, I first visited October 19th, 2012, flying my own plane, possibly a last hurrah in my 60 year flying career. Here’s a view of my avionic guidance on the return trip:
My log should report that Haiti is fortunately not quite the same today, January 10th 2013, as when I first visited in October 19-24 2012. Although the NY Times has reported worsened crime conditions, and the State Department’s gave severe travel security warnings this week, child-raping has dropped to zero since October 22nd at the seven tent camps in what is now Frandy Daniel’s and my agency’s joint project. Three hundred thousand Haitian had been displaced into these seven camps by the January 2010 earthquakes. Prior to our joint intervention program, over 6,000 Haitian children were reportedly raped according to the census taken by my Haitian colleagues. About 300 new cases of childr rape were occurring monthly in the seven camps. Since our October 21st and 22nd 2012 interventions and along with television coverage on Channel Two (San Francisco), we find there are zero child-rapes in those seven camps. Furthermore, in a cultural shift, many Haitian girls have dared to speak up on public television, and their parents urge them to go public instead of pleading to hide in silent shame. Now the rapists are ashamed,and even fearful.
In turn, the rapists also are threatening to kill the Haitian staff, especially Frandy. We have hired a body guard for him, and one accompanies me when I visit refugee camps.
Stopping the rapes was startlingly sudden. We look at it with amazement. Perhaps in the long run change will be slow. After a slow response to the earthquake, there appears to be more but still quite modest construction and road-enhancement. Yet, even as infrastructure is being rebuilt, the undisguised evil that man can perpetrate on fellow man continues. A U.S. family was kidnapped while I was visiting the Haitian national police chief. I saw uniformed N.Y. City police were on hand to help meet the long, slow, small and large waves of crime.
This January visit, unlike my October visit, was not by private plane. I had immensely enjoyed that adventure, having been a far-traveled private pilot and still active and competent. But time was important to conserve, so I came commercially this time. After arriving on American Airlines, going through baggage retrieval,customs and a slow crawl through Hertz car rental, I planned our schedule with Frandy Daniel, and my bodyguard Henriquez, There had been many threats of death and bodily harm towards both Frandy and myself following ourlast meeting in October. Then, at the hotel, after midnight, I learned about the two sharp-edged terrazo steps between my bedroom and bathroom. My shin, elbow and forearm scrapes did not hurt as much as the painful humbling lesson in aging and frailty. One must be alert in Haiti, at all times of day and night.
Today we (Frandy Daniel, Henriquez and I) met with much-needed allies in our campaign to reduce child-raping inHaiti. Jean Gardy Muscadin, is Commissioner of the Bureau of Child Protection inHaiti. He is very very pleased with our project and will help any way his office can, which is substantial. He said that some of the victims we have identified need political asylum to protect them against retaliation by particularly dangerous child-predators. We are safe-housing three right now in Haiti. Heartland Christian
Academy’s Director of Girls’ Services wrote me she has room and will take these mortally threatened three girls if we can get the Haitian and U.S. Authorities to accept the reality of need. Heartland will provide them with cost-free education, housing, board and a safe life in the US We are awaiting UNFPA funding to help safe-house the many others who are or will be threatened in the camp, since only three can go to theUS. To our pleasant surprise, police are organizing to protect the victim-witnesses. We have distributed camera equipped cell phones to committees of citizens at all seven camps and the police have changed from excuse-makers to rapid responders. This is a big and vital cultural change, on which I will write later
I also met today with Alain Auguste the Chief of Haitian National Police in the Delmas region, a part of Port au Prince which has been remarkably cooperative with us. I hope to meet the Mayor of Delmas tomorrow. Alain is very knowledgeable about the invisibility of children’s suffering from many forms of abuse inHaiti. He welcomed my proposal of children’s public marches to thank (the Haitian police, courts, etc protecting them?). Many of the girls and families I know are ready for expressing gratitude to police and judges for their hard work.
Since September 2012,, the Haitian courts have issued 200 arrest warrants and jailing over 190 alleged rapists already since our two agencies — UNEV (Union to stop Raping of Children and Elders) and Children’s Psychologica lHealth Center-started this project. Nothing remotely like our success has happened before in over 250 years to protect children against rape in Haiti. I have years of experience with large scale child molestation situations in the U.S., mixed experiences, with good and bad outcomes, increasingly good. Little compares to the – up to now — unmixed fates of already raped girls in Haiti, Some of their bellicose sexual predators have history of victim assassinations. Since corrupt judges often rapidly release criminals in Haiti, we will soon report on how our project is working on a multi-pronged means of influencing the judicial system itself, to prevent corruption from allowing raping and intimidation with impunity.
Funding remains a concerns. There is no news from UN agency UNFPA yet about the millions they keep promising to give soon. Their grant may include modest funds for our agency to administer, guide and train the UNEV of Haiti clinicians, assist in the forensic aspects, supervise those clinicians in treating hundreds of victims, and provide safe houses for a small number.
Sean Penn philanthropically runs an 85,000 dweller camp here, and wants to meet me and Frandy. He is deeply concerned by our findings. . Tomorrow, Frandy, Henriquez and I will meet the Prime Minister ofHaiti. Please stay tuned.
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