PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Sitting in a secluded courtyard in one of the Haitian capital’s many red zones controlled by armed gangs, the five women gathered in a circle and, during the course of an hour, recounted their stories of brutality.

Each had survived rape, some by multiple assailants at once, they told United Nations humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher as he met with them on a brisk September morning inside the offices of Kay Fanm (Women’s House).

The organization is among a small group of Haitian nonprofits trying to assist survivors of gang rape and other forms of gender-based violence, helping them get medical and psychological care and even legal assistance. The organization, the women said, had helped bring them back from the brink of despair after gangs violated them — and, in some cases, killed their husbands.

“They told us that when you hear that little voice telling you to ‘Kill yourself,’ don’t listen,” one of the survivors said through tears.

Haiti is no stranger to crisis, particularly sexual violence, in periods of political instability. But the scale of the current emergency has reached catastrophic proportions, medical providers and leaders of feminist groups say. They describe turning away rape survivors because of limited shelter beds, scraping together funding to keep doors open and wrestling with keeping mental-health staffers, some of whom can’t deal with the trauma that they see daily.

“This situation is truly unprecedented,” Yolette Jeanty, the head of Kay Fanm, told Fletcher before he sat down with the women. Founded in 1984, her group is one of Haiti’s oldest feminist organizations. “This is the first time in the organization’s history that we have faced this challenge.”

Between January and August of this year, Kay Fanm treated 950 cases of violence against women. Hundreds of cases were sexual assaults. They were among the more than 7,400 gender-based violence cases reported nationwide this year. That’s an average of 27 cases a day, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in November.

The crisis, Jeanty said, isn’t just plunging women deeper into poverty, it’s leaving them broken.

“We regularly provide psychological support here, three times a week to 120 women,” she said, highlighting the effects of a lack of funding amid a growing demand for services. “Despite everything, there is always a line because it is not enough.”

Displaced from their homes

Women and girls make up more than half of the more than 1.4 million people who have been driven from their homes by gang violence. In November, the U.N. warned that it was only able to help a fraction of them because the response remains critically underfunded, with an overall gap of $13.5 million of the $19 million needed for this year.

“If that funding is not received, nearly 780,000 women and girls — including survivors of gender-based violence and those at risk — will go without these critical services, including the clinical management of rape, mental health and psychosocial support, case management, legal assistance, safe spaces for women and girls,” said Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.

A Miami Herald analysis found that Haiti organizations lost funding worth a total of $1.3 billion from the U.S. Agency for International Development when the Trump administration shut down the agency this year.

At one of the few rape shelters in Port-au-Prince with beds, Òganizasyon Fanm Vanyan an Aksyon (Strong Women in Action Organization, known as OFAVA in Haitian Creole), demand is so high that staff sometimes has to turn away survivors, who often show up “with nothing in their hands,” founder Lamercie Charles-Pierre said.

“Running a shelter is not easy,” said Charles-Pierre, who receives funding from the U.N. Children’s Fund. “There isn’t enough money.”

‘A trial in my life’

Micheline arrived at the shelter’s doors last year after gang members mercilessly raped her stepmother and killed her father before kidnapping her and keeping her for five days in a secluded location east of the capital. During her captivity, Micheline, then 14 years old, was repeatedly raped and beaten. “Before the center, I felt my life was over,” she said.

Thanks to OFAVA’s partnership with the French medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières/ Doctors Without Border s, the teen got daily mental-health counseling and participated in embroidery and other activities to help her work through the trauma.

“I used to want to kill myself,” she said. “I told myself, ‘You’ve lost your father. You’ve lost someone who’s dear to you. You won’t find someone like this anymore.’ But with the help of the psychologist ... I understand that this is a trial in my life, but it’s not the end of my life. You can restart. As long as you have hope, you will get to somewhere in life, no matter what.”

Conveying such hope, however, is becoming increasingly more difficult. Women and girls are at risk during the gangs’ turf fights. And after being forced to flee their homes, many have no choice but to live in dehumanizing camps that have no doors, no privacy and poor lighting that offers little protection against sexual assaults.

Of approximately 800 women and girls the feminist aid group Nègès Mawon (Maroon Woman) has assisted this year, more than 60% live in the camps, said Pascal Solages, the organization’s founder and coordinator.

“Some women were at our safe house for months,” she said, noting that the lack of funding and the continuing violence limit her organization’s outreach. “Unfortunately, most of these women need money, relocation, new houses, work, and we can’t provide that. We did it for a small group, but there are thousands in need.”

Fletcher, the U.N. humanitarian chief, said Haitians who are victims of the gangs are fighting not just for their lives, but for dignity.

“The level of brutality from the armed groups, the level of fear is really terrifying,” he said. “People want to be heard. They want to be supported. Mostly, they ask for dignity, and at the moment they don’t feel they have dignity.”

The work that local groups are doing, he said, is essential.

“All the people in the neighborhood ... they know this center exists,” he said of Kay Fanm. “It’s like the local pharmacy, the local supermarket. This is as important to the community as the places to buy water.”

‘Vicious cycle’

Up a flight of stairs, past the check-in desk for HIV and AIDS patients and the station where nurses weigh malnourished babies, one of Haiti’s first rape-treatment centers is struggling to keep up with the surging demand.

Tucked away in a far corner a small green plaque on a door reads in English and Haitian Creole: “Counseling.”

Inside the room, a lone psychologist attempts to help rape survivors rebuild their shattered lives. Redianne Douyon softly asks them: What happened? How was your life before the assault? How do you feel now?

With each probing question, she watches not just for answers but for signs of deeper trauma.

“Someone who has gone through rape doesn’t just need two days of care. They need psychological support — sometimes for years,” said Dr. Bernard Liautaud, a co-founder of the Haitian Study Group on Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections, better known by its French acronym GHESKIO.

A health care and research center that pioneered the treatment of HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis in the Caribbean, GHESKIO added rape treatment to its offerings of care more than 20 years ago. Today, with the protracted crisis that began emerging after the 2010 earthquake, the center has become as vital as any response to the epidemics plaguing the crisis-ridden nation.

GHESKIO, which was forced to move from its main campus after the kidnappings of many of its staffers, treated about 400 survivors of rape last year, said Dr. Marie Marcelle Deschamps.

Among them were the families of two women who were burned alive in their homes by gangs. Others included adolescent girls, who, after becoming pregnant from rape, had to get costly caesarean sections because their young bodies were too underdeveloped to deliver naturally.

The costs, as much as $2,300 per procedure, were absorbed by the center.

“The biggest problem we obviously have is we do not have enough resources to do all the things we are doing,” said Dr. Jean William Pape, the leader of the institution.

In December 2023, the U.N. slashed $250,000 in GHESKIO funding for victims of gender-based violence due to its own budget constraints. Despite the cut, the center continued to provide services, its doctors said. They have no choice.

“The system has collapsed, and now we are trying to respond,” Dr. Deschamps said.

In addition to providing psychological and medical care, that means helping with fees for school and assisting survivors and their families with housing, employment and even relocation.

“There are people who have lost everything,” said Dr. Harry Theodore, who oversees the rape-treatment center he helped found at GHESKIO over 20 years ago. He notes that rape survivors are often forced to live alongside their assailants, making treatment more difficult. “This is a vicious cycle.”

Daunting challenges outside the capital

Outside of Port-au-Prince, the challenges are just as daunting for those attempting to help.

Nadesha Mijoba, executive director of the nonprofit Haitian Health Foundation in Jérémie, about 175 miles west of the capital, said some of the women and adolescents seeking care have been “victims of horrible rape violence.” Haiti’s grim reality is taking such a toll that the medical center has had to create an internal mental-health support system for its own staffers.

“There is very little support in Haiti for mental-health providers,” Mijoba said. “They are overburdened.”

Mijoba said aids groups are hurting due to the U.S. cuts: “That has truly a significant impact for the health-services delivery in Haiti and also adds to the pressure on those who are continuing to serve.”

In Jacmel, about 50 miles southeast of Port-au-Prince, the group Fanm Deside (Women Decide) sounded the alarm recently after discovering that several women in the city’s jail had been raped while in custody. The organization, led by women, said it has been able to continue its work, including providing shelter for victims of domestic violence and rape survivors, using piecemeal donations.

The port city is the capital of Haiti’s southeast region and has received more than 161,000 of the people who have been forced to flee their homes, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Rochel Delpeche, the regional director for the government’s child-welfare office, said agents have observed a troubling “phenomenon” of abandoned children, some of them born of rape.

Among them was a 2-month-old boy whose 20-year-old mother abandoned him last summer after she admitted to wanting to kill him. Child-welfare agents tried unsuccessfully to get her to keep the child.

“It’s true she could have a psychological problem due to all she has lived,” Delpeche said, “but the child remains hers. Our duty is to work with her until she accepts him.”

The woman, Delpeche said, became pregnant after gang members raped her and killed her parents, a brother and a sister. As a result, she didn’t want the child, who under Haitian law is too young to be adopted.

Even as he reiterated the agency’s obligation to keep children with their biological families, Delpeche acknowledged that Haiti’s laws on adoptions and child welfare might need to be reassessed.

Dr. Pape agrees that Haitian laws on abortion, adoptions and the ban on treating adolescents without the consent of their parents all need to change.

“Those things are totally obsolete,” he said. ”There is so much that needs to be done.”

(Miami Herald investigative reporter Shirsho Dasgupta contributed to this report.)

_____

HOW TO HELP

Doctors without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières: Generally, the French medical charity does not accept targeted donations. All donations are made to the general fund to help run operations all over the world. Donations can be made at give.doctorswithoutborders.org/

Fondasyon Je Klere/ Eyes Wide Open Foundation: The human rights nonprofit works with rape survivors. Its website is https://www.fjkl.org.ht/ U.S. dollar donations can be sent to Fondasyon Je Klere Acct : 250-1022-0154-0746 Bank:Unibank, Address: 183, Ave Martin Luther King, Turgeau, Haiti Swift code: UBNKHTPP

GHESKIO The nonprofit group runs medical centers and a rape treatment center. Its website is www.gheskio.org or follow the link: https://gheskio.org/?form=givenow No overhead is taken and all donations go directly to GHESKIO.

Kay Fanm: Donations can be made: Recipient Bank Name: UNIBANK S.A. Succursale 250, 21 rue Métellus, Pétion Ville, Ouest, Haïti Pass through account for USD Transfers: Recipient Bank Name : Bank of America Recipient Bank Address: 100 N. TRYON STREET CHARLOTTE NC 28255, USA Local Branch : Miami, Florida, USA Swift Bic Code: BOFAUS3M ABA Routing : 026009593 Account Number: 1901 8 92336 Recipient Organization Kay Fanm Account Number: 0250-1022-00550237

The Haitian Health Foundation: Follow links on its website on how to give: www.haitianhealthfoundation.org

Oganzayon Fanm Vanyan an Aksyon, OFAVA: Donations can be made: Bank: Sogebank. Account: 3816022093 Haiti Swift code: SOGHHTPP

National Human Rights Defense Network: https://web.rnddh.org/nous-contacter/faire-un-don/ Click on bank details

NÈGÈS MAWON: Donations to the feminist organization can be made through Every.org, a tax-exempt US 501(c)(3) charity that grants unrestricted funds to Haiti-based nonprofit.

©2025 Miami Herald. Visit at miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.