The International Organization for Migration (IOM) and UNICEF will soon help alleviate the heavy burden of victims of rapes; sexual assaults and child trafficking that quickly spread through Haiti’s displacement camps, following the January 2010 earthquake. These two Nongovernmental organizations will deliver relief through better lit streets in the settlement camps, post traumatic counseling, preventive measures to sexual violence and combatting child trafficking.
The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency gave $1 million to IOM that will help implement those initiatives. The nongovernmental organization will primarily target survivors of sexual violence still living in vulnerable makeshift tents where an estimated 680,000 Haitians call home. Through these efforts, 20 of the settlement camps around the capital will receive solar lights installations among other social services.
According to the Associated Press, the U.S. State Department gave $1.6 million to UNICEF as part of this program. UNICEF will monitor and combat child trafficking in persons that also became prevalent in post-quake Haiti. Aids from Sweden and the U.S. amounted to $2.6 million, a much-needed boost for the country, which experienced a baby boom or a fatherless geneartion as a result of atrocities perpetrated on women and girls exposed by poorly secured displacement camps.
A Miami Herald report indicated traffickers smuggled 1,411 children out of the country one month after the earthquake, figures that increased to more than 7,300 boys and girls through October, some eight months later. “All the officials know who the traffickers are, but don’t report them,” Regino Martinez told the Herald. “It is a problem that is not going to end because the authorities’ sources of income would dry up,” he added. Martinez is a Jesuit priest and director of the Border Solidarity Foundation in Dajabón, a Dominican border town, emphasized the report.
While, according to revised government figures, the January 2010 snatched 316,000 lives and displaced 2 million others, it also destroyed the livelihoods of scores of children. IOM will direct funds to a project that helps reunite such children with their biological parents many of whom, as the report indicated, passed off their children to strangers amid the destruction.
