Minors surviving sexual violence in Port- au-Prince, Haïti

Sexual violence (SV) is a huge public health problem in Haiti. However, it is rarely reported due to shame and stigma, lack of knowledge of consequences and limited services. Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has supported care for survivors of SV in Port-au-Prince in the Pran Men’m clinic since 2015. We describe characteristics of survivors and perpetrators, with focus on survivors under the age of 18, using retrospective descriptive analysis of routine programmatic data from May 25th 2015 to April 29th 2019. MSF provided comprehensive medical and psychosocial care to 3,411 survivors. A majority of 77.7% were survivors of rape and 97.9% were females. MSF is particularly concerned by the fact that 50.1% of all survivors were under 18. Among these minors, 23.4% were under 10 (n=400), 25.6% between 10 and 13 (n=441) and 50.8% between 14 and 17 years (n=869). Minors were less likely (56.6%) to present within three days after the incident than adults (79.2%) and 6.7% of minors (n=114) presented with unwanted pregnancy. Of the minor survivors, 74.6% knew their perpetrators, of which 4.0% was abused by their intimate partner and 10.5% by a household member other than their intimate partner. There is a high need for a multi-sectional response as 17.7% of these minors were referred to protection services. SV is an urgent medical and humanitarian issue globally and in Haiti. As it is crucial to scale up the medical and multi-sectoral response, the project is currently in process of decentralization with the Ministry of Health.