This was despite the fact they were working on anti-trafficking strategies. There you have it. The idea that the women involved in prostitution in Haiti are somehow benefiting from being bought and sold by the very men that are supposed to be helping them cope with their hellish existence. Let us consider what this person is defending. Oxfam's country director in Haiti, Roland van Hauwermeiren, admitted using prostituted females at premises paid for with charitable funds.
Children may well have been among those abused by van Hauwermeiren and other aid workers. This happened after the earthquake in , which killed , people, injured , and left 1. There are also allegations that some male senior officials at the charity were using prostituted women and girls in Chad in These men are enabling terrible human rights violations. They are literally propping up a system that causes misery and heartache for women and children.
Wherever there is conflict, natural disasters and dire poverty, women and children will be abused into prostitution. Traffickers target countries such as Haiti, knowing that there will be rich pickings, because women and girls will be additionally vulnerable.
I have witnessed scandals like this before. I saw a number of men going in and out of these establishments, despite the fact that many of them were there to advise local law enforcers on anti-trafficking strategies. I also recall the scandal that broke when Kathryn Bolkovac, a monitor with United Nations International Police Task Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina, sued her employers for unfair dismissal when she lost her job in after she reported that officers were paying for sex, raping underage girls and participating in sex trafficking.
I was in the Balkans when the story first emerged, and spoke to a number of UN officials about it. David Lamb, a former Philadelphia police officer who served as a UN human rights investigator in Bosnia until , investigated allegations that six Romanian, Fijian and Pakistani officers stationed in the town of Bijeljina were trafficking women into prostitution. Lamb found plenty of evidence to justify a full-scale criminal investigation, and faced physical threats and blocking by his superiors, including a senior Ukrainian police officer who ordered an end to the investigation.
