Girls as young as 11 were sexually abused and impregnated by UN peacekeepers in Haiti and abandoned to raise their children alone, according to testimonies from more than 2,000 residents.
So many babies were fathered by foreign peacekeepers that Haitians nickname them ‘Petit MINUSTAH’ – combining ‘small’ in French with the acronym of the UN mission, said Sabine Lee, who co-led the study in the journal International Peacekeeping.
MULTIPLE REPORTS OF SEXUAL CONTACTS
“There are a multitude of cases, a multitude of different scenarios, in which these children are being conceived and born,” Lee, a history professor at Britain’s University of Birmingham, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Wednesday. “It is quite clear that girls that could clearly be understood and seen as underage were taken advantage of,” she said, adding the study did not try to estimate how many children were born through sexual exploitation by peacekeepers.
A spokesman for UN Peacekeeping said it took the issues raised seriously. It is supporting 29 victims and 32 children born of sexual exploitation and abuse by MINUSTAH personnel, and is “actively engaged” to ensure they get child support, he said.
BRITISH MEDIA OUTLET HESITATED CALLING IT “RAPE”
BBC News Turkish, sponsored by one of the biggest media outlets in Britain, has failed to name children’s sexual abuse as rape.
UK media giant’s Turkish service underestimated the rape scandal by saying that UN soldiers got some Haitian girls pregnant.
