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Lifting the Lid of Silence: Testimonies of Victims
DETERMINED: Marie Sofonie is 25 years old and says she is determined to break the silence about sexual abuses in Haiti. (Giordano Cossu and Benoit Cassegrain/'Solidar'IT in Haiti')
Cossu and Cassegrain are watching the situation in Haiti filming every step of the process. They have found two groups in Haiti that are helping women speak from the heart about the hidden violence.
Marie Sofonie works for Ayiti SMS SOS, a project which allows victims or witnesses of abuse to send an SMS to a free number. Messages are then mapped geographically and classified based on the type of crime or help request, location, and so on.
Sofonie tells her own story:
“In the camp, the situation was really terrible; we were exposed to everything: sexual assaults, thefts, rapes, all that. After a week, people there began to take the habit, as there was no reply, they were not afraid anymore and they began to steal, rape, I was afraid it could happen to me, and I said to myself, I am going to stay in my house, whatever happens, die or live, I give up but I will not accept to be raped by some crooks. I was afraid to become BAD, because I don’t think I would have let anybody do what he wanted to me.”
Charles-Pierre from OFAVA started a program called “Women: The Box of Grief” which consists of workshops that encourage women to share their experiences and find solutions to their problems.
Since many women are afraid to speak up, Charles-Pierre created what she called a “box of grief,” a box that she puts in the middle of the workshop room as a place where women can deposit their stories after writing them down. Every Friday she opens the box and reads out the stories to the group.
BOX OF GRIEF: Every Friday the box is opened and stories are shared aloud. (Giordano Cossu and Benoit Cassegrain/'Solidar'IT in Haiti')
“The atmosphere gets rather tense, and face expressions reveal the concealed anguish. Small weeps and moans are heard during the reading of these terrible stories. In the audio portfolio that follows, everybody can listen to the stories and share in this hard but necessary moment of revelation,” writes Giordano Cossu on the website of Solidar’IT.
Here are three of the testimonies from the “box of grief,” which remain anonymous.
“It’s a young girl who after the 12 January has faced not violence, but financial difficulties, and how can I say… domestic violence, because in the house it was her who did everything to find something to eat.”
“This is a young girl who received sexual violence from her own father. Every time she tried to say something, her father promised to kill her. She has come to live in the camp.”
“It’s a young girl aged 16. She is an orphan, she has been abused sexually and so far she has not been allowed to go to the hospital. She wants help from us, to get over this rape problem.”
And after the therapy is finished, according to Haitian custom, everybody starts to sing and laugh joyfully, venting away and leaving behind everything bad.
