U.N. confronts another sex scandal

"The Sri Lankan case is the one we are hearing about now, but it's not the only one," said Olga Benoit of Haitian Women's Solidarity, recalling two Pakistani peacekeepers who were expelled two years ago for raping a mentally ill woman in Gonaives and a French policeman disciplined for keeping a prostitute captive. "These are men, soldiers in big vehicles, carrying weapons -- that has a lot of power in a patriarchal society like ours."

In a country where more than half of the 8.5 million people live on less than a dollar a day, the parents and friends of girls engaging in sex for food or other compensation "tend to close their eyes and pretend nothing is happening," Benoit said.

Anecdotal reports on the Sri Lankan scandal indicate girls in their early teens were often involved, and that in the poorest areas of the capital the going rate for sex was a dollar.

Young girls have congregated outside peacekeeping posts since the first U.N. troops arrived in the summer of 2004, sometimes begging, other times flirting or practicing a few words of English, French or Spanish. After dark, scores of young girls in skimpy shorts or dresses can be seen loitering in the streets, waving to signal their availability to off-duty soldiers.

Magalie Marcelin of the Women's Home organization, which is working to educate young Haitian women about their rights and the social risks around them, attributes the MINUSTAH scandal to a long history of Haitians regarding women's bodies as commodities.

"That a soldier can do this to a girl he's supposed to be protecting comes from the same mentality that allows a professor to do it to his student or a father to his daughter," Marcelin said. "In this society, women's bodies are regarded as meat."

Despite a successful campaign against the spread of AIDS in Haiti, sex remains a taboo subject. There is no sex education in the schools, and parents remain reluctant to discuss the topic, Benoit said.

Haitians able to scrape together a living blame parental lapses for the incidents of prostitution involving the troops. But they too tend to attribute the sex-for-compensation to their country's gnawing, unmet needs.

"I know these things happen, and it's very difficult times for many people," said Guerde Clerveau, a mother of nine who sculpts wooden artifacts and sells them outside the main base of MINUSTAH. "But I would never allow my daughters to act like that, to sell themselves, even if we were starving."