This chapter describes how humanitarian aid is gendered and how this in turn affects Haitian women designated as beneficiaries. It analyses the ways in which gender-based violence (GBV) was defined by international agencies to serve to legitimize foreign control while they render Haitian people intelligible within a foreign moral compass, categorizing beneficiaries who are subject to surveillance and discipline.

This chapter discusses the transitional state of Haiti since the Duvalier regime, characterising the country as marked by a series of crises which continue to make the lives of Haitians extremely difficult. To understand the geopolitical stakes and the terms of the current issue, it is important to also understand the context of the situation. For some years now, almost all analytic texts on Haiti take as a point of departure the difficult junction of transition that the country has been experiencing, in fact, since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in February 1986.

After Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, over half of U.S. households donated to thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in that country. Yet we continue to hear stories of misery from Haiti. Why have NGOs failed at their mission?

Contrary to the United States’ assertion that it had stifled resistance, Haitian resistance remained and took on new forms; and women participated, even if their contributions were not noted as clearly. That the United States did not leave after the First World War and after the 1920 naval inquiry demonstrates what a useful role Haiti played in the building of the U.S. empire. The violence, so fundamental to the U.S. invasion, remained consistent throughout the U.S. military’s time in Haiti.

Women in Haiti are frequent victims of sexual violence and armed assault. Yet an astonishing proportion of these victims also act as perpetrators of violent crime, often as part of armed groups. Award-winning legal scholar Benedetta Faedi Duramy visited Haiti to discover what causes these women to act in such destructive ways and what might be done to stop this tragic cycle of violence.

Raped and colonized, coerced and silenced--this has been the position of Haitian women within their own society, as well as how they have been seen by foreign occupiers. Romanticized symbols of nationhood, they have served, however unwillingly, as a politicized site of contestation between opposing forces. In this first book-length study in English devoted exclusively to Haitian women's literature, Myriam Chancy finds that Haitian women have their own history, traditions, and stories to tell, tales that they are unwilling to suppress or subordinate to narratives of national autonomy.