On and around International Women’s Day 2022, Haitian women’s organizations organized marches and demonstrations in Port-au-Prince and other cities that combined the traditional demands of women’s rights advocacy with the urgent security and justice demands specific to Haiti’s crisis moment. The marches highlighted the gendered dimensions of gang violence, the specific vulnerabilities women faced in the security crisis, and the persistent exclusion of women from political decision-making processes.
Women demonstrators carried signs naming the specific harms they faced: sexual violence by gang members operating with total impunity, displacement from homes and communities, the impossible burden of feeding families in conditions of extreme economic stress, and the daily terror of navigating a city where violence could erupt anywhere at any time. The marches were both an expression of anger and a demand for recognition that women’s experiences of the crisis were specific and required specific responses.
Women’s political organizations renewed their demands for inclusion in transitional governance arrangements, noting that the negotiations between political factions that had been ongoing since the assassination continued to be dominated by male political figures with women largely excluded from decision-making roles. They argued that this exclusion was not only unjust but counterproductive — that Haiti’s political culture of masculine competition had been central to producing the crisis, and that different leadership was part of any genuine solution.
International women’s rights organizations expressed solidarity with Haitian women’s movement and called on the Haitian government and international community to prioritize gender-responsive approaches to both the security crisis and the political transition. They emphasized that the astronomical rates of sexual violence documented in gang-controlled areas required immediate, specific, and resourced responses that the humanitarian system had not yet provided at adequate scale.