More than 100 Sri Lankan peacekeepers had sex with children in Haiti, internal UN report reveals

The Haitian girl known Victim No 1 was 12 when she first had sex with a Sri Lankan peacekeeper. She says she didn’t even have breasts yet.

The boy, known as Victim No 9, was 15 when his ordeal began. Over the course of three years, he said he had sex with more than 100 Sri Lankan peacekeepers, averaging about four a day.

From 2004 to 2007, nine Haitian children were exploited by a child sex ring involving at least 134 Sri Lankan peacekeepers, according to an internal UN report obtained by The Associated Press.

Often the children were given cookies or a few dollars in exchange for sex. Although 114 of the peacekeepers were sent home, none was ever jailed for the abuse.

Justice for victims is rare. An Associated Press investigation of UN missions during the past 12 years found an estimated 2,000 allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers and UN personnel around the world — signalling the crisis is much larger than previously known. More than 300 of the allegations involved children, but only a fraction of the alleged perpetrators were jailed.

The Haitian children had made a home for themselves at Habitation Leclerc, a resort was once well-known in the 1980s throughout Port-au-Prince as a lush refuge amid the capital’s grimy alleyways.