Between the September 1991 coup and the intervention that restored Aristide three years later, Haiti's military rulers made sexual assault an instrument of political terror. Rey argues this set the Cedras regime apart from the Duvalier dictatorships it otherwise imitated: women and girls in pro-Aristide neighbourhoods were attacked, frequently as reprisal when a male relative sought by soldiers could not be found.

The evidence comes from a survey of ninety-eight women who suffered abuse under the regime and from repeated interviews with two dozen of them over five years. The pattern points to a sharp escalation from mid-1993, and Rey holds that senior officers ordered it. Official inquiries, he shows, recorded only a small share of the cases.

The essay then asks what religion does for survivors. Belief supplies the terms in which the violence is understood, sometimes easing recovery and sometimes obstructing it, and Rey argues that it has also helped underwrite a culture permissive of sexual violence.