A decree writes sexual assault into Haitian criminal law

A decree dated 6 July 2005 amended the Haitian criminal code and inserted a section headed Agressions Sexuelles. Rape and other sexual assaults, whether carried out or attempted, became punishable by sentences running from ten years to life, with the penalty raised where the victim was a child, where the attacker was a relative, or where several men acted together. The term sexual assault entered Haitian criminal law for the first time. These acts were defined as crimes against a person and set apart from indecent assault. The same law took adultery out of the criminal code, which cancelled provisions that had applied to wives and not to husbands, and it abolished the extenuating circumstance a husband could plead after killing his wife on finding her with another man. Adeline Magloire Chancy held the post of Minister for the Status of Women in the two year transitional government that carried this through, ten years after the ministry was created. That same year the state approved a national plan against violence towards women.

In 2007 the Dominican electoral board created a separate civil register for foreigners, known as the Book of Foreigners or the pink registers. A child born in a Dominican hospital to parents who cannot show legal status is given a pink birth certificate and entered in that book. It is a document, and it is not citizenship: people registered in it cannot vote. In the same year the board issued a circular, also called Resolution 12, instructing registry officers to stop issuing identity papers to children of foreign parents whose births had been recorded irregularly. Adults who needed their own birth certificates to enrol at a university found them refused. Whether a father had used a ficha, the identity card handed out by a sugar mill, to register a birth years earlier became the mark that flagged a family. Thousands of people born in the country were left stateless while officials audited their papers.

Researchers pulled 252 outpatient mental health charts from five community clinics in the Boston area covering treatment that began between 2000 and 2005. Eighty one of the children were Haitian, eighty two African American and eighty nine white. Twenty nine percent of the Haitian children attended exactly one session, close to the twenty eight percent among African American children and far above the eight percent among white children. Among children who met the study's threshold for clinical need, Haitian patients averaged 5.7 visits in six months where white patients averaged 8.0. Twenty seven percent of the Haitian children were uninsured or covered by the state pool for the uninsured, against nine percent of African American children and four and a half percent of white children. Adjustment disorder was the diagnosis most often recorded for Haitian children. Treatment meeting national guidelines for attention deficit disorder reached eighty eight percent of white children and thirty eight percent of Haitian children.

Historians divide the human story into history and prehistory, and the line falls where writing begins. Ehret throws the division out. The word was coined in a Europe that treated literate European civilisation as the standard measure, so any society that carried its past in oral tradition, in material culture, in language and in inherited practice was filed as existing before history, waiting in the dark for European documents to arrive and switch on the lights. Applied to Africa the effect is brutal. Tens of thousands of years of migration, metallurgy, crop domestication, state formation, art and philosophy land in a category whose name announces that they are not quite history. The same demotion covers indigenous America, northern Eurasia and Oceania. Whatever people have done, wherever they did it, is history, and the evidence is read with different instruments rather than lesser ones. This sits on a Haitian timeline because the ancestors of the people shipped to Saint-Domingue lived almost entirely on the wrong side of that line.