Canada has always had a great rela­tion­ship with Haiti. Not only does it’s gov­ern­ment send aid, but many Cana­dian non-governmental orga­ni­za­tions work in Haiti. All of the work has been trou­bled with alle­ga­tions of aid work­ers sex­u­ally exploit­ing the peo­ple there.

From the Wind­sor Star, writer Don Lajoie and pho­tog­ra­pher Rob Gur­de­beke trav­eled to Haiti for a series of sto­ries they pro­duced while doing aid work in Haiti. First, the fol­low­ing video gives an overview of the coun­tries rela­tion­ship. Then Lajoie tack­les the issue of “Mis­sion Sex”

Mis­sion sex — it’s Haiti’s dirty lit­tle secret.

The west­ern world’s poor­est coun­try is, accord­ing to one aid worker, a “per­fect storm” of socio-economic con­di­tions for abuse by vis­it­ing human­i­tar­i­ans. It’s trop­i­cal tem­per­a­tures and breath­tak­ing nat­ural beauty are eas­ily, and cheaply, acces­si­ble from North Amer­ica. Heav­ily depen­dent on for­eign aid and with vir­tu­ally no reg­u­la­tion of its schools and orphan­ages, Haiti’s jus­tice sys­tem is ill-equipped to deal with a ris­ing tide of sex tourism.

Peace­keep­ing troops, aid work­ers, non-governmental orga­ni­za­tion employ­ees, priests and mis­sion­ar­ies engage in sex­ual exploita­tion with arro­gant impunity, accord­ing to Save the Chil­dren, the world’s largest children’s rights organization.

And, sadly, they say, when dol­lars are dan­gled as bait, many Haitians will turn a blind eye.

“All those who come here know this is a very poor coun­try, that there are few oppor­tu­ni­ties for youth,” said Mar­garett Lubin, Save the Children’s local child pro­tec­tion man­ager. “When finan­cial oppor­tu­ni­ties are offered, the chil­dren enter rela­tion­ships.… Do their com­mu­ni­ties see it as exploita­tion or do they see it as opportunity?”

Haiti has nei­ther ade­quate sex-offender laws nor the police to enforce them. That helps explain why sex-tourist exporters such as Canada and the U.S. are doing the job them­selves, using pro­vi­sions in their crim­i­nal codes.

Con­sider:

- Wind­sor priest Rev. John Duarte faces nine counts of sex­u­ally exploit­ing ado­les­cent boys in Port-au-Prince and the north­ern vil­lage of Labadie, where he ran a mis­sion, fol­low­ing a two-year inves­ti­ga­tion by the Ontario Provin­cial Police and RCMP.

- Amer­i­can mis­sion­ary Dou­glas Per­litz faces nearly iden­ti­cal charges in nearby Cap Hai­tien for allegedly abus­ing nine boys at the school he founded for poor chil­dren. That case is before the courts in the U.S.

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