So I happened to see this story on Haiti Gangs on Microsoft. At the moment, CNN.com doesn't want to play nice so I am giving the MSN link as my ONLY viable option. SORRY.
There is a Haitian Gang Shootout Scene in the 2003 movie Bad Boys 2, so this issue with gangs in Haiti goes back decades. I just didn't get the memo because my life has sucked so much, I had no time to read about suckitude in other parts of the world.
The above linked article indicates that gang violence in the capital of Port au Prince has been a concern for some time but it has more recently spread to rural areas -- including the bread basket of the country -- and is interfering with crop production, so this is becoming an existential threat for Haiti, not just a few assholes making a stink in a big city.
For me, the following song came to mind:
I also thought of the 1984 movie Red Dawn because, similar to the song lines quoted above, a family hides their two granddaughters in the cellar and then hands them off to a group of young militants to safeguard them as the only hope they have of protecting the girls, whom the film implies have already been raped and sodomized.
In the US, pro gun rights people like to say "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away." In a situation like you see in Haiti, it's like that only cubed.
My interpretation of the above song is rooted in my personal background. So what will follow is a bunch of personal anecdotes intended to illucidate why I saw it that way and that's ALL I can promise that it casts light upon.
He once told me that if he heard strange noises in the house in the middle of the night, he was going to load them in the dark, shoot first and THEN turn some lights on and ask questions. I think this was polite code for "Dorina, don't go sneaking any boyfriends in through your bedroom window. It may result in tragedy." but it also told me that, like the song lines above, he was prepared to actually use the guns in what he deemed to be "an emergency situation."
Actual reality: That never happened and I've thought long and hard about how and why that never happened and how it is that simply being PREPARED to kill someone in his home if necessary likely protected us without him ever having to deal with a nasty situation involving arrest, trial and etc.
The room my parents used as their master bedroom wasn't really intended to be a bedroom at all, so CUZ REASONS, the side door to the house that we used as our PRIMARY egress opened into their bedroom and most people who knew us knew that, so plenty of people came to that door and could see the guns on hooks on the wall and the shells visible on top of them from that doorway when they came knocking.
So most likely many people in the neighborhood KNEW from either seeing it themselves or hearing it through the grapevine that there were guns on the wall with ammo close at hand and those guns were NOT locked up and a decorated veteran who fought in two wars slept below them. So when there was a rash of burglaries in the neighborhood with people breaking in through a common design flaw in the homes of that neighborhood, they skipped our house.
The burglars probably were locals of some sort and probably KNEW breaking into our house would be a good means to get themselves shot, unlike other houses. Furthermore, my mother was (officially) a full-time homemaker until I was twelve (while making good money working from home as a seamstress) and my dad was a military retiree who was frequently unemployed, so our house was RARELY empty.
This is a variation of Jane Jacobs idea that the key to safety in the big city is eyes on the street. Criminals don't like witnesses and are much more likely to commit a crime in places and at times when they think they are not likely to be seen.
During at least some part of World War II, the family moved to a house in the country. They used their war ration cards for cigarettes to pay three men to serve as guards around the clock and they hid their food stores to try to minimize the impact of the war on their children.
This doesn't mean the war didn't impact them. It did impact them. Her father and at least one brother spent part of the war in prison or a concentration camp, an older brother died in the war and she witnessed Russian soldiers rape two relatives of hers while she was still quite young, but it seems to have provided some measure of security for the family, more than most families likely had at the time.
There was only one incident when my oldest son had to "come get mom" and mom did, in fact, back his right to say "NO" to some elderly relative he barely knew who felt entitled to smooch on him as her right. Fortunately, I didn't actually end up slugging this elderly in-law, but I was certainly prepared to while she stood there flabbergasted and told me "You can't."
The hell I can't, BITCH.
My son was four years old at the time and he stood BEHIND me and made faces at her the whole time, which I didn't know about until years later. Having had mom stand her ground and angrily protect him that one time, he inferred on his own that he had a RIGHT to DEFEND himself if mom was not available.
So when he was in public school -- where "Go get the teacher" turned out to be a scam and the teacher did NOTHING to help you, unlike MOM -- he had at least two incidents where he resorted to physical violence to protect himself from people for various reasons. I didn't know about any of this until years later, in part because he was so certain he had a RIGHT to defend himself, he never came home and said "Mom, I hit someone today. Was that okay?" No, he felt FINE about it and felt no need to double-check his decision.
But also there were teachers to deal with and even MOM made it clear to him that teachers are not to be trusted. I taught him from age two "Some words are bad words. You won't be punished for using them, I will TELL you which words are bad and try to remind you they are rude and you can remind me I shouldn't say them either because I'm being rude to you." (a policy for trying to let him know that mom swears like a sailor and her bad habits should not be emulated to make him feel ALL GROWN UP).
When he started school and got explanations for what some rude word meant that he was asking me about, he was also advised "If you use it at school, the school might call me. I don't care if you use it, but using it at school could be trouble, so best if you don't."
He was usually the SMALLEST kid in class, so he was routinely a target of the class bully. He also was very spry and took gymnastics for a time, so he quickly developed a policy of running from bullies and ducking under stuff they were too big and clumsy to duck under. When the bully ran to the teacher after smacking their head, my son would point to other kids playing chasing games and tag and the like on the playground.
Kids fall down and get hurt when playing. It happens. He's just a kid (aka doesn't know that much and isn't that smart. He couldn't POSSIBLY be engaged in some Machiavellian shit here).
PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY for the win.
And so justice prevailed because he generally didn't need to justify his actions as self defense. He could hand-wave it off as not really his fault, so he didn't get in trouble for hurting some kid rather than accepting that being tormented for being small was just how it would go and then teachers would side with The Bad Guy CUZ REASONS.
Pretty soon, the bully in question would STOP harassing him because being a bully ONLY works if you can divide and conquer. It's not good for the bully business for OTHER KIDS to notice that the smallest kid in class is kicking your ass and not getting in trouble for it. They might ALL decide to stand their ground.
You may be the biggest kid in class but they outnumber you. If they act as a group, you are toast.
When he was in kindergarten and being bullied, the teacher tried to explain to me that the bully needed SYMPATHY because, poor baby, his parents were going through a divorce. So her sympathies were with him over shit she had no control over rather than with HIS VICTIM whom she was supposed to be responsible for while he was in her class, but, no. We can't actually do our job cuz EXCUSES.
So getting MOM to talk to TEACHER wasn't effective either and this likely informed his later "I just a kid" policy of kicking ass and playing dumb when the teacher got called on by the BULLY.
It was probably also informed by an incident where a much older and much bigger kid in a different grade offered to "helpfully" carry his backpack after school, he declined to hand it over, the kid tried to take it and my son bodychecked him and ran off. Being a little squirt, he shouldered him in the gut and the kid clutched at his gut for the next week, so he likely did real damage.
Meanwhile when called to the principal's office the next day, the principal -- seeing what a tiny squirt had supposedly ASSAULTED this much bigger kid -- he asked my son "Have you taken martial arts?" and my son -- genuinely enthused because he had never heard the term before and it sounded like something cool -- asked all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed "What's THAT???"
The principal laughed and sent my son back to class without answering his question, BUMMER. The bully never bothered him again.
My sister probably still has emotional scars from listening to me call her long distance and CRY ON HER SHOULDER about my A MINUS.
So let it be hereby officially known: Law is NOT my strong suit.
But the first thing that comes to mind is that civilians on the ground in a place like rural Haiti are in a real pickle because we have no legal precedents which genuinely cover THEIR needs in that kind of situation.
We have things like this hand-wavy thing called Martial Law which is apparently not really clearly defined if you believe Wikipedia. Related concepts are declaring a state of emergency during disasters and justifying martial law under the doctrine of necessity in places that haven't really codified when, how and why martial law applies.
This is more about covering the ass of THE STATE and saying "We can do as we please." Martial law has a reputation for being an abusive mechanism that serves despots more than it serves The People.
And since World War II, we generally expect the international community to intercede in ugly messes and have trials for War Crimes and such but mostly after the fact, so the world at large has become like teachers in elementary school for my son: authorities making sure the victims couldn't protect themselves from the bullies without getting into trouble OFFICIALLY if they got tired of putting up with his shit and fought back.
I don't really have anything to suggest at this time, either in terms of law or in terms of practical measures, because I have never dealt with something like this firsthand so I am reluctant to suggest something that may backfire and make things worse -- though I am THINKING and may write more on the topic.
But someone who has had more than two law classes in college and made actual bonafide As, not A MINUSES, should revisit the ancient concept of outlawry, which served the interests of the STATE when states lacked the means to adequately enforce some things, and consider updating it or something to serve not only weak nation-states but the needs of the people in messes like you currently see in Haiti which has been ongoing for years and seems to ONLY be getting worse, not better.
I am just beginning to read up on the situation in Haiti. The housing situation is really terrible. The international community has been dropping the ball for a lot of years on, for example, implementing hurricane resistant housing in a place where hurricanes are the primary natural disaster interfering with the establishment of effective solutions.
The gangs are likely filling a power vacuum and things might be WORSE without them, not better.
The international community needs to find a means to allow more LOCAL solutions while providing REAL help. The international aid provided in Haiti for housing is a joke and part of the problem, not part of the solution.
There are REAL and serious problems in Haiti, like a serious lack of housing, that NEED to be addressed. International news blaming the gangs may well be a misrespresentation of reality on the ground for a long list of reasons. Real solutions need to be based on a meaningful analysis of the situation, not one biased and sensationalistic article pointing fingers at one group as if that is all there is to it.
In the meantime, I will ADVISE people that if you do NOT have a REAL solution, it's better to stand there and watch it burn than to "put out the fire with gasoline." See also The Hand Licking Incident.
There is a Haitian Gang Shootout Scene in the 2003 movie Bad Boys 2, so this issue with gangs in Haiti goes back decades. I just didn't get the memo because my life has sucked so much, I had no time to read about suckitude in other parts of the world.
The above linked article indicates that gang violence in the capital of Port au Prince has been a concern for some time but it has more recently spread to rural areas -- including the bread basket of the country -- and is interfering with crop production, so this is becoming an existential threat for Haiti, not just a few assholes making a stink in a big city.
For me, the following song came to mind:
Take the children and yourself
And hide out in the cellar
a guy who's traveled light-years away, out in space somewhere...trying to get the message to them ...(about)..the (coming) breakdown of society...I would have never in a million years guessed that's what the song is supposed to be about. The title is borrowed from a 1972 film about life on earth being extinct due to some unspecified cause.
I also thought of the 1984 movie Red Dawn because, similar to the song lines quoted above, a family hides their two granddaughters in the cellar and then hands them off to a group of young militants to safeguard them as the only hope they have of protecting the girls, whom the film implies have already been raped and sodomized.
There's a gun and ammunitionThere are no actually good answers for innocent citizens who happen to reside somewhere with war or similar levels of violence and anarchy. If you take up arms yourself without being part of an organized force, you probably will soon be exterminated and even if you aren't, you may end up charged with murder and go to jail for trying to defend yourself.
Just inside the doorway
Use it only in emergency
In the US, pro gun rights people like to say "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away." In a situation like you see in Haiti, it's like that only cubed.
My interpretation of the above song is rooted in my personal background. So what will follow is a bunch of personal anecdotes intended to illucidate why I saw it that way and that's ALL I can promise that it casts light upon.
Anecdote One: My Father
My father was a two-time decorated war veteran and I grew up with double-barrel shotguns on the wall above his bed. They were NOT locked up and for safety reasons they were NOT loaded, BUT there were two shells resting in the groove of the barrel so they coud be loaded quickly -- in seconds, not minutes -- because you didn't need to go find his hidden lock box full of ammo, unlock it, etc.He once told me that if he heard strange noises in the house in the middle of the night, he was going to load them in the dark, shoot first and THEN turn some lights on and ask questions. I think this was polite code for "Dorina, don't go sneaking any boyfriends in through your bedroom window. It may result in tragedy." but it also told me that, like the song lines above, he was prepared to actually use the guns in what he deemed to be "an emergency situation."
Actual reality: That never happened and I've thought long and hard about how and why that never happened and how it is that simply being PREPARED to kill someone in his home if necessary likely protected us without him ever having to deal with a nasty situation involving arrest, trial and etc.
The room my parents used as their master bedroom wasn't really intended to be a bedroom at all, so CUZ REASONS, the side door to the house that we used as our PRIMARY egress opened into their bedroom and most people who knew us knew that, so plenty of people came to that door and could see the guns on hooks on the wall and the shells visible on top of them from that doorway when they came knocking.
So most likely many people in the neighborhood KNEW from either seeing it themselves or hearing it through the grapevine that there were guns on the wall with ammo close at hand and those guns were NOT locked up and a decorated veteran who fought in two wars slept below them. So when there was a rash of burglaries in the neighborhood with people breaking in through a common design flaw in the homes of that neighborhood, they skipped our house.
The burglars probably were locals of some sort and probably KNEW breaking into our house would be a good means to get themselves shot, unlike other houses. Furthermore, my mother was (officially) a full-time homemaker until I was twelve (while making good money working from home as a seamstress) and my dad was a military retiree who was frequently unemployed, so our house was RARELY empty.
This is a variation of Jane Jacobs idea that the key to safety in the big city is eyes on the street. Criminals don't like witnesses and are much more likely to commit a crime in places and at times when they think they are not likely to be seen.
Anecdote Two: My Mother
My mother was born in the 1930s in Germany. She spent much of her childhood in the Freistadt of Danzig, now Gdansk, Poland. This was a large, cosmopolitan city where her mother went once a week and bought fresh seafood from the docks and generally enjoyed an upscale, big city, privileged life.During at least some part of World War II, the family moved to a house in the country. They used their war ration cards for cigarettes to pay three men to serve as guards around the clock and they hid their food stores to try to minimize the impact of the war on their children.
This doesn't mean the war didn't impact them. It did impact them. Her father and at least one brother spent part of the war in prison or a concentration camp, an older brother died in the war and she witnessed Russian soldiers rape two relatives of hers while she was still quite young, but it seems to have provided some measure of security for the family, more than most families likely had at the time.
Anecdote Three: My Son
I was molested and raped as a child, so I thought long and hard about how to protect my children from similar and my approach was to teach them about CONSENT via letting them EXPERIENCE giving consent from birth for hugs and kisses. I told them "If you tell someone no and they disrespect your decision, come get mom."There was only one incident when my oldest son had to "come get mom" and mom did, in fact, back his right to say "NO" to some elderly relative he barely knew who felt entitled to smooch on him as her right. Fortunately, I didn't actually end up slugging this elderly in-law, but I was certainly prepared to while she stood there flabbergasted and told me "You can't."
The hell I can't, BITCH.
My son was four years old at the time and he stood BEHIND me and made faces at her the whole time, which I didn't know about until years later. Having had mom stand her ground and angrily protect him that one time, he inferred on his own that he had a RIGHT to DEFEND himself if mom was not available.
So when he was in public school -- where "Go get the teacher" turned out to be a scam and the teacher did NOTHING to help you, unlike MOM -- he had at least two incidents where he resorted to physical violence to protect himself from people for various reasons. I didn't know about any of this until years later, in part because he was so certain he had a RIGHT to defend himself, he never came home and said "Mom, I hit someone today. Was that okay?" No, he felt FINE about it and felt no need to double-check his decision.
But also there were teachers to deal with and even MOM made it clear to him that teachers are not to be trusted. I taught him from age two "Some words are bad words. You won't be punished for using them, I will TELL you which words are bad and try to remind you they are rude and you can remind me I shouldn't say them either because I'm being rude to you." (a policy for trying to let him know that mom swears like a sailor and her bad habits should not be emulated to make him feel ALL GROWN UP).
When he started school and got explanations for what some rude word meant that he was asking me about, he was also advised "If you use it at school, the school might call me. I don't care if you use it, but using it at school could be trouble, so best if you don't."
He was usually the SMALLEST kid in class, so he was routinely a target of the class bully. He also was very spry and took gymnastics for a time, so he quickly developed a policy of running from bullies and ducking under stuff they were too big and clumsy to duck under. When the bully ran to the teacher after smacking their head, my son would point to other kids playing chasing games and tag and the like on the playground.
Kids fall down and get hurt when playing. It happens. He's just a kid (aka doesn't know that much and isn't that smart. He couldn't POSSIBLY be engaged in some Machiavellian shit here).
PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY for the win.
And so justice prevailed because he generally didn't need to justify his actions as self defense. He could hand-wave it off as not really his fault, so he didn't get in trouble for hurting some kid rather than accepting that being tormented for being small was just how it would go and then teachers would side with The Bad Guy CUZ REASONS.
Pretty soon, the bully in question would STOP harassing him because being a bully ONLY works if you can divide and conquer. It's not good for the bully business for OTHER KIDS to notice that the smallest kid in class is kicking your ass and not getting in trouble for it. They might ALL decide to stand their ground.
You may be the biggest kid in class but they outnumber you. If they act as a group, you are toast.
When he was in kindergarten and being bullied, the teacher tried to explain to me that the bully needed SYMPATHY because, poor baby, his parents were going through a divorce. So her sympathies were with him over shit she had no control over rather than with HIS VICTIM whom she was supposed to be responsible for while he was in her class, but, no. We can't actually do our job cuz EXCUSES.
So getting MOM to talk to TEACHER wasn't effective either and this likely informed his later "I just a kid" policy of kicking ass and playing dumb when the teacher got called on by the BULLY.
It was probably also informed by an incident where a much older and much bigger kid in a different grade offered to "helpfully" carry his backpack after school, he declined to hand it over, the kid tried to take it and my son bodychecked him and ran off. Being a little squirt, he shouldered him in the gut and the kid clutched at his gut for the next week, so he likely did real damage.
Meanwhile when called to the principal's office the next day, the principal -- seeing what a tiny squirt had supposedly ASSAULTED this much bigger kid -- he asked my son "Have you taken martial arts?" and my son -- genuinely enthused because he had never heard the term before and it sounded like something cool -- asked all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed "What's THAT???"
The principal laughed and sent my son back to class without answering his question, BUMMER. The bully never bothered him again.
Some Thoughts
I'm not exactly an expert in international law here and, in fact, in spite of WORKING MY ASS OFF, only made an A minus in Environmental Law. Meanwhile, in the Intro to Statistics class I mostly blew off studying for the last half of that quarter to free up time for the stinking LAW class, I had the highest grade in the class, 107 after they curved the grade to let a few math incompetent losers get an undeserved A. Or whatever.My sister probably still has emotional scars from listening to me call her long distance and CRY ON HER SHOULDER about my A MINUS.
So let it be hereby officially known: Law is NOT my strong suit.
But the first thing that comes to mind is that civilians on the ground in a place like rural Haiti are in a real pickle because we have no legal precedents which genuinely cover THEIR needs in that kind of situation.
We have things like this hand-wavy thing called Martial Law which is apparently not really clearly defined if you believe Wikipedia. Related concepts are declaring a state of emergency during disasters and justifying martial law under the doctrine of necessity in places that haven't really codified when, how and why martial law applies.
This is more about covering the ass of THE STATE and saying "We can do as we please." Martial law has a reputation for being an abusive mechanism that serves despots more than it serves The People.
And since World War II, we generally expect the international community to intercede in ugly messes and have trials for War Crimes and such but mostly after the fact, so the world at large has become like teachers in elementary school for my son: authorities making sure the victims couldn't protect themselves from the bullies without getting into trouble OFFICIALLY if they got tired of putting up with his shit and fought back.
I don't really have anything to suggest at this time, either in terms of law or in terms of practical measures, because I have never dealt with something like this firsthand so I am reluctant to suggest something that may backfire and make things worse -- though I am THINKING and may write more on the topic.
But someone who has had more than two law classes in college and made actual bonafide As, not A MINUSES, should revisit the ancient concept of outlawry, which served the interests of the STATE when states lacked the means to adequately enforce some things, and consider updating it or something to serve not only weak nation-states but the needs of the people in messes like you currently see in Haiti which has been ongoing for years and seems to ONLY be getting worse, not better.
An outlaw, in its original and legal meaning, is a person declared as outside the protection of the law. In pre-modern societies, all legal protection was withdrawn from the criminal, so anyone was legally empowered to persecute or kill them. Outlawry was thus one of the harshest penalties in the legal system.
Footnote
Haiti is an EXAMPLE of an issue that we need to do something about. The most important point of THIS post is that the international community needs to STOP being like the elementary school teachers who made my son's life HARDER when trying to deal with trouble at school and were just another enemy to worry about, not an ally.I am just beginning to read up on the situation in Haiti. The housing situation is really terrible. The international community has been dropping the ball for a lot of years on, for example, implementing hurricane resistant housing in a place where hurricanes are the primary natural disaster interfering with the establishment of effective solutions.
The gangs are likely filling a power vacuum and things might be WORSE without them, not better.
The international community needs to find a means to allow more LOCAL solutions while providing REAL help. The international aid provided in Haiti for housing is a joke and part of the problem, not part of the solution.
There are REAL and serious problems in Haiti, like a serious lack of housing, that NEED to be addressed. International news blaming the gangs may well be a misrespresentation of reality on the ground for a long list of reasons. Real solutions need to be based on a meaningful analysis of the situation, not one biased and sensationalistic article pointing fingers at one group as if that is all there is to it.
In the meantime, I will ADVISE people that if you do NOT have a REAL solution, it's better to stand there and watch it burn than to "put out the fire with gasoline." See also The Hand Licking Incident.