Displacement, Gendered Harm, and the Normalization of Crisis in Port-au-Prince, Haiti

The displacement crisis in Haiti reached record highs in 2025, with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reporting 1.4 million people internally displaced by violence. In the same year, UNICEF warned that the number of children displaced by violence in the country had nearly doubled, reaching 680,000 at the end of 2025. Despite expanding and intensifying violence outside Port-au-Prince, the highest cumulative incidence of protection harm continues to be in Haiti’s capital, where displaced women and children are at particular risk.

This report synthesizes findings from 114 structured surveys and 20 key informant interviews (KIIs) conducted across five internally displaced person (IDP) camp sites in Port-au-Prince. The data suggest that life inside IDP sites is defined less by access to temporary shelter and more by ongoing exposure to violence, high rates of gender-based violence (GBV), near-total livelihood collapse, and extreme food insecurity, all compounded by weak reporting mechanisms and inadequate protective infrastructure.

Survey results indicate that 95.6% of respondents do not feel their site is secure, and only 4.4% feel a sense of security. Three in ten women (30.7%) say they have experienced physical or sexual violence inside the IDP site, and two thirds note an absence of mechanisms for reporting such violence. Nearly all respondents report suffering economic collapse after their displacement (99.1% have no income) and now face severe food deprivation (96.5% of women and 87.5% of children eat fewer than two meals a day).

The humanitarian significance of these findings is twofold. First, the data indicate that IDP sites in Port-au-Prince are currently functioning as risk environments rather than protective spaces, particularly in the case of adolescent girls, women-headed households, or children experiencing chronic hunger and disrupted education. Second, the baseline data provides operationally relevant insight into how harm is produced within displacement settings (e.g. due to scarcity, coercion, lack of privacy, weak accountability), filling a persistent gap in humanitarian reporting on Haiti, which is all too often dominated by a macro-level enumeration of displacement figures and access constraints.