Estimating Rape in Post Earthquake Haiti: Scaling up Technique

For an explanation of the above photo and visual fake news about Haiti from South Atlantic Press Agency, click here.

This White Paper is important for two reasons.

1) It is more evidence that the 2010-2012 post-earthquake Haiti rape epidemic was contrived by a combination of overly-ambitious activists, aid workers looking for a dramatic cause, shoddy if not fabricated survey data, and excitable journalists.

2) It is an excellent example of Bernard and Killworth’s Scaling-Up technique, a method for estimating unknown populations that the researchers pioneered estimating deaths from the 1985 Mexico earthquake, and later used to estimate populations such as rape victims, illegal immigrants, and  people HIV positive.

The data we used comes from a 1,600 household random survey of the communes of  Leogane and Carrefour, two communes (counties) near to Port-au-Prince that were among those most heavily impacted by the January 12th 2010 earthquake. The work was financed by Care International.

What we found was that the incidence of rape in the three years following the earthquake in partially Leogane–ground 0 for the earthquake–and  heavily urbanized Carrefour, is quite likely 1/4th that the mainland US at the time.

Download the paper here:  Rape_Scaling_Up

Also read here, for a History of Haiti’s Fabricated Rape Epidemics