2/6/2012
UNICEF
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In 2007, 10-year-old Larissa Saint-Claire (NAME CHANGED) lived quietly with her parents in Beaumont, in southwest Haiti, when a visit from one of her sisters changed her life. "At first I was happy to see her,” recalled Larissa. “I quickly became disillusioned because in reality she was telling us about an acquaintance who she suggested I go to live with in Port-au-Prince. My sister said that this woman would put me in school, offer me some nice clothes, and take good care of me." The proposal divided the family. Larissa had no desire to leave her parents, and her father did not want her to go. But her mother was convinced it was a unique opportunity for her daughter to go to school, something her parents could not afford. "I left the next day with my sister. My parents cried. I told my father I did not know when I would come back," Larissa said. Unknowingly, Larissa was trading the safety of her home for the life of a ‘restavek’, a child entrusted to the care of a wealthier family. Restaveks – which in Creole means ‘stay with’ – are part of a deeply-embedded Haitian tradition designed to help poor children and families. In principle, the children are cared for as family members and are enrolled in school in exchange for small services.
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But in reality, children are often forced to work as domestic servants, labouring around the clock without pay, frequently subjected to abuse by their caretakers. They are generally not permitted to attend school, and lack basic necessities such as shoes. There are around 225,000 restaveks in Haiti, although exact numbers are almost impossible to determine given the informal nature of the arrangement. Most come from the countryside and are sent to live with families both in Haiti and in the Dominican Republic. Larissa, now 14, was exploited and abused by her caretakers. She began each day at 4 a.m. by cleaning the floors, making beds, fetching water, cleaning dishes and helping prepare lunch. In the afternoon, she washed dishes, went to the market and sometimes did laundry. Despite her young age, Larissa says she was also tasked with minding the family’s 4-year-old child. Her days ended only after the family went to sleep, when she was finally able to rest on a cloth on the floor. Fetching water from a pump down the street was her most difficult chore. "I had to go in the morning, and often a second time in the afternoon. I was whipped if there was no more water,” she said. “I carried water in a large bucket and a bottle. Weight gave me some pain in the head and chest.”
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At the market, she made friends with other restaveks, and talked with them about the abuse she had suffered. "They said I should ask the woman to send me back to my parents, but again I received the whip for suggesting that,” Larissa said. “I had no way of contacting my parents.” After three years, Larissa built up the courage to leave. “I escaped from the house one night, and I jumped in the first tap-tap [taxi],” she said. “I was in tears. I had no money. Passengers asked me what was happening. They took me to the police." UNICEF is responding to the restavek practice by helping raise awareness of the issue among communities and government services. UNICEF has helped the Haitian government reactivate its Sectoral Working Group on Children in Domesticity. Partners in the group, including UNICEF, the International Organization for Migration, and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour, focus on reuniting restavek children with their families, close relatives or families known by the child. UNICEF is also providing support to institutions taking temporary care of child victims of domestic abuse and trafficking, to ensure these children receive appropriate psychosocial support. "To this day, I still think often about these years of suffering. At night in my dreams, I see my mother’s house. I definitely want to go back,” Larissa said. But memories of hardship have crowded out her memories of a happier childhood – and even the name of the town where her family lives. UNICEF and its partners are working to fill in these gaps and locate her family so she can finally go home.

11/3/2010
United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)
By MP Nunan
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For the children at Foyer l'Escale, a UNICEF-supported children's shelter, performance is a form of therapy.
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VIDEO: UNICEF correspondent MP Nunan reports on the reintegration of unaccompanied 'restavek' children with their families in post-earthquake Haiti. Watch in RealPlayer
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Adolescent girls in traditional costumes come out on a small stage to swirl and sashay to a drumbeat in Haitian style. They're accompanied at times by some of the youngest children, also residents of the shelter, serving as back-up dancers. But the song and dance numbers are punctuated by a certain pathos, as the children take turns at the microphone to tell their stories. Most of the 42 residents now living at Foyer l'Escale are former 'restaveks' – from the French 'rester avec' or 'to stay with' – a term describing children who were given away by their parents to serve as unpaid domestic servants.
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"While they were slapping me, they were cherishing their kids," says a teenage girl. "The housework was mine. Going to the market was mine. Washing and cooking were all my mine. Not going to school – that was me. Even being beaten by someone – that was me." A teenage boy recalls the day when he and his sister were trafficked to the Dominican Republic. "This day was a tragedy for me. Dominican soldiers grabbed us by the shirt. They beat us," he says. "When we arrived there, they made us work as hard as a horse without getting paid. And they wanted to rape my sister and force her into prostitution."
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UNICEF estimates that there are 250, 000 children in Haiti serving as restaveks. The phenomenon is widely believed to have started as a means for poor parents to give their children a better life. "Usually these were children coming from the rural areas who were brought to rich families," explains UNICEF Representative in Haiti Françoise Gruloons-Ackermans. "They were providing services to the families, but they were also given education and food and care. This was how it happened decades ago."
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But all that has changed – and restavek children now serve as unpaid domestic servants, or virtual slaves. "You can just imagine the abuse, the possibility of abuse, the potential of violence that can happen," says Ms. Gruloons-Ackermans. At Foyer l'Escale (or 'Home Stopover'), the emphasis is on reintegrating restavek children with their parents, who often did not know they were placing them into abusive situations. UNICEF also offers financial assistance to families – sometimes in the form of micro-grants for small businesses – so that they do not come under the same pressures to give a child up. Child-protection officers conduct a series of follow-up visits to these families to make sure their children are going to school and being cared for.
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Before the sensitive step of reintegrating a child with his or her family, the parents are interviewed by Foyer l'Escale staffers to determine whether they truly want the child back. Ninety per cent of the time, they do. But sometimes, the realities of raising a child in Haiti make that simply too hard. "There was one case when the parents said, 'No, I don't want the child. I already have nine children. This girl is 13 or 14 now and she's hitting puberty – I'm not interested in those sorts of problems," says UNICEF Child Protection Officer Geslet Bordes. In that case, the girl was welcomed into the home of her cousin. "Most of the parents would rather die than have their kids in an abusive situation," says Mr. Bordes.

6/11/2010
CNN Radio
By Ninette Sosa
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Child slavery has escalated six months after a devastating earthquake demolished the Haitian capital and left a generation of orphans, according to an advocate who works in the Caribbean nation. Jean-Robert Cadet is the author of "Restavek," a book on the plight of Haiti's child slaves. The word, derived from a French expression that means "'stay with," refers to children given by a biological parent to a family for the purpose of doing minor housework in exchange for school, food and housing.
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"Once children enter the family, they become a domestic slave and they are at the mercy of everyone in the house," Cadet said. "The only thing worse is if the child is a girl, because there is sexual abuse and the risk of pregnancy once she reaches puberty." If a girl gets pregnant, she is ousted from the house and sent to the countryside.
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"About 80 percent of the slaves are girls and they are so vulnerable," according to Cadet. Cadet is headed to Haiti on Monday to visit some of the tent camps and monitor treatment of restavek children. The plight and the number of restavek children have increased after the January 12 earthquake, he said.
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"Usually, in times of crisis, restavek children will receive very little food and are exposed to harsher elements than other Haitians," he said. The author said his plan is to ensure camp directors, who are paid to create social programs, are helping children deal with the trauma of the earthquake. Most of the social programs are financed by nongovernmental organizations, such as Red Cross and the United Nations Children's Fund.
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The earthquake last year killed more than 300,000 people, according to the Haitian government, and left almost an entire generation of children homeless and orphaned. "It's these children who will be absorbed into restavek," Cadet said. "Before the earthquake, UNICEF had estimated about 300,000 children were in domestic slavery. I suspect the number will double unless the international community does something drastic, such as push Haiti toward universal education to make sure every child is in school."
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Cadet said he visited some tent camps and witnessed people who offered their neighbor's children to be domestic slaves "I was able to get three of the children and two have come to the U.S." he said. Cadet's passion to rescue children from slavery comes from personal experience. His says his mother died when he was 4, and he was given as a restavek to a Haitian family in the capital, Port-au-Prince.
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By the early 1970s, the family moved to the United States in search of a better life. "Today I have a foundation that tries to put an end to the restavek system and to advocate the demise of child slavery," he said.

By Beverly Bell and Tory Field
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“I’m struggling to end slavery because I know how I suffered,” said Helia Lajeunesse, a former restavèk, child slave, who is now a children’s rights advocate. Today there are an estimated 27 million slaves in the world, according to the research of Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves.[1] This is more than at any time in history, even including during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
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In Haiti, the only nation ever to host a successful slave revolution, 225,000 to 300,000 children[2] live in forced and usually violent servitude in a system known as restavèk, literally “to stay with.” The numbers are at risk of rising dramatically because of the hundreds of thousands of children who lost their parents or were abandoned after the earthquake. In addition to likely trauma, hunger, and health problems, unaccompanied minors are at threat from adults who may take advantage of a source of free labor. Unprotected girls are also at risk of what amounts to sex slavery, as rape of restavèk girls by the men and youth in the household is common.
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The system usually works this way: A parent who cannot afford to feed or educate a child may give him or her to a better-off relative, neighbor, or stranger who promises to provide care and schooling. The families giving up children are usually from the countryside, where poverty is unrelenting. The children are as young as three, with girls between six and 14 years old comprising sixty-five percent of the population.[3]
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Restavèk children toil long hours and rarely go to school. They are regularly abused. They usually eat table scraps or have to scavenge in the streets for their own food, sleep on the floor, and wear cast-off rags. They are not chained or locked up. One reason the children usually stay is the threat of severe punishment – often including beatings - if they are caught trying to escape and are returned to the family. Another reason is that they have no other source of food and shelter. Survival and safety options for street children in Haiti are not good, though some restavèk do escape to live on the streets.
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Alina “Tibebe” Cajuste described her childhood as a restavèk this way: “This is a sad, sad story to the world. A woman who used to come sell in the market told my mother to give me to her. My mother had no support, so she had to. “What did this woman make me do? I had to get up before 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning to make the food, sweep the floor, and wash the car, so that when the family woke up everything would be ready. Then I had to wash dishes, fetch water, and go sell merchandise for her in the countryside. When I came back from the marketplace, I would carry two drums of water on my head, so heavy, to wash up for her. Then I’d go buy things to make dinner. And I couldn’t even eat the same food as her. If she ate rice, I only got cornmeal. I didn’t even wear the same sandals or dresses as her child. My dresses were made out of the scraps of cloth that were left over from what she sold in the marketplace. I couldn’t even sleep in a bed.”
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Among the trials she recounted of her life as a restavèk, Helia Lajeunesse recounted this: “One day I was coming back from delivering food to the child of the house, which I had to carry on my head to her at school every day. There was a man holding a school under a coconut tree. He called to me, ‘Come be part of this school.’ I said, ‘No, I can’t, because when I go home my aunt will beat me.’ He said, ‘You should come.’ I went. Now when I went home, I said, ‘There was a man holding a school, so I attended today.’ The woman said, ‘What? You went to school?’ I said, ‘Yes, and could you please give me a little pencil and a notebook?’ She asked me what I thought I was doing, and started beating me.
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“Poverty and misery made me not know how to read and write, or count in my head, until I was a grown-up. “I escaped three times and went to different homes, four in all. But each time I suffered as badly or worse than before. I was abused so much. Misery was killing me. Still, many years later when Helia’s husband was murdered and she could no longer feed her five children, she said, “I was obliged to give four away, even though the youngest was only three years old. I only kept one who wasn’t even a year old then.”
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Later, however, she went to a child rights training by the grassroots groups Commission of Women Victim to Victim (KOFAVIV). “That gave me consciousness and I went and got my children back. I said to myself, no matter what, I am going to keep my children. Now I’m with my four children [one of her five died in the earthquake]. I’m their mother, I’m their father.”
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The system has long been widely socially accepted, and its neutral-sounding name has rarely been replaced by the more appropriate term of slavery. But efforts are underway to change this. Today Tibebe and Helia are part of a group of restavèk survivors who are raising visibility of and opposition to the system. Their group, KOFAVIV, is among a small but growing child protection network. The two women have traveled as far as Washington, D.C. to speak out. They conduct trainings in children’s rights and have helped organize two marches where thousands of women wore T-shirts saying “I oppose the restavèk system. And you, what are you waiting for?” They are also part of a diverse global movement of people working to supplant commercialization and degradation of human life with dignity and rights.
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For more on the work to end child servitude in Haiti, and how you can help, see the upcoming blog post “A Second Slave Rebellion in Haiti,” on July 15th. Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds,www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

6/10/2010
Cincinatti Enquirere
By Mark Curnutte
mcurnutte@enquirer.com
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Jean-Robert Cadet studies the landscape of his native Haiti and sees 10,000 nonprofit organizations running food programs and other relief efforts. He sees only one of him, a former child slave from the Caribbean nation who survived, got out and now speaks worldwide on behalf of the estimated 300,000 Haitian children trapped in the restavek domestic slavery system.
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His purpose, said Cadet, who lives in Madeira, is the reason he has split from the three-year-old foundation that once bore his name and has started his own organization. "We have a different vision," Cadet said. "They are bricks and mortar. I am advocacy." His new nonprofit is called the Jean-Robert Cadet Foundation: Restavek No More.
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This week, the Blue Ash-based Restavek Foundation did as Cadet asked and removed his likeness and name from its organization and changed its name to the Restavek Freedom Foundation. It formerly was called the Jean R. Cadet Restavek Foundation. Restavek is a French term, the meaning of which, "staying with," is an attempt to conceal the true nature of the arrangement.
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Primarily girls between the ages of 5 and 15, restavek children are kept in domestic servitude, rarely allowed to attend school and often are forced to live on the fringe of the owner family, sleeping outside and left to eat alone. Joan Conn, director of Restavek Freedom, and her husband, Ray Conn, were inspired by Cadet's story to join him in creating the foundation in 2007. The split appears amicable.
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"We wish Jean-Robert the best and will continue to focus on our work with restavek children," Joan Conn said. "Our staff in Haiti is very committed to this work and we have many things going at the moment to work at the root of this system. The facts would show that our programs working with restavek children have grown since the earthquake." Restavek Freedom remains engaged in relief efforts undertaken immediately after the 7.0-magnitude quake shook Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12. The official death toll has stood at 230,000 for several weeks but is expected to exceed 500,000.
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The organization distributes food to schools in areas otherwise not served and is rebuilding security walls and school buildings in efforts to get children back into class. It has eight child advocates working in Port-au-Prince to try to identify enslaved children and convince owners to allow them to attend school. Cadet said the time is right for him to strike harder against the restavek system because of the world's increased attention on Haiti since the earthquake. His new website is jeanrcadet.org.
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He said he will leverage international pressure on Haiti's government to attempt to create a mandatory public school system that guarantees each Haitian child the right to attend school and a national registry that keeps track of every child. Only 30 percent of children under 18 attend school in Haiti, and most of them are enrolled in foreign-run religious schools. "The only way to eliminate damaged children in Haiti is to get children in school and allow them to enjoy childhood," said Cadet, who is writing a sequel to his 1998 autobiography, "Restavec," and who has appeared on "60 Minutes" and "Oprah."
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In short, Cadet said, Haiti needs to move from being a foreign-dependent welfare nation to independent self-determination by educating children and developing new leadership. Cadet is allied with former U.S. President Bill Clinton in efforts to help Haitians rebuild their nation. Cadet has met with several U.S. lawmakers and State Department leaders and plans a visit to France, where his book is available in French.
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One new supporter is Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La. "I join Mr. Cadet in his concern for the welfare of Haiti's children, and in particular those who are living as restaveks," Landrieu told the Enquirer. "The children of Haiti not only comprise over 50 percent of the population, but 100 percent of their country's' future. More needs to be done to support poor families in Haiti so they do not feel forced to place their children in these harmful situations."
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Families often will give their children away under the false promise that they will be educated. Cadet said he has dedicated his life to ending the restavek system, in spite of the denials of Haiti's leaders that the practice exists. "You wouldn't have asked Jefferson Davis in the 1800s if slavery existed here, you would ask Frederick Douglass," Cadet said. "This is my passion, my life's work. I will succeed."

I really hate slavery and that its still going on at this day. For the people that laugh at the people for being poor or have not as good cloths. Then think to yourself, what if YOU were that poor person and YOU were laughed at because you dont have money and not the new cloths and shoes that just came out. To me I dont think its very funny, its serious to most people.

3/26/2010
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The DNA Foundation -- a not-for-profit organization initiated in January by Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher -- has announced plans to end child slavery in Haiti by banning a centuries old practice that allows the buying and selling of children for labor purposes.
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There are approximately 300,000 "restavec" children in Haiti -- those who are sent from their own family to live with another, often for economic reasons. Too often, these children are sold for money and forced to do housework and sleep on the floor.
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Ashton Kutcher asserted that making this issue known during the reconstruction process is imperative to assuring that these children are released from slavery. "We call on donor governments, foundations and non-governmental organizations to demand that child slavery be banned as they fund the $11.5 billion that the Haitian government has requested," he said. "We will work to educate all of the major donors and members of the United States Congress on this opportunity." The DNA Foundation is committed to ending child sex slavery around the world and rehabilitating victims of human trafficking.

Reuters
By Jim Loney
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Living in a tent after an earthquake left a million Haitians in the streets, Melila Thelusma says she cannot support her two daughters and is ready to give them away to foreigners if she can find a good home for them. Despite her desperation, Thelusma said she would never turn 11-year-old Gaelle and 6-year-old Christelle over to a Haitian family, as tens of thousands of other poor parents have done.
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"Not a Haitian family. Haitians will make them suffer," Thelusma, 39, said. "They ... force the child to work like a animal. They don't really take care of them." Deeply ingrained in the culture of the impoverished former slave colony, the practice of poor families giving away children to wealthier acquaintances or relatives is known in the native Creole as "restavek," from the French words rester avec, or "to stay with."
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The children, they said, are taken in as servants, forced to work without pay, isolated from other children in the household and seldom sent to school. "A restavek is a child placed in domestic slavery," said Jean-Robert Cadet, a former restavek who now runs a foundation to improve the lives of restavek children (www.restavekfreedom.org).
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After the January 12 earthquake, the Haitian government warned that child traffickers could take advantage of the ensuing chaos to prey on vulnerable children. The well-publicized drama surrounding 10 US missionaries caught trying to spirit 33 children over the border seemed to reinforce the threat. But critics say tens of thousands of Haitian children have been freely given by their own parents to a life of slavery within Haiti.
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A 2002 study for UNICEF and other organizations by Norway's Fafo Institute for Applied Social Science said there were 173,000 restavek children, more than 8 percent of the population between 5 and 17. Cadet believes there are more than 300,000.
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"When I was a child, the family basically owned me," said Cadet, whose mother died young. He was given away to a wealthy family when he was four.
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"I grew up sleeping under the kitchen table. I got up early, swept the yard, washed the car, fetched water, emptied the chamber pot. I went to the market, bathed the children, walked the children to school and I couldn't come to school," he said. "I never ate with the family. I was abused physically. I was abused emotionally with bad words."
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The restavek tradition may date to the time when Haiti was a French slave colony, when the children of slaves worked as domestics in the home of the master. Cadet said a relic of that era, a twisted cowhide whip known in Creole as a rigwaz, is still used to beat restaveks. "It's the same whip that the French used during colonial times to beat slaves," he said. "You can buy them in the markets (in Port-au-Prince) today."
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The restavek tradition lives on in part because it is accepted, or at least tolerated, in Haitian culture. Some families school and feed their restavek children, and some argue the children would die if they remained with their poor parents.
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A family that has taken in a restavek child, Cadet said, will never admit to mistreating that child, and the government is reluctant to interfere in domestic affairs. Marie Regine Joseph Pierre calls her 16-year-old charge, Rosaline, her cousin, and says she took in the girl when she was eight.
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Rosaline lives "like brothers and sisters" with Pierre's own children, she says, and goes to school. "My behavior with them, it's like a mother," she said. Expatriates have carried restavek traditions to the United States, Two years ago, a mother and her adult daughter were convicted in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, of keeping a Haitian teenager as their slave for six years.
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The girl, Simone Celestin, described in court how she was beaten, forced to sleep on the floor and bathe from a bucket. Although Haiti is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Caroline Bakker, a child protection adviser for UNICEF, said it has no laws to protect restavek children.
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Haiti needs new laws to protect children in domestic servitude from illegal labor practices, as well as social service programs to help parents who might otherwise give their children away.
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"It should go hand in hand, protection and criminalization," she said. "Set up programs ... so that those families are able to keep those children with them, in their family, so that they can go to school (and) have a normal life with their families."
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Jean-Robert Cadet said he sang along with his host family at the birthdays of their children, but never knew how old he was and believed that restaveks did not have birthdays. "It's like a restavek child is not really a person. It's almost like you are disposable cloth," he said. "They use you and they throw you away."

By Shauna Steigerwald | The Enquirer | ShareThis
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Jean-Robert Cadet, a former “restavec” or child slave in Haiti, recently paid a visit to the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students at St. Aloysius Gonzaga School in Bridgetown. During his visit, Cadet gave students at the Green Township school a firsthand account of his childhood in Haiti and his subsequent efforts to end child slavery there. A Cincinnati resident and the author of “Restavec: From Haitian Slave to Middle-Class American,” Cadet has been featured on CNN, “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and elsewhere, and he has spoken throughout the country and at the United Nations to raise awareness about restavecs in Haiti.
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In addition, he founded the Jean R. Cadet Restavec Foundation to raise awareness about and bring an end to child slavery in Haiti. Kathy Kremer, who teaches seventh- and eighth-grade religion and social studies at St. Al’s, organized the visit after hearing Cadet speak at Crossroads church in Oakley. Touched by his message, she wanted to share it with her students.
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“Hearing it from me is secondhand,” she said. “To hear it from him and to hear his experiences, I think really made an impression on them.” After Cadet’s talk, the students presented him with a check for $169 to support his foundation’s work, which includes paying for schooling for restavecs. Students raised the funds by paying 50 cents to $1 to be out of uniform during a school day in November.
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Kremer hopes Cadet’s visit will have a long-lasting impact on her students. Already, she said, students have been talking about how else they can help his foundation, and they’re considering future fundraising activities. “I think it opened their eyes to the fact that even in 2009, the rest of the world isn’t as neat and clean as their world,” she said of Cadet’s visit.

Date: 18 Nov 2009
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Authorities in Haiti must enact legislation to protect children working as domestic help in conditions that amount to slavery, said Amnesty International ahead of Universal Children's Day.
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Amnesty International launched a campaign to press the government in Haiti to enact measures to protect child domestic workers from abuse, ill-treatment and exploitation. Many Haitian families, too poor to support their children, are forced to send them to work as domestic help. The children -- most of them girls -- end up working long hours cleaning, cooking, fetching water for the whole household and looking after other children in the family.
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"Most child domestic workers in Haiti live as virtual slaves," said Gerardo Ducos, Haiti researcher at Amnesty International. "They work in inhuman conditions, suffering violence and abuse by their hosts, only for a plate of food."
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UNICEF estimated that there were as many as 100,000 girl domestic workers in Haiti in 2007. Trapped in a situation of total dependence, many girls are compelled to put up with violence and sexual abuse. Some flee the employer or host family and live on the streets where they may have no option but to sell their bodies for sex in order to survive.
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15-year-old Régina told Amnesty International that when she was 10, she was sent to work as a domestic servant, but she ran away because the beatings became unbearable. She spent the next four years at Foyer Maurice Sixto, a shelter for children who have been domestic workers. During that time she was able to go to school. When she turned 14, Régina went back home, were she suffered further abuse.
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"Girls in Haiti are trapped in a spiral of poverty and violence," said Gerardo Ducos. "The eradication of this modern form of slavery is the only way to protect the rights of thousands of children."
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Haitian laws do not provide a protective framework for children. In 2003, the Law for the prohibition and elimination of all kind of abuses, violence and inhuman treatment of children came into force. This law removed a chapter of the Labor Code that regulated the work of children in domestic service but failed to ban the practice of children in domestic service.
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The Code had prohibited the "employment" of children under 12 as domestic workers and had provided guarantees that those aged over 15 would receive a salary for their work. The Code required foster families, among other things, to request authorization from the Institute of Social Welfare and Research if they wished to employ a child as domestic worker.
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"Ahead of Universal Children's Day, Haiti should step up its commitment to the protection of girl domestic workers and take concrete steps to improve their situation," said Gerardo Ducos.
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See details on Amnesty International's campaign "Overcoming poverty and abuse: Protecting girls in domestic service in Haiti".

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Poverty has forced at least 225,000 children in Haiti's cities into slavery as unpaid household servants, far more than previously thought, a report said Tuesday. The Pan American Development Foundation's report also said some of those children - mostly young girls - suffer sexual, psychological and physical abuse while toiling in extreme hardship.
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The report recommends Haiti's government and international donors focus efforts on educating the poor and expanding social services such as shelters for girls, who make up an estimated two-thirds of the child servant population. Young servants are known as "restavek" - Haitian Creole for "stays with" - and their plight is both widely known and a source of great shame in the Caribbean nation that was founded by a slave revolt more than 200 years ago.
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Researchers said the practice is so common that almost half of 257 children interviewed in the sprawling Port-au-Prince shantytown of Cite Soleil were household slaves. Most are sent by parents who cannot afford to care for them to families just slightly better off. Researchers found 11 percent of families that have a restavek have sent their own children into domestic servitude elsewhere.
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Despite growing attention to the problem, researchers said their sources were unaware of any prosecutions of cases involving trafficking children or using them as unpaid servants in this deeply poor nation of more than 9 million people. Glenn Smucker, one of the report's authors and a cultural anthropologist known for extensive work on Haiti, said he believes the number of restavek children is increasing proportionally with the population of Port-au-Prince as more migrants flee rural poverty to live in the capital.
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The researchers surveyed more than 1,400 random households in five Haitian urban areas in late 2007 and early 2008, with funding help from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
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The most widely used previous number for restaveks came from a 2002 UNICEF survey, which estimated there were 172,000. The new report used a broader counting system to include children related to household owners but still living in servitude, such as nieces or cousins, and as well as "boarders" living temporarily with another family but are still forced to provide labor.
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"Most people working with restavek children ... think that these numbers, both ours and UNICEF's, are actually underestimating the problem," said Herve Razafimbahini, the Pan American Development Foundation's program director in Haiti.
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He called for Haitian officials to conduct a national survey to analyze the full scope of the problem, including in rural areas. Officials with the Ministry of Social Affairs could not be reached for comment Tuesday. Associated Press writers Evens Sanon reported this story from Port-Au-Prince and Jonathan M. Katz reported from San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Many children in the town of Gonaives rely on handouts from the UN for their drinking water.
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Gonaives, Haiti.- Haiti is not a pleasant place to be a child. While over two thirds of the country’s inhabitants are estimated to be living below the poverty line it is the young who suffer most. The figures make for grim reading. With an under-five mortality rate of 120 in every 1,000 live births over 10% of Haitians never see their 5th birthday. A shocking 40% of children under ten have no access to basic health services and over half of those under five suffer from anemia or malnutrition. On top of this the UN estimates that 17,000 Haitian children are living with HIV/AIDS, and hundreds of thousands in conditions of slavery. The state is incapable of providing these children with the protection and support they so desperately require. State institutions from the National Police to the Judicial and corrections systems are unable to effectively face up to the enormous challenges the country now faces. With little effective policing children have become attractive targets for a wide array of criminal acts. The UN reports that in the last six months 84 were the victims of rape cases while human trafficking and abuse of all sorts remain prevalent.
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Inevitably in such conditions many children, with so little to lose, have turned to crime themselves. Those that get caught end up in horrendously overcrowded prisons where they languish, in some cases for years, before standing trial. Of 332 minors in detention at the time of the UN’s last report to the Security Council a staggering 284 had yet to face trial. The United Nations has worked hard in conjunction with Haitian security forces to resolve the problem and charities like UNICEF, who offer free legal advice to children also play their part but alone there is little they can do.
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To compound these problems is the issue of children involved in armed conflict, a legacy of Haiti’s recent upheavals. Minors are exploited by myriad criminal groups who use them in kidnappings, lootings and gun-running operations as well as at roadblocks and protests and even the attempt to breach the presidential palace last spring. During the conflict children were recruited by multiple armed groups and put to a variety of uses. In one particularly macabre case children were equipped with replica weapons and sent to approach UN checkpoints brandishing them in an attempt to spark violence and civil unrest.
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However since the cessation of open hostilities in the country focus has returned to a problem that has plagued Haiti for years: the phenomenon of ‘Restaveks’. In what can only be described as a form of slavery children from impoverished families are given away by their parents to work in another household. The hope for parents is that the child will receive an education and have a better life than they could have had at home but in reality the restaveks usually spend their days in hard labour for which they are not paid, they are denied an education and suffer frequent abuse. UNICEF estimates that there are up to 300,000 restavek children currently living in domestic servitude despite Haiti’s adoption of two UN resolutions banning child labour. Of these, figures suggest that over half have been physically or sexually abused.
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Part of the problem is the country’s dysfunctional education system which lies in tatters after decades of poverty and conflict. Only about half of primary-school-age children attend school and according to a devastating report by the United Nations Children’s Fund, less than 2% finish secondary school. For many families the problem is an economic one. While state schools are supposed to be free many parents simply struggle to pay for books and uniforms for their children. Others are kept at home to work for their parents, exacerbating the vicious cycle of poverty gripping rural Haiti.
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Efforts are being made to address the problem both by the Haitian government and the international community. Ironically the state already has several institutions in place that should prevent such abuse of children’s rights. There has for example, been a special Children’s Tribunal in Port au Prince ever since 1961 yet minors continue to waste away behind bars waiting to face trial. The Haitian National Police (PNH) has also been working to rectify the problem by building up its Child Protection Brigade with the help of UNICEF and the United Nations Mission for the Stabilization of Haiti (MINUSTAH) who recently trained 70 more officers. The UN in particular has taken significant steps towards improving the situation including the creation of a special Child Protection Unit within their own structure, whose job it is to monitor the current situation and offer advice and support to the Haitian authorities. They have also been working to provide extra support for children who have been victims of sexual abuse.
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But despite these efforts the systematic neglect of children’s rights in Haiti remains chronic and is a direct contravention of the UN Convention on Children’s Rights which the country ratified in 1994. How long must the children of Haiti wait before their government steps up to the challenges it set itself by adopting the convention and puts an end to the suffering?
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If you want to help Unicef in their fight against injustice in Haiti please follow the link below:
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http://www.supportunicef.org/site/pp.asp?c=9fLEJSOALpE&b=1023561

The brutal life of Haiti's child slaves
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By Mike Thomson
Today programme
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As soon as dawn breaks in Port-au-Prince the first children appear, staggering under the weight of five-gallon buckets of water. The water carriers, many as young as 6-years-old, are some of the thousands of children living as virtual child slaves in the country. Given away to other families by parents too poor to feed and clothe them, they cook, clean and fetch water without any payment.
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Under what is known as the restavek system, the children are supposed to get food, shelter and a place at school in return. But for many, the reality is very different. "Sometimes they beat me with lengths of electrical cable and sometimes they punch me," says 14-year-old restavek Jenette.
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"I was grinding a coconut and I wasn't doing it very well so they took a knife and cut me with it," she says. "My mother is dead and my father doesn't care for me. I would like to run away but I have nowhere to go."
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Unicef estimates that there could be as many as 300,000 restavek children in Haiti, thousands living with the constant threat of violence. "There is physical abuse, psychological abuse and there are cases of rape, and there are children who actually die from the abuses," says Julie Bergeron, Unicef head of child protection in Haiti.
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She says that parents are often unaware of how their children are being treated. "Someone approaching the family will often say to parents that their child will have a better life," she says. "And often the parents do not have any feedback, they don't know what is happening.
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Former restavek Jean Robert Cadet campaigns against child slavery "If they do have, it is through he intermediate, and they will say 'your child is doing fine'. So the parents have no clue." Jean Robert Cadet, founder of the Restavek Foundation, knows the life of what he describes as "child slavery" only too well. At the age of four he was given to another family soon after his mother died. For the next 16 years he slept under a kitchen table, was forbidden to smile, laugh or speak unless spoken to, and endured sexual abuse and savage beatings.
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Thirty years later, he says, the abuse of restavek children in Haiti continues. "They use a cow hide whip. One hit will split your skin open," he says.
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"Some families who own these children, they still use cheese graters - you will find they have two of them. "One for the normal cooking in the kitchen, and if they have an old rusty one, they use it to punish the child. The child has to kneel on a cheese grater after the beating."
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Deep in the Haitian countryside, two hours by car from the capital, a ten-year-old boy sits stiffly on a small wooden chair. Sometimes I look at other children around me and I wish I was like them
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Clad in a freshly washed white shirt and dark trousers, the boy has just been returned to his parents, eight days after running away from the family he was given to. His mother smiles, constantly looking from me to him as I ask how she came to part with her son. Suddenly, my translator Mario halts the interview. "She's completely confused," he says. "She thinks that we are the ones who are interested in the child."
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So that is why young Jean is dressed so smartly. But after explaining that I am not there to take him away, Jean's mother, who has six other children, looks almost disappointed. "It is very difficult, very difficult indeed for me to feed the children. My husband is in prison and I have to rely on help from friends and neighbours," she says.
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"If someone wants to come and take the child, they can come and take him. "I am concerned about the state of my children. They don't even have proper cloths to wear. None of them are in school, I simply don't have the money to send them there."
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The government social worker who helped return Jean to his family later warned his mother and her neighbours that the restavek system is now illegal in Haiti. The Haiti's parliament ratified two UN conventions banning child labour in 2007. But with little enforcement of the law, the system continues unabated.
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There are projects in Haiti to alleviate the suffering of the restavek children. Disparate poverty in rural Haiti fuels child slavery
At the Foyer Maurice Sixto School, 200 restavek children are given an education inbetween their daily chores. As soon as lessons are over they return to their life of bondage.
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The School's Director, Granpierre Jeremie, says that abuse is common among the children who come to the school. "We have a lot of children that come here covered in bandages. They have wounds all over their bodies," she says. "We pray that this system will come to an end. It is bad for the children and bad for the future of our country." But with deep poverty still gripping Haiti and so many parents unable to cope, prayers alone are not enough.
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"Sometimes I look at other children around me and I wish I was like them," says 14-year-old restavek Jenette. "I dream about that."
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Some of the names in this report have been changed to protect participants' anonymity.

I agree with you Peter, I went to Haiti on my own to help in an orphanage, on my second evening there, I heard a child of 12 years old( he is in the orphanage since he is 4 years old) scream, when I went to see what was happening, I realized he was being whipped. I was then told to go back in my room and that i was in my country. i returned 3 more times and saw more mistreatment...there was nothing I could do to stop it. Now, my security is no longer assured, since I expressed my anger to the director. I tried to get others to get involved. I even had a friend which fell asleep as I was telling her about it. No one wants to get involved. Got in touch with a few journalist...not interested either.My next move is to get in touch with our Governor General and see what she can do to assure my safety in denouncing this abuse of little children and babies and freeing them.

We have to look at every aspect of slavery among Haitian people to acquire freedom categorically. In Haitian communities in Haiti child slavery is indeed blatant, but so is the enslavement of adults who grew up as slaves. This slave system extends to the United States and is a secret practice among families. Depending on the cruelty of the mistress, certain Haitian adults in Haiti and abroad may find themselves socially murdered by the barriers of their enslavement. Please read further by visiting www.claudineetienne.com.

I too saw the CNN special on slavery and was shocked to see that it still exists in this day and age. The truly sad part is that one human can treat another worse than we treat our dogs. I would love to adopt a restavec and see that she gets an education, a decent meal and some real heartfelt hugs, lots of hugs.

I found the CNN report to be an exaggeration of the restavek and it shows a poor understanding of the Haitian culture. Restaveks are kids that lived in the province, their parents either cannot afford to take care of them or provide them with an education so they send them to the city to a friend/family member where they stay. In exchange for their room and board they are required to do chores around the house, cooking, cleaning, wash clothes.

In a lot of cases these kids do get mistreated. They are treated less than the people in the house. In some cases, they are abused. I am not saying Restavek is a good thing but it's a Haitian solution to poor economic activity and opportunity in the provinces. Instead of crying about it, and putting up NGOs that will provide programs that will NOT be sustainable why not look for ways to increase economic activities in the provinces. If you provide opportunities to the people in the provinces, you will not see kids going to the cities to be restaveks.

These people that are putting up NGOs, once they run out of money, they are gone and the kids are in a worst shape than they were before.

These do-gooders should go to Haiti, speak to the Haitians that are in these situations and try to understand what is going on in the society before passing judgment. All these BAND-AID they are providing to Haiti has not help. I know they mean well but they have to try to understand the problem and understand the cause before throwing a bunch of money out that will not benefit the intended recipient.

After watching the CNN report on this version of modern-day slavery in Haiti, I am sickened to think that Canada gives more than $100+ million in aid to Haiti each year. My vocabulary is too limited to express my anger.

With that said, I'm not surprised since we have one of the weakest world leaders on the planet in Stephen Harper and a Haitian as a Govenor General. Imagine, we are having conversations about slavery in 2009. Simply unbelievable.

The Jean-Robert Cadet Restavec Foundation organized a one-day conference on May 23, 2009 to highlight the plight of restavek children and gain greater commitment from the assembled audience to act in unison towards the elimination of the system. I participated as a panel moderator. My colleague
Anna Grimaldi Colomer who has long labored to raise awareness of the issue internationally and campaigned for coordinated action of all allied organizations on this subject filed the following report which was printed last month in the Puerto Rico Daily Sun. We reprint it with her permission.

On May 23, 2009 more than 500 people gathered in Port-au-Prince, Haiti to hold a national dialog on the status of the Haitian child known as "restavek". The Jean Robert Cadet Foundation and The Maurice Sixto
Foundation sponsored the conference, "Mwen Se Ayiti Tou/I Am Haiti Too". (www.restavecfreedom.org) The exceptional organization as shown in the timely flow of the conferences, panel discussions, musical presentations and speeches was the result of more than six months of meticulous research, planning, preparation, coordination, partnerships and team building.
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The subject was examined under four lenses: Legal and Law Enforcement, Psychological and Social Impact, the Role of the Religious Community and Current Initiatives. For those that doubted that this was possible to do in Haiti - to bring a wide variety of people together to talk on a very sensitive and taboo subject, to find common grounds and set future goals
together- they can now put that concern to rest. This encounter was another building block in the foundation and network to defend children's rights and
to end exploitative and hazardous child labor.
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It was a critical, overdue and much needed next step to raise the national consciousness and to continue the struggle of protecting the childhood of hundreds of thousands of Haitian children.
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The conference honored the pioneer work of Maurice Sixto by inviting his widow to address the participants. Recalling Maurice's recording of "Ti
Santaniz" was a painful reminder that more than 40 years have passed since these insightful narratives on the harmful cultural practice (HCP) aired on
radio and records. Such harmful traditional practices (HTP) are widespread in all societies and are so tightly woven in the fabric of society that it becomes impossible to see them as anything other than part of normal life. If they are recognized at all, they are seen as unfortunate situations that are inevitable under the surrounding circumstances and environment. If they are recognized as wrong, there is a sense of hopelessness in seeking solutions especially on the national level. This practice that was once seen as a solution to poverty is now understood to not only perpetuate it but to entrench it even more deeply.
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Restavek is not a singular concept but a totality of conditions, and for this reason many continue to engage in defining and defending the practice
of taking in someone else's child "to stay with" another family. The arrangement is as diverse as the families who take in these children. Some adults and children look back on the experience as a positive one: they were able to go to school, eat daily meals and had some opportunities they would not have had otherwise. For some restaveks, the practice was a form of kinship care, foster care, in-formal or formal adoptions and provided them with some sense of family life.
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The individuals and groups that are speaking out are doing so on behalf of the vast majority of children that are the kind of restaveks that Jean Robert Cadet so vividly describes in his memoirs "RESTAVEK: From Haitian Child Slave to Middle Class American". What distinguishes restavek children from foster children is their treatment: the degradation, the lack of
respect for their inherent dignity, value and rights.
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The flagrant violations of their most basic human rights and the violence they endure sabotage early childhood development and their personhood. They are
stigmatized and an outcast social class. Over the past decades there has been a shift in the profile of the families who take in these children. Most live in radical poverty themselves, have been victims of violence and depravation and are looking for survival strategies for their own families. It is the critical need for free labor that drives them to take in a child. Haiti ratified The United Nation's Convention of the Child in 1994 (www.crin.org)
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Hope was high and international and local agencies worked as a coalition to widely disseminate this new convention, to educate, advocate and defend the
rights it articulated. Civil strife, political unrest, corruption, and embargos were just some of the setbacks experienced during these years. In
Haiti's report to the CRC monitoring committee the government was cited as being deficient in meeting its obligation to children as articulated and
agreed upon in the Convention.
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The situation of the child domestic worker/servant/slave was cited multiple times. The linkage to forced labor, organized trafficking and contemporary forms of slavery were being highlighted around the world. The fact that so little has been achieved by
the government, intergovernmental agencies and the major international agencies to impact the restavek system is shameful.
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The "I Am Haiti Too" conference made reference to this but also highlighted the very good projects such as Foyer Maurice Sixto, Mouvman Vin Plis Moun,
Limyè Lavi Foundation and The Matènwa Community Learning Center and showed what is possible. The call for change was directed to the individual. It
called for all members of society to speak out and stand up for these children, to become advocates and activists in order to bring an end to the
restavek system.
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The panelists emphasized that true change comes when values shift and behaviors change. The government needs to meet its legal obligations but its failure to do so cannot excuse one from influencing the
community by changing one's own and one's family's practices. As Pastor Shiba said "If you can't be a star in the sky be a lamp in your own home".
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Violence has always been a part of Haitian society and to break this culture of violence will require the engagement and deep commitment of all institutions and individuals. The toll that violence takes on children and a nation is well documented. It wastes human capital and impedes progress and development on all levels.
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What needs to be done now to distinguish "I Am Haiti Too" from other conferences that made no significant change? What needs to be done to make it a pivotal meeting, a catalyst for collective action, and one that will unite and serve as a tipping point in this lethargic movement?
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It will take leadership, authentic engagement, commitment, strategic alliances,resources, inclusive participation, shared learning and time. In order to
engage others there must be a clear vision and a viable course of action for a broad coalition. Sister Martha said, "I love to live in hope!" Most people
do. Real hope has action behind it. I hope that the time has finally come to seriously work on transforming the lives of the restaveks and to put this harmful cultural practice that Maurice Sixto spoke about more than 40 years ago to its final rest.
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Anna Grimaldi Colomer
Teaching for Tomorrow
annagc@coqui.net
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Jocelyn (Juny) McCalla
CEO | JMC Strategies LLC
PO Box 1143 Maplewood, NJ 07040
Phone: 862.452.7196 | Email: jmccalla@jmcstrategies.com
Website: http://jmcstrategies.com