No Safe Abode for Haiti’s Restavek

By Madiha Naseem for The Toronto Globalist

“Because my mom can’t afford to raise me,” says 13-year-old Mathieu Maignon in his interview with ABC’s Carmen Russell and Dane Liu. After arriving in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, in August of 2006, he describes his daily life as, “I wash dishes, I clean the house, and after that, I sweep the yard.”

In the Haitian society, Mathieu is not living life as a child. Instead, he is one of approximately 300, 000 “restaveks” (a Creole word for “stay with”). Children from impoverished rural areas in Haiti are given away by their parents for domestic servitude to urban families. Since their own parents cannot provide for them, restaveks arrive into a host family with the hope of receiving a better life, education and care in exchange for unpaid labour. The life offered to these innocent visitors, however, is far from the basic care they expected.

Enraged by his treatment as a slave, Jean-Jacques Dessalines led the war against slavery, allowing Haiti to be the first slave-free republic governed by a people of African descent. One would expect a nation founded upon anti-slavery values to condone such behaviour. This is not the case. With an average daily income of less than two dollars a day for most families in Haiti, slavery continues to exist in its de facto form through the restavek system.

Origins of the restavek system date back to early 19th century, when Haitians sought a better life by migrating to Port-au-Prince. The children worked for wealthy families, developing personal bonds and fulfilling relationships. It was not until technological advancements that fewer wealthy families required domestic assistance, leaving the restaveks to work for the middle and lower class urban families.

Today, most restaveks work for families in Cite Soleil, La Saline and other Port-au-Prince towns. These shanty towns are characterized by flimsy tin and plywood shacks, rivulets of raw sewage and violent street gangs. According to a November 2009 report by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)- Haiti Mission, two thirds of the 300, 000 restaveks are girls, among whom most are denied schooling and suffer from malnutrition.

These children are unpaid, undocumented, and unprotected. They are often physically, emotionally, and sexually abused. Often permanently traumatized by being beaten with electrical cords, leather belts and other objects, these children do not have what Prospery Raymond describes as “official existence” in his interview with the BBC.

Raymond, like many other human rights activists, works in Port-au-Prince to provide restaveks with education, food and opportunities to recognize their rights as human beings. He explains to BBC reporter Nick Caistor, “They often don’t have a birth certificate or any proof of who they are, and this makes them even more vulnerable to exploitation.”

As if conditions were not precarious enough, the lives of restaveks along with thousands of wandering Haitian children lie in peril after an earthquake of magnitude 7.0 hit Haiti with full force at 4:53 p.m. on January 12th, 2010. The United Nations (UN) executive summary states that approximately three million people were present in areas strongly affected by the earthquake, with Port-au-Prince being one of the most affected communities. UN surveillance report states, “The streets of Port-au-Prince are filled with people too scared to go back into their damaged homes, sleeping in the open at night amidst the bodies of those killed in the disaster.”

The United States Geological Survey’s maps for the areas hardest hit showed the number of people living in the areas affected by the earthquake to be 3,725,615, including an estimated 495,509 children between the ages of 0 and 5 years. In total, approximately 50% of the affected population comprises Haiti’s second class citizens, i.e. children under the age of 19, many of whom have been killed, orphaned, separated from their families, and left to fend for themselves amidst the horrifying scenes of a devastated land.

This natural disaster has undoubtedly compounded an already unstable Haitian society. Since the exile of Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, political rebellion, internal strife, torture, killings and abuse have been on the rise. Such events have prompted the UN to render the human rights situation in Haiti as “catastrophic.”

The 2009 USAID-Haiti Mission findings attribute the vast majority of rapes, murders and kidnappings of restaveks to armed authorities, politically partisan groups, and gangs. Port-au-Prince, one of the heavily hit regions by the earthquake, was found to have double (16%) the average number of rapes of restaveks than other cities.

With open access to lost children by gangs and other partisan groups as a result of this natural disaster, the safety of these already insecure children is expected to be in greater jeopardy than ever before.

This fear has been raised after UNICEF reported the disappearance of at least 15 children from hospitals after the earthquake, now thought to be victims of child trafficking. BBC’s interview with Margarett Lubin from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Port-au-Prince states, “There is an increasing traffic in children across the border that Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic in the east of island. But those kids have no rights at all in the Dominican Republic, and they are often abused.”

UNICEF reports that even before the earthquake, Haitian children were regularly sent to the Dominican Republic to work in sex tourism, or recruited by armed gangs.

Raymond describes that once restaveks reach 15 years of age, Haitian law requires them to be paid. At this point, the host families provide these kids with the option of either living on the streets or continuing unpaid domestic service. As if street life is any better, former restaveks would face an alternate set of problems with absolutely no protection from traffickers.

After Haiti was hit with successive hurricanes in 2008, UNICEF reported a drastic increase in the number of restaveks within major urban cities. In light of this current disaster, serious concerns are raised about the future of restavek system and its long-lasting implications for the Haitian society. How much worse will this situation get? Can global cooperation aid with the moral, societal, political and economic upheaval of Haiti?

Junior Delusa, a 17-year-old restavek, chose street life over servitude. He worked odd jobs, begged, washed cars and stole to survive. In his interview with the Chicago Tribune, he states, “They [the host family] started humiliating me….Life was unbearable.”

Though the whereabouts of Delusa and thousands of children in Haiti are unknown, the “unbearable” nature of life is certainly an understatement of the real threats facing this neglected population right now.