A Quarter Million Haitian Children Are Slaves

If you're a child born to poor parents in Haiti, chances are your career options are slave, slave, or slave. That's because approximately 225,000 children in Haiti live in situations of modern-day slavery. That's nearly a quarter million child slaves in one country. The existence of Haitian child slaves, often referred to as restaveks, has been documented for a long time. However, this is the first time the scope of the issue has truly been understood to be so large.

Restaveks are usually children from extremely poor families who are sent away to work as domestic servants in wealthier homes. The children aren't paid for their work, but provided shelter and a sometimes meager meal supply. In the best case scenarios, families will send their restavek children to school. But restaveks often work long days performing a variety of household tasks for nothing more that a meal or two a day. Two-thirds of restaveks are girls, and they are extremely vulnerable to rape and sexual abuse from the families who house and control them. The life of a restavek child in Haiti often varies between bleak and hopeless, and many children never successfully leave their slave conditions.

This new study of child slavery in Haiti, the largest of its kind to date, was conducted by the Pan American Development Foundation. They found that 22% of children were living away from home, and 30% of households had restavek children in them. The study also uncovered a new trend of movement. While historically, restavek children were sent from rural areas to urban areas, increasingly children are being moved from one urban area to another. Poverty has become a stronger indicator of restavek status than geography.

The system of restaveks in Haiti is strongly rooted in poverty. Poverty pushed families to send children away to work. And desperately trying to remain out of poverty is what pushes the families who take in these children to exploit their labor. While human trafficking is often a demand-driven enterprise, this is a case in which addressing the poverty of the potential supply of victims will seriously reduce the number of trafficked children. While some families might still demand slaves and traffickers will be willing to meet that demand, the scope would be much less without such high poverty levels.

A quarter million child slaves is obscene, especially in a single country. But it's the reality for far too many children in Haiti. In fact, 225,000 too many.

Photo credit: danborder