Haitian Children Suffer through Servitude to Survive
by Clinton Dudley
March 2010
Ever since the 1980’s Haiti’s economy has been in shambles. It was named the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and the 27th poorest nation in the world. It was poor in the ‘80’s and is even poorer today. The Haitian economy was once dominated by agriculture, but due to the exploitation of Haiti’s few natural resources, farming’s influence sharply dropped. Tourism was also a big money earner in Haiti, especially during the ‘70’s. However, civil unrest and the belief that Haiti was the starting point of the AIDS virus caused tourism in Haiti to all but disappear. Poor leadership also resulted in the utter poverty that exists in Haiti today. Haiti is rigidly divided into ethnically based classes. “The mulatto elite dominated the capital, showed little interest in the countryside, and had outright disdain for the black peasantry.”1 There is a general hate between the ruling class and the peasant majority of the country. All of these factors lead to the utter economic disparity of about 99% of the Haitian population. Nearly 1% of the population has 45% of the wealth. Most of Haiti’s income comes from foreign aid from other countries.
Haiti’s incredibly poor inhabitants are desperate for money, food, and shelter. Many families cannot afford to feed everyone, especially their children. Those blessed with a home and with a job work for very little and in horrible conditions. Unfortunately there are families in Haiti that are not so lucky. Many parents cannot afford to support all of their children and so they are forced to sell them into slavery so they will have food and a roof over their heads. “Sent to the slums of the Haitian capital when she was 9 years old by parents unable to feed her, Madeleine had been delivered by a trader into a life of unpaid domestic servitude in exchange for food and shelter. Like an estimated 300,000 other children in this poorest of Western countries, she had no alternative except homelessness and hunger.”2 Madeleine and the 300,00 children like her move from the countryside to the harsh urban cities to become slaves for the sole purpose of survival. It is either slavery or death in the dirty streets. Child slavery is so popular in Haiti mostly because children are easily persuaded to do most anything. “‘Most of these patrons want someone they can have do anything they need done without the conditions that come with employing an adult domestic,’ . . . ‘With kids, there are no limits. They have no rights and can be made to do anything. They're not just slaves to the parents but to the patrons' children as well.’” 2
These children are called retaveks from the French, rester avec, which means to stay with. “[The] restaveks first appeared in the capital in the 1920s and 1930s, when wealthy families, as ‘an act of solidarity’ with the rural poor, offered shelter and education in exchange for domestic labor, explains Wenes Jeanty, director of the Maurice Sixto program, named for a playwright who first exposed the plight of the restaveks in the 1960s.” 2 As the rich get richer and poor get poorer in Haiti, more and more children are flocking to the cities from the rural parts of the countryside. Many restaveks are drawn in by the hope for education. However, since most of the people they end up working for today are not rich, but just less poor than they are, the children usually do not end up with much of an education.
These children forced into servitude are treated very badly by their “patrons.” They are trained from an early age to be subservient and to take orders (and beatings) obediently and without question. They unsurprisingly have generally low self esteem through no fault of their own. They are barely treated like humans and more like livestock or house pets. “‘When kids come from the provinces to the city, the families treat them like slaves, like lower life forms,’ says Patrick Bernard, who has worked at the Foyer Maurice Sixto refuge in the sprawling Carrefour slum for seven years. ‘That reaffirms their sense of inferiority, that they are treated like property and not people.’”2 Children like Madeleine are subject to regular beatings for the most minor of offenses, some of which are not really offenses at all. “Madeleine Vilma describes the beating that drove her to the streets as if she deserved it. ‘I made them mad at me,’ the skinny 15-year-old recalls of the two women who had paid a [small price] for her six years ago and then put her to work as a maid. ‘I broke the heel off my shoe, so they beat me with their sandals.’ Their anger not fully vented, the women she called Auntie and Maman then singed her chest and arms with jolts from a frayed electrical cord, Madeleine recounts, rocking and shifting her legs at the memory. ‘They wanted to mark me so that I would remember.’” 2
How does the Haitian government feel about this horrendous injustice? The US Justice Dept. has accused Haiti’s government of tolerating the trafficking and abuse of child slaves, but of course, their government denies this vigorously. A representative of the Haitian government has made assurances that Parliament has taken legislative action to ban domestic servitude of children younger than twelve years of age and to ensure that the youths get educated. This may be true, but these restrictions are not even being enforced and the Social Affairs Office of Haiti acknowledges this fact. The impoverished children of Haiti have no significant refuge to speak of; not even their own government bothers trying to help them. They have only three options in life: be homeless and starve in the rural country, be homeless and starve in the cities, or eat as a slave and be treated extraordinarily harshly.
Sources Used:
1. http://countrystudies.us/haiti/44.htm 2.http://www.heritagekonpa.com/archives/Haiti%20slave%20child%20labor.htm
3. http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=5326508&page=1