Study Condemns Child Labor
By Madeline Baró Diaz, Miami Bureau
Originally published in the Sun-Sentinel, April 13, 2002
MIAMI — The National Coalition for Haitian Rights released a study on Friday that estimates one in 10 children in Haiti is a domestic servant and said the Haitian government has not done enough to end the traditional practice.
The system is known as "restavek," from the French rester avec, meaning to "stay with." Some poor parents living in rural parts of Haiti turn their children over to a family, usually one in an urban area, that agrees to care for the child and provide schooling, food and shelter in exchange for domestic labor. Most restavek children, however, end up as house slaves who are treated worse than the family's children, are denied education and are abused, the study says.
"I believe to a certain extent Haiti's ills, political and otherwise, are closely linked with the way children in Haiti are being abused," said Jocelyn McCalla, the study's co-author, who said the acceptance of the restavek system leads to the acceptance of human rights abuses in Haiti.
The yearlong study, conducted through monitoring and interviewing restaveks, makes recommendations to the Haitian government, Haitian civil society and the international community. The study says Haiti should enact tougher child labor laws, outlaw the practice of restavek and toughen enforcement. It also asks the international community to step up pressure on the Haitian government to end the practice and calls on Haitian human rights and other organizations to increase awareness of and end the restavek practice.
The Haitian government said it is trying to address the problem by combating the conditions that force parents to give away their children. Minister of Social Affairs Eude Saint-Preux Craan said Haiti recently passed a law to combat violence against children. She also said the government is encouraging peasant cooperatives, providing literacy training and expanding school access for children in rural areas.
"We welcome the recommendations of the NCHR report, and in fact their recommendations are along the lines of what the government of Haiti is already doing," she said.
The study's authors and other community leaders expressed concern that the restavek practice might have made its way in some form to the United States.
In 1999, Haitian-American leaders expressed outrage over the case of a 12-year-old girl who said she was kept as a maid in the home of a Pembroke Pines family and sexually abused by the 20-year-old son in the family.
Leonie Hermantin, of Sant La, the Haitian Neighborhood Center in Miami, said she is unaware of other restavek cases in South Florida. Her organization, however, recently helped the family of a dying woman whose three children were undocumented immigrants. The organization was concerned that the children might end up in the hands of non-relatives, but the children's grandmother was appointed as their guardian instead, Hermantin said.
Merrie Archer, co-author of the report, said the Immigration and Naturalization Service has tried to be on the lookout for immigrants who might have restavek children with them.
