A restavek (or restavec) is a child in Haiti who is given away by their parents to work for a host household as a domestic servant because the parents lack the resources required to support the child. [1] The term comes from the French language rester avec, "to stay with". Parents unable to care for children may send them to live with wealthier (or less poor) families, often their own relatives or friends. Often the children are from rural areas, and relatives who host restaveks live in more urban settings. The expectation is that the children will be given food and housing (and sometimes an education) in exchange for doing housework. However, many restaveks live in poverty, may not receive proper education, and are at grave risk for physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
The restavek system is tolerated in Haitian culture, but not considered to be preferable[ citation needed ]. The practice meets formal international definitions of modern day slavery and child trafficking, and is believed to affect an estimated 300,000 Haitian children. [2] The number of CDW (Child Domestic Workers) in Haiti, defined as 1) living away from parents' home; 2) not following normal progression in education; and 3) working more than other children, is more than 400,000. 25% of Haitian children age 5–17 live away from their biological parents. [3]
The restavek tradition dates back centuries. [4]
Following the January 2010 earthquake, thousands of individuals in Haiti were displaced from their homes and families. According to anecdotal evidence, many of these individuals were children who had nowhere to turn but to become part of the Haitian restavèk population. Along with displacement due to natural disasters, children are solicited as restavèks by recruiters looking to find domestic servants for families. [5]
Many street children are former domestic servants who were dismissed by or ran away from the families they worked for. These children have not fully escaped the restavèk life. Instead, they become part of a different level that results in their exploitation in begging rings and prostitution. [6]
Many parents send their children to be restaveks, expecting them to have a better life than possible in poor rural areas. [7] Poor rural parents who cannot provide their children with clean water, food, and education send them away, usually to cities, to find these opportunities as restaveks. [8]
Restaveks are unpaid and have no power or recourse within the host family. [8] Unlike slaves in the traditional sense, restaveks can run away or return to their families, and are typically released from servitude when they become adults; however, the restavek system is commonly understood to be a form of slavery. [8] Often host families dismiss their restaveks before they turn 15, since by law that is the age when they are supposed to be paid; many are then turned out to live on the street. [8] Increasingly, paid middlemen act as recruiters to place children with host families, and it is becoming more common to place children with strangers. [8] Children often have no way to get back in touch with their families. [8]
A 2009 study by the Pan American Development Foundation found that "leading indicators of restavèk treatment include work expectations equivalent to adult servants and long hours that surpass the cultural norm for children's work at home." [9] A contradicting 2002 survey found that restaveks were allowed to sleep as long as or longer than the household children, received fewer beatings, 60 percent or more attended school, and many had their own bed or mat. [10]
Some restaveks do receive proper nutrition and education, but they are in the minority. [11] According to the Pan American Development Foundation,
Education is also an important indicator in detecting child domesticity. Children in domesticity may or may not attend school, but when they do attend, it is generally an inferior school compared to other children ... and their rates of non-enrollment are higher than non-restavèk children in the home. [9]
The estimates for numbers of restaveks in Haiti range from 100,000 to 500,000. [12] A 2002 door-to-door survey found the number of restaveks under age 17 in Haiti to be 173,000, and 59 percent of them were girls. [10]
As poverty and political turmoil increase, the reported number of restaveks continues to rise dramatically. [13] In 2009, the Pan American Development Foundation published the findings of an extensive door-to-door survey conducted in several cities in Haiti, focused on restaveks. The findings documented thousands of restaveks living in Haiti. The report also found that 11% of households who have restaveks working for them send their own children to work as restaveks for someone else. [14]
It is believed that the widespread damage and displacement caused by the 2010 earthquake has caused many more children to become restaveks. Children who were orphaned by the quake could potentially be turned over to work as restaveks by distant relatives who cannot care for them. [15]
Two major factors that perpetuate the restavek system are widespread poverty and a societal acceptance of the practice. [8] Parents who cannot provide for their children continue to send them to be restaveks. Haiti, a nation of 10 million people, [13] is the most poverty-stricken in the western hemisphere. [8] Guerda Lexima-Constant, a child rights advocate with the Haitian Limyè Lavi Foundation, says:
I have yet to meet anyone who wanted to send their kid to be a restavek. Parents are forced to because of a lot of national and international givens. The [economic] means they used to have, they don't anymore. The invasion of foreign rice, eggs, and other things on the market by big business, destroying the peasant economy... there's been a whole chain of events that makes some people have to send their child away. [16]
The practice of restavek is widely accepted in Haitian culture, although the upper classes have increasingly begun to look down on it. [8] The connotation of the word restavek is understood to be negative, implying servility. [8] [17]
Individual factors that increase a child's likelihood of becoming a restavek include lack of access to clean water, lack of educational opportunities, access to family in a city, and illness or loss of one or both parents. [8] Haiti has too few orphanages for its abundance of orphans, putting the children at high risk of becoming restaveks. [8]
Efforts exist to address the root cause of child servitude. Improving the economy, especially through government support for the rural population, would undermine parents' incentive to give children up, as would an improved health care and education system. [16] Parents would not be as easily pressured by recruiters to hand their children over to become restaveks if they were provided with aid such as food, clothing, and clean water. [8]
In May 2009, over 500 Haitian leaders gathered in Port-au-Prince, Haiti to discuss the restavek condition and how to make positive changes to improve this complex problem. [18] Leaders from all facets of society attended the full-day session and conference organizers from The Jean Cadet Restavec Foundation and Fondation Maurice Sixto hope that this dialog is the start of a large grass-roots movement. They hope, at a minimum, to stop the abuse of restavek children. [18] The Restavec Freedom Foundation hosted 13 additional conferences titled "Compassion and Courage" (Haitian Creole : Kompasyon ak Kouraj) across Haiti. These conferences were hosted from the spring 2012 through the spring of 2013, and asked community leaders and pastors to take a stand on the issue of restavek. Over 3,000 leaders participated in these conferences and have agreed to take the lead in their respective communities to bring an end to the restavek practice. [19]
Other organizations in Haiti, such as Restavek Freedom Alliance, BEM Inc. are also actively working in south-western Haiti with restavek children. [20] Organizations such as the Center for Action and Development (CAD) and L'Escale in Port-au-Prince exist to house, feed, and give medical and psychological care to escaped restaveks while working to return them to their families. [8]
Debt bondage, also known as debt slavery, bonded labour, or peonage, is the pledge of a person's services as security for the repayment for a debt or other obligation. Where the terms of the repayment are not clearly or reasonably stated, or where the debt is excessively large the person who holds the debt has thus some control over the laborer, whose freedom depends on the undefined or excessive debt repayment. The services required to repay the debt may be undefined, and the services' duration may be undefined, thus allowing the person supposedly owed the debt to demand services indefinitely. Debt bondage can be passed on from generation to generation.
Child slavery is the slavery of children. The enslavement of children can be traced back through history. Even after the abolition of slavery, children continue to be enslaved and trafficked in modern times, which is a particular problem in developing countries.
A domestic worker is a person who works within a residence and performs a variety of household services for an individual, from providing cleaning and household maintenance, or cooking, laundry and ironing, or care for children and elderly dependents, and other household errands. The term "domestic service" applies to the equivalent occupational category. In traditional English contexts, such a person was said to be "in service".
Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC) defines the "umbrella" of crimes and activities that involve inflicting sexual abuse on to a child as a financial or personal opportunity. Commercial Sexual Exploitation consists of forcing a child into prostitution, sex trafficking, early marriage, child sex tourism and any other venture of exploiting children into sexual activities. According to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the lack of reporting the crime and "the difficulties associated with identifying and measuring victims and perpetrators" has made it almost impossible to create a national estimate of the prevalence of Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the United States. There is an estimated one million children that are exploited for commercial sex globally; of the one million children that are exploited, the majority are girls.
Trafficking of children is a form of human trafficking and is defined by the United Nations as the "recruitment, transportation, harboring, and/or receipt" kidnapping of a child for the purpose of slavery, forced labour, and exploitation. This definition is substantially wider than the same document's definition of "trafficking in persons". Children may also be trafficked for adoption.
Haiti's Constitution and written laws meet most international human rights standards. In practice, many provisions are not respected. The government's human rights record is poor. Political killings, kidnapping, torture, and unlawful incarceration are common unofficial practices, especially during periods of coups or attempted coups.
Slavery has been called "deeply rooted" in the structure of the northwest African country of Mauritania and estimated to be "closely tied" to the ethnic composition of the country, although it has also been estimated that "Widespread slavery was traditional among ethnic groups of the largely nonpastoralist south, where it had no racial origins or overtones; masters and slaves alike were black", despite the cessation of slavery across other African countries and an official ban on the practice since 1905.
Prostitution in Colombia is legal, regulated and limited to brothels in designated "tolerance zones". Sex workers are required to have regular health checks. However, the laws are rarely applied and prostitution is widespread, partly due to poverty and internal displacement.
Cambodia is a source, transit, and destination country for human trafficking. The traffickers are reportedly organized crime syndicates, parents, relatives, friends, intimate partners, and neighbors.
Contemporary slavery, also sometimes known as modern slavery or neo-slavery, refers to institutional slavery that continues to occur in present-day society. Estimates of the number of enslaved people today range from around 38 million to 49.6 million, depending on the method used to form the estimate and the definition of slavery being used. The estimated number of enslaved people is debated, as there is no universally agreed definition of modern slavery; those in slavery are often difficult to identify, and adequate statistics are often not available.
In the United States, human trafficking tends to occur around international travel hubs with large immigrant populations, notably in California, Texas, and Georgia. Those trafficked include young children, teenagers, men, and women; victims can be domestic citizens or foreign nationals.
Crime in Haiti is investigated by the Haitian police. Since the late 2010s, the country has suffered from widespread gang warfare and civil unrest, including a massive prison breakout in 2024. It also suffers from extreme corruption and high levels of sexual violence.
India has a very high volume of child trafficking. As many as one child disappears every eight minutes, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. In some cases, children are taken from their homes to be bought and sold in the market. In other cases, children are tricked into the hands of traffickers by being presented an opportunity for a job, when in reality, upon arrival they become enslaved. In India, there are many children trafficked for various reasons such as labor, begging, and sexual exploitation. Because of the nature of this crime, it is hard to track; due to the poor enforcement of laws, it is difficult to prevent. As such, there are only vague estimates of figures regarding the issue. India is a prime area for child trafficking to occur, as many of those trafficked are from, travel through or destined to go to India. Though most of the trafficking occurs within the country, there is also a significant number of children trafficked from Nepal and Bangladesh. There are many different causes that lead to child trafficking, with the primary reasons being poverty, weak law enforcement, and a lack of good quality public education. The traffickers that take advantage of children can be from another area in India, or could even know the child personally. Children who return home after being trafficked often face shame in their communities, rather than being welcomed home.
Human trafficking in Nepal is a growing criminal industry affecting multiple other countries beyond Nepal, primarily across Asia and the Middle East. Nepal is mainly a source country for men, women and children subjected to the forced labor and sex trafficking. U.S. State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons placed the country in "Tier 2" in 2017.
Challenging heights is a non-governmental organization in Ghana protecting the rights of children and focusing their anti-trafficking efforts in the fishing and cocoa industry. According to Challenging Heights, over 24,000 children in Ghana fall victim to the worst forms of child labour annually. Challenging Heights aim is to end Child Trafficking through Rescue & Recovery, Prevention, and Advocacy.
Chad is a source and destination country for children subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically conditions of forced labor and forced prostitution. The country's trafficking problem is primarily internal and frequently involves parents entrusting children to relatives or intermediaries in return for promises of education, apprenticeship, goods, or money; selling or bartering children into involuntary domestic servitude or herding is used as a means of survival by families seeking to reduce the number of mouths to feed. Child trafficking victims are primarily subjected to forced labor as herders, domestic servants, agricultural laborers, or beggars. Child cattle herders follow traditional routes for grazing cattle and at times cross ill-defined international borders into Cameroon, the Central African Republic (CAR), and Nigeria. Underage Chadian girls travel to larger towns in search of work, where some are subsequently subjected to prostitution. Some girls are compelled to marry against their will, only to be forced by their husbands into involuntary domestic servitude or agricultural labor. In past reporting periods, traffickers transported children from Cameroon and the CAR to Chad's oil producing regions for commercial sexual exploitation; it is unknown whether this practice persisted in 2009.
Child labour in Nigeria is the employment of children under the age of 18 in a manner that restricts or prevents them from basic education and development. Child labour is pervasive in every state of the country. In 2006, the number of child workers was estimated at 15 million. Poverty is a major factor that drives child labour in Nigeria. In poor families, child labour is a major source of income for the family.
Human trafficking in Texas is the illegal trade of human beings as it occurs in the state of Texas. It is a modern-day form of slavery and usually involves commercial sexual exploitation or forced labor, both domestic and agricultural.
Sexual violence in Haiti is a common phenomenon today, making it a public health problem. Being raped is considered shameful in Haitian society, and victims may find themselves abandoned by loved ones or with reduced marriageability. Until 2005, rape was not legally considered a serious crime and a rapist could avoid jail by marrying his victim. Reporting a rape to police in Haiti is a difficult and convoluted process, a factor that contributes to underreporting and difficulty in obtaining accurate statistics about sexual violence. Few rapists face any punishment.
Slavery in Haiti began after the arrival of Christopher Columbus on the island in 1492 with the European colonists that followed from Portugal, Spain and France. The practice was devastating to the native population. Following the indigenous Tainos' near decimation from forced labor, disease and war, the Spanish, under initial advisement of the Catholic priest Bartolomé de las Casas and with the blessing of the Catholic church, began engaging in earnest during the 17th century in the forced labor of enslaved Africans. During the French colonial period, beginning in 1625, the economy of Saint-Domingue, was based on slavery; conditions on Saint-Domingue became notoriously bad even compared to chattel slavery conditions elsewhere.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)