Protecting children

Helping Haiti's half million child slaves

An estimated 500,000 children in Haiti are restaveks, or child domestic workers. The term restavek comes from the French 'rester avec' meaning staying with, which is appropriate as it describes children, some as young as six years old, who act as live-in cooks, cleaners and even child carers to typically poor families in the slums of Port-au-Prince.

The majority of restaveks are originally from the countryside and are 'lent' by their parents, who faced with the dilemma of too many mouths to feed are persuaded of the merits of giving away their child in the vain hope it will help them gain a better life, live closer to school or be better fed.

Unfortunately, for the majority of restaveks, their new life fails to meet these basic expectations and is often more reminiscent of a Grimm's fairy-tale. Many are fed only scraps, forced to sleep on the hard, cold floor and expected to toil all day from dusk to dawn, without pay.

Even worse, restaveks, like all child domestic workers, risk a disproportionate rate of physical and sexual abuse. Their young age, isolation and separation from their families and near-total dependence on their employers exacerbate their vulnerability. Despite many children entering domestic service in the hope of continuing their schooling, most are deprived of education, creating a cycle of poverty and lost opportunity.

Many argue that the restavek phenomenon is cultural, that children of poor families have always worked. The UN's Special Rapporteur on Slavery, told Anti-Slavery International after returning from a fact-finding mission to Haiti that she strongly dismissed such arguments.

’I am afraid I don't believe in using the excuse of culture to justify a human rights abuse. I saw first hand how the practice of sending a child to live with another family was part of a survival strategy,’ she said.

The loss of education from a childhood of work is perhaps the most tragic element of the story. The reality is that child domestic workers, robbed of their education, are very likely to grow up to be exploited and poverty stricken adult domestic workers, who through economic necessity will be forced to send their own children into domestic work.

This is why it is essential to support education programmes that attempt to break the cycle, like the Foyer Maurice Sixto School in the suburbs of Port-au-Prince, which offers classes to fit in between the chores of 200 restaveks.

Anti-Slavery International is also trying hard to stamp out the practice of child domestic work by pushing for a new international convention at the International Labour Organization that will spell out the rights of domestic workers.

By improving pay and employment rights for adult domestic workers the convention will also raise the esteem of the industry and thus help reduce the poverty related factors that result in children entering the industry to begin with.

The convention will also be a major step forward in holding Haiti to do more to protect disadvantaged parents who cannot afford to provide for their children and to hold the government to account for failing to protect the 500,000 children who are robbed of their childhood.

Audrey Guichon is the domestic work programme co-ordinator for Anti-Slavery International

11 Dec 2009 15:59

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