Advocacy, Child Advocacy available at Beyond Borders - 2010 Haiti Earthquake / Fondasyon Limyelan / Free the Slaves

Haiti is a hard place to be a child. A quarter of Haiti’s children suffer chronic malnutrition. Only about half attend school and only 2 percent complete high school.

Haiti is also a hard place to be a parent, especially in rural areas where there are far fewer schools, hunger is more common, and poverty is especially severe.

Because poor rural parents are so desperate for a better life for their children, they are especially susceptible to being lured into sending one or more children away to live with and work for a poor urban family. These parents are often led to believe that the urban family will send their child to school and provide a better life.

While some of these children do fare better with the urban family they serve, far more end up trapped in a brutal form of modern slavery. As many as one in ten (or about 300,000) Haitian children live apart from their families in unpaid domestic servitude.

A typical child living in servitude is forced to work endlessly and given little or no time to attend school, play, form friendships, or rest. Physical and emotional abuse is common.

About three quarters of these children are girls. Many are abused sexually and end up pregnant during adolescence, which often leads to their being forced from the household. Some manage to make it back to their parents. Others end up on the street. Almost all these children, boys and girls, grow up emotionally wounded and illiterate. They grow up to fill the poorest economic strata of the poorest nation in our hemisphere.

A child living in servitude is often called a restavèk, a Creole word that literally means a "stay-with." But the word has come to be a foul word in Haiti, an insult one would use to say someone is worthless. And this is how restavèk children generally feel.

Beyond Borders combats child servitude in Haiti through its support of the Limyè Lavi (Light for Life) Foundation. Limyè Lavi leads Haiti's largest and most ambitious effort to bring an end to child servitude in Haiti.

Often all that is needed to prevent rural parents from deciding to send a child into servitude is a chance for that child to attend school locally. Other parents respond to radio programs developed and broadcast to remote rural communities that talk frankly about the risks children face when sent to work for another family.

For the past five years Beyond Borders has promoted an integrated strategy for bringing an end to child servitude--an approach that supports the growth of a national child rights movement that demands the Haitian government take a stand against the exploitation of these children. Meanwhile we are working with rural communities to develop models that can be scaled up and replicated all across Haiti to improve the welfare of children and reduce the risk that they will be sent into servitude

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