First Major Study Explores Urban Violence, Human Rights Issues

Nearly a quarter million impoverished children – mostly young girls – are forced to work as unpaid domestic servants in major Haitian cities, according to the first major survey of Haiti’s human rights, the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF) announced.

Called restavèks, these very poor children are sent by their parents to live in other homes with the idea that they would have access to education and food. PADF’s ground-breaking study, which focused on key neighborhoods in five major cities, found that 16 percent of all children are restavèks.

“Restavèks are prone to beatings, sexual assaults and other abuses by host families,” says Herve Rakoto Razafimbahiny, PADF’s Protecting Human Rights in Haiti Program Director. “This major survey is a key tool in our efforts to eliminate this stain on dignity.”

With support from the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Haiti Mission, PADF conducted the largest field survey on human rights violations, with an emphasis on child trafficking, abuse and violence. Called "Lost Childhoods," it consists of nearly 1,500 door-to-door surveys in troubled urban neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince, Cap-Haïtien, Gonaïves, Saint-Marc and Petit-Gôave. (Click here for a copy of the report.)

In the broadest sense, alleviating the risk of trafficking in restavèk children should be guided by the following premises: The recruitment of restavèk servant children is intimately linked, overall, to poverty, especially for sending households, and oftentimes for receiving households as well. 

• Donor and government programs directed at reducing the risk of restavèk placement should invest heavily in poverty alleviation and better quality and more widely available education, especially in rural areas.
• Program interventions directed at trafficking in children should retain a focus on the broader issues of children’s rights, the wider social problems of child abuse and child labor exploitation, and an emphasis on humane treatment of all children, rather than focusing solely on restavèk placement.
• Independent of the restavèk issue, the survey also revealed details about the extent of violence in urban areas.
• More than 7 percent of urban households surveyed by PADF cited incidents of rape, murder, kidnapping or gang involvement. In terms of incidents of physical assault, Port-au-Prince households had more than double the average (nearly 16 percent) than other cities.
• Overall, respondents attribute the vast majority of violence to armed civilians and politically partisan groups, including gangs. However, a majority of victims do not report incidents to authorities.
• Recommendations on targeting victims for services
• In light of study findings and partner priorities, the human rights and social service sector should orient future programming as follows:
• The sector should assign high priority to social services that target child domesticity and sexual assault of minors. 
• The category of unschooled children is by far the most numerous population of children at risk, and should be assigned high priority for program assistance to prevent child victimization and alleviate risk, especially the risk of restavék placement. 
• Donors with an interest in child trafficking and restavèk children should invest heavily in educating the poor, especially all school age children.  
• Services to street children should give first priority to improving services to children-in-the-street who sleep at home, and shelters for children newly arrived in the street including abandoned, lost, or runaway children. 
• For long term, hardened street children of the street, funding sources should increase efforts targeted at prevention, since services to hardened street children tend to be less effective. 
• The vast majority of restavèk children are girls, but services appear to be more available to boys rather than girl restavèk and street children.  Therefore, social services should expand services to girls, including shelters for restavèk children and other children fleeing abuse.
• In response to partner concerns and the lack of well grounded information on the social dynamics of child prostitution, sector support should include study of underage prostitution that builds upon the household survey and other available data, including analysis of data sets available from partner organizations.
• To ensure more effective referral of rape victims and other hidden victims, including those with a heightened risk of HIV-AIDS infection, the sector should promote systematic collaboration among (i) women’s organizations, (ii) medical institutions, (iii) public social service providers, and (iv) specialized HIV-AIDS services. 
• Sector funding should expand support for direct physical accompaniment and ongoing follow-up of victims, including the use of trained volunteers, as a strategy for increasing the number of victims served, especially rape victims and other “hidden” victims, and to diminish the impact of psychological trauma and social stigma in response to sensitive crimes.  

For the past two years, PADF’s Protecting Human Rights in Haiti program has been working closely with the Haitian public institutions with a mandate to protect human rights, as well as non-governmental organizations that focus on human rights and the private sector.

The services provided by PADF’s partners and supported by its program include shelters for vulnerable children and children in servitude, vocational training, schooling, health services, counseling and rehabilitation of children recruited by gangs and children in prostitution.