The Campaign to End Child Servitude

"I wash my mistress’s clothes [by hand] along with her husband's and two children’s clothes. I wash the dishes. Sweep, dust, and mop. I go to the market. I have to wash their clothes before I wash my own, so sometimes I don’t find time to wash my own clothes. Her children sometimes beat me and rip my clothes." --Aline Dena

The Need: According to UNICEF, as many as 300,000 Haitian children live apart from their families in unpaid domestic servitude. Although the treatment these children endure varies, this practice is generally regarded by international human rights groups as a modern form of slavery.

Many of these children are forced to work endlessly, with no time to attend school, play, form friendships, or rest. Physical and sexual abuse is common. About three quarters of these children are girls, many of whom end up pregnant from rape during adolescence. This usually leads to their being forced from the household often with no place to go but the streets. Almost all these children, boys and girls, grow up emotionally wounded and illiterate.

They are used until they are used up, run away, or become too big to control and are turned out to fend for themselves. If they survive, 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 restavek, a Creole word that literally means a "stay-with." The word restavek has come to be a foul word in Haiti, an insult one would use to say someone is worthless. And this is how restavek children generally feel.

The Campaign to End Child Servitude works on two fronts. We work to: 

1. stop and reverse the flow of children into servitude, and for children who cannot return home to
2. transform the treatment they receive from exploitation into nurture and love.

1. We work to slow, stop, and reverse the flow of children into servitude.

The great majority of children being sent into servitude each year come from poor rural communities. These communities generally lack schools, health services, roads, electricity, or any of the most basic services we take for granted. Hunger and despair are widespread. Rural parents hope that life will be better for the child they send to work for an urban familiy. They hope their child will be sent to school, well fed and cared for. These parents are often too ready to believe lies told to them by brokers and prospecting urban families that pass through their communities. They rarely imagine the nightmare that awaits their children.

A. Raising awareness of the restavek reality: The Campaign works to raise awareness of the restavek reality among rural families. This makes them less vulnerable to the alure of the city and less likely to send their children into servitude. We do this through radio programs we produce, rural conferences we organize, adult education programs we support, and by training rural leaders who take the news back to their communities. Some rural parents will go and retrieve children they have sent away after participating in a conference or hearing a broadcast.

B. Investing in rural development: We also invest in rural communities to make life there more sustainable and hopeful. We invest in adult literacy training and basic education in sustainable agriculture, children's rights, parenting, sexual and reproductive health. We support rural leadership development. In short, we help rural communities develop the ability to overcome the challenges they face and build a brighter future. Parents who have hope rarely send their children away into servitude.

C. Rural Schooling: Rural schooling is especially important. Fewer than half of Haiti's rural children attend school. Most who do never complete elementary school, and fewer than four in one hundred graduate from high school. We work to both improve the quality of rural schooling and to greatly increase the number of children able to attend school. We offer scholarships to the children of the poorest families and design special accelerated classes for unschooled children and youth who are too old to start first grade. We offer scholarships to children who have been sent into servitude already, which provides their parents with a significent incentive to go and retrieve their child.

Join the Campaign and help us reach these children: To accomplish our plans in 2008 we need to find 300 people who will commit to giving $100 each month. See where we are in reaching this goal. If you want other ideas of how you can help advance to goals of the Campaign to End Child Servitude in Haiti, please contact David Diggs.

2. We work to transform the relationships and treatment children caught in servitude experience.

Formal, legal adoption or government sanctioned foster care is essentially non-existent in Haiti. However, the extended family and community ties to children are very important. Children who lose their parents are often taken in without hesitation by extended family members or neighbors. Children who complete elementary school in rural areas are also often sent to live with extended family members who reside in town so they can attend high school. In many respects, the restavek practice is a perversion of these healthy efforts to care for children.

A. Raising Awareness of Children's Rights: There will always be children who can no longer live with their parents. The Campaign to End Child Servitude is working to encourage what is healthy for children who can no longer reside with their parents and distinguish this from what is harmful. We focus these efforts in urban areas where restavek children are concentrated and make use of radio, conferences, and various educational programs to increase the general understanding of the needs and rights of children.

B. Pushing for Government and Civic Engagement: Just as the Haitian government provides almost no services to rural Haiti, the government does almost nothing to protect children from exploitation or abuse. To push for civic and government action we are engaged in grassroots organizing. We have trained hundreds of local leaders and human rights activists all across Haiti who are in turn serving as change agents in their local communities. We initiated the National Day Against Child Servitude. We have led local, national, and international organizations in the development of a set of demands and recommendations to the Haitian government. We are initiating a new program to train Haitian police in children's rights and the enforcement of laws that aim to protect children from abuse and neglect.

C. Building a Grassroots Movement: We have led in the development of Haiti's largest network of organizations committed to defending children's rights and ending child servitude--the Down-with-Child-Servitude (ASR) Network. We are working to organize regional networks as well, and neighborhood associations all dedicated to protecting children and ending servitude. 

D. Working with Survivors: We are also training adult survivors of child servitude to become modern day abolitionists who will cry out on behalf of these children locally and nationally. As they come together to push for change, they find healing by sharing the stories of what they have suffered with one another and the broader community.