Creating Safe Spaces to Change Attitudes About

Child Slavery

by Brian Stevens

For Coleen Hedglin, who directs Beyond Borders’ Child Protection Program, supporting the movement to end child slavery in Haiti begins by creating safe spaces for people to talk and learn about the rights of children. “People are ready to talk about this. They have been,” said Hedglin, whose work is to develop techniques to prevent and even reverse the flow of Haiti’s kids into forced slavery as restavèk children. “It’s important to give people a safe space,” Hedglin said, explaining how Beyond Borders supports Haitians who are organizing frank conversations with their neighbors as a means to end child slavery.

Beyond Borders children's rights training sessions are helping create safe spaces where adults can talk about and learn how to protect children.

“Opening conversation at the community level and with individuals too – this is the work that we do,” Hedglin said in describing one aspect of how Beyond Borders and Limyè Lavi – our sister organization in Haiti – work to end child slavery. The foundation of these community conversations organized by both Beyond Borders and Limyè Lavi is a series of 22-week interactive dialogue sessions known as ‘Education is a Conversation’ (ESK). ESK sessions provide groups of 10-15 adult neighbors with a guided, in-depth exploration of subjects like corporal punishment, sexual abuse and child slavery. In reaction to the 2010 earthquake, Beyond Borders organized ESK sessions in the tent camps where hundreds of thousands took refuge after losing everything. In the coming months, ESK sessions will become more centered in permanent neighborhoods. To complement the ESK sessions, Beyond Borders facilitates Open Space gatherings where each Haitian participant has the opportunity to help set the agenda, lead conversations and propose approaches and solutions to the many challenging conditions in Haiti that often push children into slavery.

This approach puts local community members at the center of developing and advancing the movement to end child slavery and is deeply reflective of Beyond Borders’ philosophy of fostering empowerment rather than creating dependence. “The most lasting solutions to any problem come from those who know it best,” said Jean Prosper Elie, Program Director for Beyond Borders. After completing the six-month program, participants take what they learn and elect members of their ESK groups to create volunteer Child Protection Committees (CPCs). Elected members then become responsible for continuing awareness raising activities, organizing Open Space gatherings, training other community members and intervening in cases of child abuse in their community. Hedglin and her colleagues from Beyond Borders also lead workshops to train staff from both Haitian and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in Haiti. Seventeen organizations – among them some of the largest NGOs in Haiti – have sent a total of 183 staff members to date. These organizations then hold child rights discussions and training sessions where they work in Haiti, mobilizing more communities to establish their CPCs.

By the end of 2011, Beyond Borders’ goal is to reach more than 10,000 using this ‘train-the-trainer’ approach. “And each of these participants should become a local child rights activist,” said David Diggs, Beyond Borders’ director.

A children's rights training in a tent city in Port-au-Prince sponsored by Beyond Borders.

“Some who have themselves been abusers become defenders and protectors of children in their neighborhoods,” Diggs added. Estimates put the number of impoverished Haitian youth living as restavèk children between 240,000 to 300,000. They work long hours, doing chores well beyond their capacity, receiving little or no education and enduring emotional, physical and sexual abuse.“They are robbed of their childhood,” Hedglin said, as she described heartbreaking yet all-too-typical conditions faced by restavèk children. “The adults in their lives who are holding them are not interested in investing in them as future adults.” Hedglin recalled one of many instances in which ordinary Haitians used the ‘safe space’ of a Beyond Borders-sponsored community conversation on child rights to challenge a neighbor who had a restavèk child in her home. “Since her neighbors had the courage to talk directly with her about that,” Hedglin said, “it gave her the ability to have that conversion experience,” and admit that she had a restavèk child in her house. In a safe space, “people can change and can come to the point where they see what they’ve been doing is wrong.”

Click here to listen to an interview with Coleen Hedglin and learn more about the Beyond Borders Child Protection Program.