With the major rescue efforts being called off in Haiti and those resources being diverted to the continuing provision of emergency relief and care, alongside efforts to stabilise the country another pressing problem is becoming of increasing concern, child trafficking.
Child trafficking in Haiti was already a problem with several NGO’s noting a sharp increase in the number of children being trafficked out of the country into the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas in 2008. With 80% of the population living below the poverty line and 54% living in abject poverty, it has been rife for trafficking predators seeking “victims”. It is estimated that 30,000 children annually are shipped out of Haiti to work as prostitutes or labourers in the Dominican Republic.
One of the biggest problems are the poor in rural areas who send their children to “wealthier” relatives in the city where they expect their children to be cared for and educated, only to end up with a percentage of them being subjected to domestic servitude (domestic slaves are known as Restaveks), hard labour or sold off. A 2002 survey by the Fafo Institute for Applied Social Sciences noted that 8.2% of the child population in Haiti (age 5-17 yrs) were living as child domestic workers subjected to conditions of slavery.
In Haiti, a country where child trafficking was already a problem and children represent the most vulnerable part of society, the earthquake and the destruction it has caused leaves children even more open to exploitation. In the wake of the earthquake there has been a wave of children that have gone missing.
Frantic actions are taking place at the moment to register children in the country with organisations visiting hospitals, clinics and any other place children may be in order to register them. With the death toll so high, many children have lost their parents/families or been parted from those who care for them. They are wide open to becoming victims of the vile practice of trafficking and sadly, many already have fallen victim.
It takes a belly crawler to steal children and sell them off as slaves, but the current conditions in Haiti provide fertile ground for such human beings to take advantage of the chaos and to engage the evil thatthey do. Haiti needs to stabilize in order for this issue to be brought under control. Amongst all the issues present in this crisis, protecting Haiti’s children, its future population, needs to be of utmost concern to the international community.
Check out this article at Good Intentions are not Enough for a great explanation of the strategies needed to deal with children in emergencies like this. The article was originally written by Linda Raftree.
I don’t normally do an ask on this blog, but if you particularly feel compelled to do something about this, consider sponsoring a child in Haiti alongside denoting to reputable agencies to help the immediate relief efforts (don’t be sucked in by sham organisations jumping on this for money). Child sponsorship provides, amongst many other great things, an effective form of insulating children against the circumstances that can lead to them falling victim to trafficking and in Haiti it’s a very real danger at the moment.
Child sponsorship is one form of providing a mechanism to protect children and draw them into participating in the solutions to their community’s issues. It keeps children with their families and can be used as a means to engage families and communities alongside local workers in relief, recovery and reconstruction as it creates a social eco system around the sponsorship projects.
If you would like to fight child trafficking in Haiti, call TEAR Fund on 0800 800 777 to look at what it might mean for you to sponsor a child. If you are closely aligned to another development agency, get in touch with them and find out what you can do to help the fight against the destructive practice of child trafficking.
Update: There are some reports coming out of local police using at least one hospital as a place for trafficking – to sell children.
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Thanks again for posting this, Frank. It seems that all the sponsorship agencies I know of, including Compassion, have removed all their Haitian children from their databases until they are located and put into safe houses where necessary. I’d encourage anyone thinking of sponsoring to keep checking back with these organizations though.
Commercial sexual exploitation of children is one of the cruellest kinds of activity in our world today. The two girls I sponsor through Children International have both been through this. Learning about these issues, and the risks that children face in poor countries all over the world, is just heartbreaking. As a sponsor, I pray every day that my eight children will be protected from all forms of violence, abuse, exploitation, coercion and forced labour. We need to become more aware of these things, however painful that is. We can be thankful that our God is always ready to redeem anyone who cries out to Him for mercy, and that He can give anyone a completely new start no matter what their situation.
Thanks, Paul.
The removal of children from the databases is partly a safety response to protect those children from trafficking vultures. We are keeping in close contact with Compassion at the moment.
There are almost 700 children in Haiti currently sponsored by New Zealand donors through TEAR Fund.
Ten U.S. Baptists arrested in Haiti: A word of caution!
The influx of financial aid to Haiti could fuel bribery and corruption on a scale that is unimaginable. Transparency International an NGO that fights governmental corruption consistently ranks the Haitian regime as one of the most crooked on earth. The enormous foreign aid already given to Haiti has done nothing but ignite a feeding frenzy of bribery, looting and criminality. Case in point: Concerning the billion dollars already given to Haiti over the past twenty years Politicol News Com says, “…not one penny has been invested in infrastructure for the past twenty years other than a (luxurious presidential) palace which oddly enough was demolished in the earthquake.”
Now as new sources of wealth flow into that tiny country, Haitian government officials insist ten U.S. Baptists entered their country to engage in child trafficking??? Nonsense! The Haitian government is infested with criminals who control a slave trade involving hundreds of thousands of Haitian children (called Restaveks) who have been sold as laborers, domestic servants and prostitutes. These bureaucratic maggots control the courts and the police; they are upset because they didn’t get bribes from the ten American Baptists! If these missionaries really were child traffickers – and had paid U.S. dollars to smuggle the children out – the world would never have known about thirty-three impoverished Haitian children or the ten loving Christians from the United States who tried to rescue them from lives of poverty and hopelessness.
Dane Dahl, Author and Historian
Hi Dane, thanks for stopping by and commenting.
I hear your concerns, but think you’re off base in a few places.
Yes, Haiti has a large scale problem with systemic corruption – I have no disagreement there but you stated this:
Yes, some of the aid money where it is not properly tracked or administered is probably being used for dubious purposes, but to say that it has done nothing but that is simple angry hperbole that betrays the untold amounts of great and effective work taking place.
I work for a development organisation in Aotearoa (NZ) and can attest to the fact that we very carefully monitor where the money is going. We pick our partners on the ground carefully, making sure we are using trusted and effective organisations engaging in work that actually makes a difference.
Also, and I say this as a licensed Christian Minister with sympathies for well meaning Christians, the fact of the matter is that those ten Baptist missionaries were very unwise no matter what their intent – and I give them the benefit of the doubt in that regard.
Good practice in a disaster such as this is to exhaust all avenues for reconnecting children to their relatives and communities before trying to remove them from a country – such removal is an extremely serious last resort. Many of the children they were trying to move have been shown to have living family, some of whom the missionaries had contact with. Even if the parents agreed to have their children taken out of the country because of their desperate situation, it should not have been done. Rather, work should be pursued to put support systems in place so a parent would not feel a need to make that choice, or where the parents have died, then systems that see local communities integrating orphaned children. The saviour mentality of many foreigners in these situations only creates more problems and helps to destabilize the already weak communities even further.
What they did was simply stupid, well meaning maybe, but still stupid.
Would they have been noticed if they had been involved in paying bribes to actually traffick the children? Maybe not, but they are facing the consequences of a poorly thought out action.
Every such issue has layers; reducing the complexity of Haiti’s problems simply to corrupt systems while trying to whitewash the actions of foreigners does nobody any favours.