The long term solution for Haiti's future, for Haiti's small children is equitable distribution of the Haiti's resources, an end to foreign-sponsored dependence, false benevolence, occupation/dictatorships/regime change and the monopoly of the rich, forced scarcity and assimilation, exclusion of the majority, endless debts, financial colonialism, and the fraudulent free trade of US foreign policy that causes famine, wage slavery and containment in perpetual poverty.
(For more, go to: The Slavery in Haiti the Media Won't Expose, and TRAVESTY in Haiti - A true account of Christian missions, orphanages, fraud, food aid and drug trafficking.) Thank you.
Ezili Dantà ²
Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN),
USA and Haiti
http://www.ezilidanto.com/
erzilidanto@yahoo.com
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See also,
Restavek: Letter to the New York Times - Demonizing the Gonaives Hurricane Victims, Sept. 14, 2008
click here
Haitian child restaveks - domestic servants - does not equate to the European TransAtlantic trade/holocaust | Ezili's counternarrative on the ABC/Nightline report on the abuse of Haitian children, July 9, 2008
click here
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Report says 225,000 Haiti children work as slaves
By EVENS SANON (AP) December 23, 2009
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Poverty has forced at least 225,000 children in
Haiti's cities into slavery as unpaid household servants, far more than
previously thought, a report said Tuesday.
The Pan American
Development Foundation's report also said some of those children --
mostly young girls -- suffer sexual, psychological and physical abuse
while toiling in extreme hardship.
The report recommends
Haiti's government and international donors focus efforts on educating
the poor and expanding social services such as shelters for girls, who
make up an estimated two-thirds of the child servant population.
Young servants are known as "restavek" -- Haitian Creole for "stays
with" -- and their plight is both widely known and a source of great
shame in the Caribbean nation that was founded by a slave revolt more
than 200 years ago.
Researchers said the practice is so common
that almost half of 257 children interviewed in the sprawling
Port-au-Prince shantytown of Cite Soleil were household slaves.
Most are sent by parents who cannot afford to care for them to families
just slightly better off. Researchers found 11 percent of families that
have a restavek have sent their own children into domestic servitude
elsewhere.
Despite growing attention to the problem,
researchers said their sources were unaware of any prosecutions of
cases involving trafficking children or using them as unpaid servants
in this deeply poor nation of more than 9 million people.
Glenn
Smucker, one of the report's authors and a cultural anthropologist
known for extensive work on Haiti, said he believes the number of
restavek children is increasing proportionally with the population of
Port-au-Prince as more migrants flee rural poverty to live in the
capital.
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