Haiti: A Global Stage

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Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, and is a good stage for understanding human trafficking because it is on the Tier 2 Watch List. Human trafficking is more than a global problem, it has a culture within some societies, and it can be familial, as well as cyclical. Using Haiti as a platform for explaining this is beneficial, because all three of these concepts can be found in Haiti. Haiti is a country of approximately eight million people, and about 2,200,000 people are from the ages of 5-14, which is prime restavec age. The concept of a restavec is a respectable one, if it were to work the way it should. What happens, is that a family that realizes that they cannot support their children, they decide to give to another family member or family friend to give their child a hope of a better life: to be able to go to school, to have access to food, maybe get a job. The family that provided their child hoped that they would be accepted as part of the supporting family. This rarely happens, the child usually ends up sleeping on a mat away from the family, often times in the kitchen, and they get different food than that of the rest of the family, typically the gristle. Often times, this process is cyclical. Those who were restavecs have a chance of putting their own children through the restavec process, in hope that their own children would have better luck than they did. There have also been accounts of how people who actually owned restavecs and had children, they would send their own children to be restavecs for other families. In Haiti, we can see the connections between family, culture, and the cycle of enslaving children for domestic work. It is important in Haiti to have children, they help do housework, but if the children aren’t being taken care of fully, they are sent to other families. This is a cultural problem because the concept of a restavec has been part of Haiti for such a long while. Lastly, it’s cyclical because it continues to occur, restavecs have children, then those children are put through the restavec process. These three things are often connected with one another, somehow all interwoven. This is something that can be seen throughout countries. Such as Ghana, when parents send their children off to work for the family – knowing the situations that they send their children to. There needs to be a delicate revolution in these countries, the ones that have this never-ending, engrained process of predominantly child labor. is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, and is a good stage for understanding human trafficking because it is on the Tier 2 Watch List. Human trafficking is more than a global problem, it has a culture within some societies, and it can be familial, as well as cyclical. Using Haiti as a platform for explaining this is beneficial, because all three of these concepts can be found in Haiti. Haiti is a country of approximately eight million people, and about 2,200,000 people are from the ages of 5-14, which is prime restavec age. The concept of a restavec is a respectable one, if it were to work the way it should. What happens, is that a family that realizes that they cannot support their children, they decide to give to another family member or family friend to give their child a hope of a better life: to be able to go to school, to have access to food, maybe get a job. The family that provided their child hoped that they would be accepted as part of the supporting family. This rarely happens, the child usually ends up sleeping on a mat away from the family, often times in the kitchen, and they get different food than that of the rest of the family, typically the gristle. Often times, this process is cyclical. Those who were restavecs have a chance of putting their own children through the restavec process, in hope that their own children would have better luck than they did. There have also been accounts of how people who actually owned restavecs and had children, they would send their own children to be restavecs for other families. In Haiti, we can see the connections between family, culture, and the cycle of enslaving children for domestic work. It is important in Haiti to have children, they help do housework, but if the children aren’t being taken care of fully, they are sent to other families. This is a cultural problem because the concept of a restavec has been part of Haiti for such a long while. Lastly, it’s cyclical because it continues to occur, restavecs have children, then those children are put through the restavec process. These three things are often connected with one another, somehow all interwoven. This is something that can be seen throughout countries. Such as Ghana, when parents send their children off to work for the family – knowing the situations that they send their children to. There needs to be a delicate revolution in these countries, the ones that have this never-ending, engrained process of predominantly child labor.