The cry ‘child slavery’ grabbed world attention in 1998 when Haitian born Jean-Robert Cadet published his shocking autobiography, From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American, in which he recounted his life as a restavek, the Haitian Creole word for child domestic servant. As the Cadet Foundation website tells potential donors, “As a restavek he lost his childhood as he worked from sunup to sundown. Like countless others he dressed in rags, slept on the floor and endured countless beatings.”[i]
In June 2000, in a development that must have surprised even Cadet, he found himself testifying before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (25th Session, Geneva). What followed can only be summed up as a human rights, NGO, and media hysteria. NPR (2004), TIME (2004), The Telegraph, (2007), Oprah Winfrey (2007), CNN’s Gupta Sanjay (2009)–all jumped on the bandwagon and used sensational titles like the BBC’s, “The Brutal Life of Haiti’s Child Slaves (BBC 2009).
But similar to the issues of voodoo and AIDS before it, the cry slavery was founded on sensationalist claims, extreme cases, and shoddy journalism and research.
The figure of 300,000 restavek cited in every one of the articles mentioned above, came from a 1996 UNICEF study for which it was never clear where they got the data. It represents 14% of all Haitian children in the target age category. The image presented was one of mostly girls; translating to some 25% of the female population in that age category. Almost every article mentioned sexual abuse, hard work, and getting tossed out of the house at the age of fifteen, the “legal age”—as if the legal system works in Haiti–when “owners” would be obliged to pay a salary. And all the journalists humanized their story with specific cases of children longing for a better life and/or cases of severely abused children. TIME, for example, in telling readers about about what they portray as a peculiarly Haitian institution and how it had reached US shores, recounted a restavek case in Pembroke Pines, Florida, with an image sure to disturb any reader: “Florida officials removed a 12-year-old Haitian girl–filthy, unkempt and in acute abdominal pain from repeated rape…”
As typical of the hundreds if not thousands of “orphanages” and aid agencies fund-raising to help the poorest of the Haitian poor, the charities jumped on the restavek bandwagon. In the scramble to solicit donations, they further inflated the numbers. Organizations like Haitian Street Kids Inc. (HSKI 2007), lumped homeless street children with the restavek in even more absurd and self-contradictory claims such as “There are currently over 400,000 child slaves as young as 4 years old throughout Haiti,” telling the reader that they “often times are beaten to death,” and that if one were to go to Haiti—which few readers ever will—they can identify the restavek by “their torn rags and tattered clothes hanging from their strained and feeble limbs, often times begging for food and money.” (HSKI 2010).
But if their work was shoddy and sensationalist, aid agencies and journalists were in good company. The U.S. Department of Commerce (2006) and the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (2007) both cited the same astounding figures and the same obscure 1996 UNICEF source and the same abusive nature of the restavek institution as a type of child slavery. The U.S. Department of State (2006) went even farther, describing thousands of Haitian children annually “trafficked” across the border to the Dominican Republic making it an international issue of trade in child slaves.
What the aid agencies and the mainstream media didn’t mention , still don’t mention, and reveals the extreme bias of the anti-child slavery campaign, were the scholarly attempts to place the restavek issue into perspective and provide a statistically valid representation of the scope and nature of the problem.
As early as 2002 UNICEF, ILO, and Save the Children had pulled their resources to fund a professional investigation. They hired Fafo (Institute for Applied International Studies).[ii] Defining restavek according to the criteria of parent-child separation, high work load, and lack of or low level of schooling, Fafo sent its interviewers to visit a randomly selected sample of 7,812 households throughout both rural and urban areas of Haiti. Their findings presents a more sobering picture of the restavek situation than had been seen before—or since.
Fafo estimated the number of Haitian restavek between the ages of five and seventeen years at 6.3% of the population in this age group (173,000 children); and in a discovery that should have ended accusations that a statistically significant group was getting thrown out at 15 years of age, they found that if the age of fifteen years and under were used to define restavek, the percentage of children who are restavek remained the same, 6.3% of the population in that age group (134,000 children).
Fafo also presented a less dramatic picture of the life of the average restavek. The researchers pointed out that one problem with the image of the slave-restavek was that most of the 70 percent of the Haitian population that live in rural areas and towns have access only to primary schools that end at 6th grade or earlier and most village schools only go up to the 8th grade. Thus, families used social connections in towns and cities to find board for their children and help them get educated—all in an effort to escape the spiraling rural overpopulation and land scarcity that Haitians have been experiencing in the past three to four decades (I outline this process in a book titled,Sex, family and Fertility in Haiti). So, what earlier researchers had been doing was lumping informal boarding-school arrangements with child slavery.
Moreover, many of the child domestics were not abused. Fafo researchers found that parents tended to beat their own children more often than they beat the restavek; that the restavek had equal or greater sleeping time; and that as or more often than non-restavek children, the restavek had his or her own bed, mattress, or mat. Another important finding was that contrary to the common assertion that most restavek were girls, 41 percent were boys; and contrary to the portrayal of them as missing out on education, at least 60 percent were enrolled in school, essentially the identical rate of school enrollment for all Haitian children at that time (Fafo 2002: 56–58).
But the Fafo findings did little to quell accusations of rampant child slavery. Indeed, without an explanation from any of the child protection agencies who had funded the study or in any of the press articles mentioned above, the Fafo findings were roundly ignored. Not a single publication cited above even mentioned the Fafo study. Even official agencies ignored Fafo. In its 2007 report, the U.S. Department of Labor repeated the unsubstantiated UNICEF study (1996/1997) to claim 250,000 to 300,000 restavek in Haiti, saying that 80 percent were girls under fourteen years of age–an absurd figure that, as seen earlier, places in the status of child servant 25% of all Haitian girls. They also disregarded other Fafo findings, saying that “most” restavek worked from ten to fourteen hours per day and that “most” were not enrolled in school.
And as if to erase the findings of the Fafo study, in 2009 the US embassy along with Fafo funding agencies UNICEF, Save the Children, the ILO, got together with other agencies to celebrate the results of a new study. This one was funded by USAID and carried out under PADF (Pan American Development Foundation). Dramatically entitling the study, “Lost Childhoods in Haiti,” the authors claimed that it was “the largest field survey on Human Rights violations with an emphasis on child trafficking, abuse, and violence” –it was in fact a 1,480 household survey, less than 1/4th the size of the Fafo study. Indeed, they never even mentioned their Fafo precursor. Yet, they conveniently overturned many of its findings.
The press was quick to hail these finding. Fox., BBC, ABC, CBS, all had the same ‘we are shocked’ things to say. A CNN news report cited the new figure of 225,000 children in “slavery” saying that it was “far more than previously thought,” despite the fact that for more than a decade virtually every article and report had been citing UNICEF’s 1996 figure of 300,000. They also returned to the heavy emphasis on girls, saying that over two thirds of restavek are female and, once again emphasizing abuse as if it were the norm. Specifically, they told readers that, “mostly young girls…they suffer sexual, psychological and physical abuse while toiling in extreme hardship”. And as if this were not enough, Sanjay Gupta (2009) went to Haiti with Jean Robert Cadet, ending his tour de force exposure of alleged cases of slavery, saying that,
.. Jean Robert Cadet, who himself was a Restavek 40 years ago…cries when he tells me how little has changed since he finally escaped his awful life…wipes his eyes and says “I don’t understand how anyone could treat a child this way. I look into the eyes of children, and I see angels.
I am not saying that child abuse in Haiti is nonexistent or that the institution of restavek does not give way to cases of severe exploitation. Rather, I am saying is that it has and is being exploited as an institutional mechanism to collect money and sell newspapers. Grabbing on to extraordinary cases such as the Pembroke Pines rape victim, seen earlier, and transforming them into exemplary cases of a Haitian tradition, while at the same time ignoring the importance of the restavek institution as a mechanism of social mobility is also manifest of a deeply disturbing bias, one evident in two centuries of treatment of Haiti in the international press–from the sensationalized pseudo-scholarly accounts of voodoo conflated with zombies and cannibalism, to the devastating impact of blaming AIDS on Haitians
Perhaps more telling than anything with respect to sensationalizing Haiti’s “child slavery” is the story of Jean Robert Cadet himself, for by definition, he was not a restavek.
Jean Robert Cadet’s story (and I am drawing from his own account) is of a boy who’s mother died and whose wealthy white father left him with a childless mistress. A twisted, hateful, and perhaps jealous woman, the mistress abused him, leaving deep emotional scars. But unlike the classic media image of Haitian child slaves, Cadet’s father was paying for his son’s board (which means that he was not sold or even given away), the mistress legally adopted him and gave him the last name Cadet (which makes him, not a slave, but her son), she sent him to Ecole Canada (which means he could not possibly have been “working from sunup to sundown”), and got him a passport (which means he was a full blown citizen, not a slave). When his adoptive mother moved to the US, his father then sent him to the United States to live with her where, despite his claims of being chattel (in the book he refers to his legally adoptive mother, as his “owner”) he finished high school, joined the military, went on to become a teacher and, as the child slavery issue became an international obsession, wrote a best-selling book, became famous, and founded a charity to aid restavek.
Based on the hard facts that can be gleaned from Cadet’s story, defining himself as a slave is a logical stretch. But then it’s Cadet’s definition and his book. There is no written record from anyone else. I should say, almost no written record. When reading reviews of Cadet’s book posted on Amazon.com, I came across a review by someone who was raised with Jean Robert Cadet and who wrote in praise of the book, at the same time but unwittingly called into question Cadet’s claims of abuse, of never having had time to play, of only having other restavek as friends, and of having to work from sunup to after sundown. The reviewer writes,
I knew Mr. Cadet, I played with him, I saw him every day for at least four years, and only thought of his adoptive mother as a strict disciplinarian…. As they say in HAITI, nothing is what they seem.
WORKS CITED
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NOTES
[i] The first rumblings of child slavery in Haiti came with the 1984 and 1990 Conferences on Child Domesticity held in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Participants at the conferences equated child domestic service with “slavery,” talked of beatings, sexual abuse and, in their zeal to please funding institutions and win support, presented it as epidemic. Lumping together every Haitian child between the ages of five and seventeen and not living with their parents in the category of child domestic servant, the experts came up with estimates ranging from 100,000 to 250,000, translating to 5 to 12 percent of all Haitian children in this age category (25% of the Haitian population is between the ages of 4 and 15 and 32% between the ages of 4 and 18; UNICEF 1993; Dorélien 1982; 1990; Clesca 1984).
[ii] My work on the topic includes, The Fading Frontier: A 1998 USAID funded report on the Haitian-Dominican border with a section on restaveks, The Most Vulnerable: A 1999 a CARE International and USAID funded report with a chapter on Orphanages and child labor within Haiti; Children are the Wealth of the Poor: A 2001 National Science Foundation funded University of Florida doctoral dissertation focusing on largely child labor in Haiti on child labor in Haiti; “#### Child labor…. A and Fewer Men, More Babies: Sex, family, and fertility in Haiti, a 2009 book published by Lexington Press as well as a self published book entitled… with a chapter ….
