Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive on Tuesday expressed the fear that amid the clamor to airlift Haitian orphans out of the devastated country to waiting adoptive parents in the U.S. and Europe, others are being trafficked.
The U.N. says it's on alert to prevent the exploitation of the thousands of Haitian kids who've lost or been separated from their parents and who wander aimlessly in search of food, water and shelter.
Source: Time
The U.N. says it's on alert to prevent the exploitation of the thousands of Haitian kids who've lost or been separated from their parents and who wander aimlessly in search of food, water and shelter.
- UNICEF, the U.N.'s child advocacy arm, as well as groups like Save the Children and the Red Cross, say they're registering at-risk kids and setting up shelters exclusively for them. Says one UNICEF official monitoring reports of scenes like the one witnessed by Pean, "Traffickers fish in pools of vulnerability, and we've rarely if ever seen one like this."
- The earthquake seems to have shaken more Haitians into vigilance as well - and perhaps, unfortunately, some vigilantism. In the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Petit Place Cazeu on Wednesday, a crowd of quake survivors living in tents surrounded a pickup truck and beat up the driver, saying he had for several days been trying to kidnap young girls.
- Bleeding from his nose, mouth and scalp, he managed to get back in his truck and flee. (The angry crowd then threatened to beat up a journalist for even asking questions about child trafficking.)
- But the problem remains daunting, and it is exacerbated by the fact that children are not accorded much if any protection under Haitian law or culture. That's a big reason restaveks are still so prevalent today, not just in Haiti but even in Haitian-American enclaves in the U.S., such as New York and Miami, as TIME first reported in 2001.
- Restavek in Creole means "to stay with," an innocuous term for a far more sinister practice - children, often given up by their poor Haitian families, "stay with" more affluent families as slaves. And like most slaves, they're usually subject to physical, emotional and sexual abuse.
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