Haitian call to end slavery
Though the “civilized” world clamps sanctions on nations and peoples they dislike, the same heads of “civilized” nations tolerate, sanction, ignore and in effect support brutal in-your-face abuses of human rights by people and corporate entities within individual countries, among them highly “developed” countries, and within countries developed and underdeveloped throughout all hemispheres. Two to three centuries later, nations have failed, shamefully, to abolish slavery.
Haiti’s Child slaves
Children in RESTAVEK situations are beaten, sexually abused and isolated. Often they grow up to be illiterate adults who do not value other people’s lives because their own lives were never valued. These children are given nothing of value; and in the context of society, they have little or nothing to give back.
RESTAVEK is a Creole word whose literal meaning is ‘stay with’ — The term and condition describes children, hundreds of thousands of them, given by desperate parents to live with host families who exploit them for their labor in exchange for a place to sleep, some leftover food, and a promise —rarely kept — to go to school.
Jean-Robert Cadet, author of RESTAVEC: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle Class American (1998) was a child slave. He has dedicated his life to the cause of RESTAVECS and, in his own words: he will do this “until all Haiti’s children are seen as their nation’s future.”
Jean-Robert Cadet’s latest book in progress is A Stone of Hope. “My greatest hope,” he says on his foundation website, “is that the new book will draw more attention to the plight of Haiti’s children, pushing the Haitian government to protect the rights of the nation’s children and make education mandatory as prescribed by the constitution.”
Gated international helpers’ unhelpfulness
“If you were in Haiti today, you’d think the January earthquake happened last month but it happened nearly a year ago,” Cadet writes in a December update.
“More than one million of my fellow Haitians are still living in tent camps while those who came to help them drive expensive SUVs and live in gated communities. With so many people homeless and so many schools destroyed, the international community spent millions on a presidential election and politicians seem oblivious to the people’s immediate need.”
What Haitians can do for Haitians — what Cadet’s foundation does— rescuing children, negotiating with host families on behalf of Haiti’s slave children, “International organizations cannot do … [because] they depend on Haitian staffs who tell them what they want to hear to keep their jobs.”
“‘Freedom begins at home’
“Child slavery is one of Haiti’s biggest problems that will be solved when Haitians take ownership of it.
“Helping a people means speaking their language, knowing their culture, going to their homes, listening to them and breaking bread with them. Change is not dependent on the outside in, but must begin within Haiti by Haitians at every level of society.”
Haitian music altering
slavery-perpetuating mindset
The Jean R. Cadet Organization, a nonprofit registered ‘Restavek No More’ has begun a project of annual contests “to harness the transformative power of music to change the mentality that is perpetuating child slavery.” Coordinating the contests is Restavek foundation member and Haitian pianist, composer and entrepreneur Fabrice Rouzier. The project invites Haiti’s musicians to write songs that condemn child slavery and violence against children [Foundation: www. JeanRCadet. Org].
“Growing up in Haiti,” Jean-Robert Cadet writes in the December update, “I remember how much Haitians feared the brutal secret police of the Duvalier regime yet the masses loved the dictator because radio stations constantly played songs lionizing him.
“We want to fill the airwaves with songs that make Haitians begin to see every child as precious.”
Sources and notes
The Restavek system (from French term Reste-Avec, “to stay with”) has continued since Haitian independence (1804) despite Haiti’s constitution, its ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and its 1984 Child Labor law. Improvement for children trapped in the Restavek system remains difficult as Haiti struggles to address its root causes: poverty, overpopulation, a lack of access to education and both political and societal acceptance of this form of child slavery. http://www.jeanrcadet.org/aboutus.aspx; http://www.jeanrcadet.org/media-news.aspx#News
Jean-Robert Cadet
Jean-Robert Cadet is an advocate for children enslaved in the Haitian Restavek system and the founder of the U.S.-based Jean R. Cadet Foundation. He is an author and one-time member of the UN Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery. He has collaborated on several documentaries and has testified before the United Nations and the U.S. Congress regarding his experience as a survivor of slavery.
Jean-Robert Cadet was born in the late 50s to a wealthy white father and an impoverished black mother. When he was four years old his mother died and Cadet became a Restavek, forced to work long hours in the home of a master. His masters physically, verbally, sexually and emotionally abused him and often lent him out to work for neighbors and friends. He was excluded from all family, cultural, civic, and religious activities and was what he describes as “an observer rather than a participant in my Haitian culture and society.”
When he turned 15, Jean-Robert Cadet’s owners immigrated to the United States and he joined them, again as their domestic servant. When his owners realized that “domestic servitude was stigmatized” in U.S. society and that they would be required to send him to school alongside their own children, they turned him out of the house.
Despite the abuse within his own culture and racism in U.S. society, Cadet finished high school, served in the United States army, finished university with a major in international studies, married, started a family, and earned a master’s degree in French literature.
Restavek No More is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization “dedicated to ending child slavery in Haiti by raising international awareness, partnering with international organizations working to change domestic family policy issues, advocating for children in servitude, conducting national campaigns and empowering the new generation of Haitians to take ownership of this national shame.” http://www.jeanrcadet.org/mission.aspx; http://www.jeanrcadet.org/page2180430.aspx
See also:
“Taking a Stand” December 7, 2010 interview — program introduction: BBC Radio 4’s Fergal Keane talks to Jean-Robert Cadet. Born in Haiti, Jean-Robert became a domestic slave when his mother died. He was four years old. On the island, they are called ‘Restavecs,’ children given board and lodging in exchange for unpaid work.
More than a quarter of a million Restavecs are estimated to be in Haiti and the number has almost certainly swelled with the children left orphaned by the earthquake. Jean-Robert Cadet tells Fergal Keane how his early experience as a slave has affected his life; and why he is putting pressure on the Haitian government to make the practice unacceptable. BBC Radio 4, December 7, 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wdgcv
Jean R. Cadet Restavek Organization, PO Box 43414, Cincinnati, OH 45243; Email: info@jeanrcadet.org
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