The history of youth and children in the Republic of Haiti

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Children in the Streets of Haiti
By Blanchard, 14 September 1996. A 16-year old from Port-au-Prince on street kids. A plea for help.
Traffickers target Haitian children
BBC News, Sunday, 11 August, 2002. Thousands of Haitian children are being smuggled into the Dominican Republic each year and forced to beg or work as manual labourers. Traffickers on either side of the shared border smuggle the youngsters into the Dominican Republic to work as farm hands, construction workers and street peddlers, some without parental agreement, but others with.
Hundreds of Haitian street kids find haven in the capital's huge cemetery
By Tim Collie, Sun-Sentinal, 30 December 2002. An estimated 7,000 street children live in Port-au-Prince and thousands more in other cities. That doesn't include thousands more a notch above the streets, barely surviving in dusty rural villages, working as orphaned domestic slaves in elite households or living without education or medicine in vast shanty slums while parents forage for food. What street children means here are children without parents who sleep outside and find their own food.
Remarks by Mrs. Mildred T. Aristide, First Lady of the Republic of Haiti, at the Seminar on the Trafficking in Children
Mrs. Mildred Aristide, Montana Hotel, 11 July 2003. The US broadly defines trafficking to refer to any kind of placement of children outside their family, and in such terms Haiti ranks at the bottom. But this definition too broad. Child slavery in fact is not accepted in Haiti, and it obscures the realities. The effect of poverty on treatment of children.
Seeking opportunity, Haitian children find slavery
By Amy Bracken, Reuters, 24 October 2003. Today about one in every 10 Haitian child is a restavek, or a child who works for free in exchange for room and board. Most are girls, sometimes as young as four. When parents cannot care adequately for their children, they often send them to live with a relative or acquaintance or another adult in the hope that they will be looked after and sent to school. That rarely happens