Haiti’s gangs turn to starving children to bolster their ranks

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After months of relentless gang violence, thousands of killings, and the unseating of a government, Haiti is faced with another heartbreaking issue which seems likely to prolong the Caribbean island nation’s woes for another generation. Testimonies collected by Amnesty International have uncovered how Haiti’s armed gangs are enlisting hundreds of children.

Ana Piquer, Americas director at Amnesty International, says: “We have documented heartbreaking stories of children forced to work for gangs: from running deliveries to gathering information and performing domestic tasks under threats of violence.”

Boys as young as six are being forced to work as lookouts, made to build street barriers, trained to use machine guns, and are being ordered to participate in kidnappings and other acts of violence. Girls in the possession of gangs are subjected to rape and other forms of sexual violence by older male gang members, according to Piquer.

Haiti’s 200 or so armed gangs currently control around 90% of the capital city, Port-au-Prince, and large parts of the country are ungovernable. The collapse in law and order has allowed gang leaders such as Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier to commit terrible atrocities largely unchallenged.

Read more: Jimmy 'Barbecue' Chérizier: the gangster behind the violence in Haiti who may have political aspirations of his own

The involvement of children in Haiti’s gangs is not exactly new. According to Unicef, between 30% and 50% of children in Haiti are involved with armed groups in some capacity. There are several socioeconomic explanations for this.

Haiti was once the wealthiest European colony in the Americas – and staged the only ever successful slave rebellion against its French colonial masters before declaring independence in 1804. But modern Haiti is a failed state where more than half of the population now live below the World Bank’s poverty line.

According to figures published by the International Fund for Agricultural Development, Haiti has the highest prevalence of food insecurity in Latin America and the Caribbean. One-third of the population goes hungry every day.

Impoverishment and grinding poverty has made the population desperate. With limited options for survival, many children in Haiti are drawn into criminal groups. At times, the promise of a single meal can be enough to attract a child to join a gang.

That said, the breakdown of order throughout the country has undoubtedly encouraged the gangs to increase their recruitment of children. As with most conflict zones, once indoctrinated, child soldiers make for cheap and deadly combatants.

There is also one other specific social factor that contributes to some parents turning a blind eye to their children joining the gangs. The prevalence of child recruitment by gangs can be linked to a Haitian socioeconomic practice called restaveks.

A restavek, which is Creole for “to stay with”, is a child who is given away by impoverished parents with the unwritten understanding that they will be fed, looked after and will not die of hunger. It has become a form of modern-day slavery.

The End Slavery Now project has found that “more than 300,000 children are victims of domestic slavery” in Haiti today. Many of these children regularly undergo forms of physical and sexual violence.

A set pattern Child sex slavery and sexual abuse are familiar occurrences in societies torn by civil war. It is more likely to take place in settings where the process of governance is weak or non-existent. This situation facilitates conditions of criminal impunity, leading various actors involved in conflict to sexually exploit children.

There is an established pattern of predatory child sexual slavery in Haiti. Following the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010 and the ensuing cholera epidemic, some members of the UN peacekeeping force stationed in the country were found to have been running a child sex racket.

In 2017, an investigation by the Associated Press revealed at least 134 Sri Lankan peacekeepers were involved. It has been documented that girls as young as 11 were sexually abused and impregnated by the peacekeepers, and then subsequently abandoned to raise their children alone. Impoverished and starving Haitian children fell victim to this racket in exchange for scraps of the peacekeepers’ leftover food.

According to its own admission, the UN peacekeeping force was responsible for “transactional sex” during its operations in the country.

Read more: 'They put a few coins in your hands to drop a baby in you' – 265 stories of Haitian children abandoned by UN fathers

In 2019, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, branded violence against children as a “silent emergency” of our time. Unfortunately, not much is being done to address this challenge, despite the urgency of Guterres’ statement.

There are many existential challenges facing Haiti. Some of them are homegrown, such as the prevalence of gangs and their terror techniques.

But, as it is located on a geological fault line in a region susceptible to severe storms, Haiti is particularly prone to natural disasters. A devastating earthquake in 2010 and a cholera epidemic in 2016 debilitated the country, and the knock-on effects will last decades.

To make matters worse, Haiti also suffers from a compassion deficit. A lack of real engagement from the international community has contributed to the erosion of the Haitian civil society and left the population at the mercy of gang violence.

Even the Kenyan-led policing mission tasked with restoring order is suffering from inadequate funding and equipment, which has affected its operational capacity. Only around US$400 million (£308 million) of the US$600 million that was originally pledged for the mission has materialised, with the US shouldering a disproportionate financial burden.

Preoccupied with more high-profile conflicts elsewhere, the international community appears to have little interest in the horrors that are unfolding under the tropical sun in the faraway Caribbean.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Amalendu Misra is a recipient of British Academy and Nuffield Foundation fellowships.

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