Ahead of a forum in Vienna next week organized by the UN Global
Initiative to Fight Trafficking (UNGIFT) – a partnership of
four United Nations agencies, IOM and the Organization for Security
and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) which aims to raise awareness of
human trafficking and to find effective means of combatting it, a
new video news release (VNR) by IOM today highlights the plight of
an estimated 173,000 Haitian children internally trafficked for
domestic servitude, known as Restavek (stay with).

Through the Restavek system, parents unable to care for their
children send them to relatives or strangers living in urban areas
supposedly to receive care and education in exchange for housework.
But the reality is a life of hardship and abuse; enslaved by their
so called "hosts", the children seldom attend school.

Some of these children manage to escape and are picked up by the
authorities and referred to the Haitian Social Welfare Institute or
IBESR (Institut pour le bien-être social et la recherche),
and are then taken to centres where they are cared for until their
biological families can be found.

The Center for Action and Development or CAD (Centre d'action
pour le développement) and L'Escale in Port-au-Prince
receive financial and technical support from IOM to provide
shelter, food, medical and psychosocial support for these children
until their parents can be found and conditions are in place for
the children to return to their families.

Geslet Bordes, Manager of IOM's Counter-Trafficking in Children
Program in Haiti says the Restavek system is a modern form of
slavery and a gross violation of the most fundamental human rights.
"Every person in Haiti thinks it is OK, ‘It's not a problem
to have a servant in my house'; ‘It's OK, I am helping him or
her'. What about the future? We have to think about the
future."

When the Restaveks get older and are deemed by their "hosts" as
no longer manageable, they run the risk of ending up on the streets
where the girls often work as servants or are forced into
prostitution and the boys join the ranks of petty criminals.

Since 2005, IOM has assisted more than 300 Restavek children to
reunite with their families. Fifty others have been identified and
30 are currently under rehabilitation in local shelters until
enough information is obtained to identify their hometowns and
families.

Twelve former Restaveks youth have also benefited from IOM's
programme through three-month vocational training and funding for
setting up of shoemaking, baking and dressmaking and other small
businesses.

Many Restavek children and those taken from their homes to be
placed in orphanages hail from Jeremie, in the department of Grande
Anse, an isolated and impoverished region in south-west Haiti. Most
families in the region have between seven and nine children and the
parents are unable to meet the most basic needs such as food,
health care and education.

Deceptive practices in order to lead destitute parents in the
country's poorest regions to place their children with orphanages
in the capital, is another form of abuse against children in
Haiti.

Bordes explains: "The trafficker says to the parent, ‘You
have a lot of children, you have to give one or two because you are
going to receive money to have a small business, you are going to
visit the US, and you have to give a chance to your child.' So, if
you are a parent you are going to think, you're going to look at
your situation, and you're going to make the decision to give your
children."

Last August, at the request of Haitian authorities, IOM and the
Pan American Development Foundation (PADF) returned 48 small
children that had been taken from Jeremie and were being kept in an
orphanage in Port-au-Prince where they were found in a state of
neglect. Their parents, too poor to cater to their needs, were
deceived in sending them away in the belief that their children
would be provided with food and education, and would soon return to
them. However, many had already been included in international
adoption procedures.

The Haitian government, with IOM's technical support, has taken
steps to draft legislation addressing the specific concerns of
Haiti's human trafficking context.

IOM activities in support of national efforts to combat
trafficking in persons and to assist in the provision of social and
educational support to vulnerable children returning to their
families are funded by the United States Bureau for Population,
Refugees and Migration (PRM), and from the Government of Canada and
the United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF).

For more information please contact:

Judy Dacruz

E-mail: "mailto:jdacruz@iom.int" target="_blank" title=
"">jdacruz@iom.int

or "mailto:jdacruz@iom.int" target="_blank" title="">

Geslet Bordes

IOM Haiti

Tel: +509 245 51 53

E-mail: "mailto:gbordes@iom.int">gbordes@iom.int

NOTE TO BROADCASTERS: The script and video can be downloaded
from IOM's Video Vault, Video News Releases, at "paragraph-link-no-underline" href=
"http://www.quicklink.tv/IOM/Cat_BrowseQ.asp" target="_blank"
title="">http://www.quicklink.tv/IOM/Cat_BrowseQ.asp