The restavek system — in which poor rural families send their children to live with more affluent urban households in exchange for domestic work — remained a deeply troubling feature of Haitian social reality in 2019, with child rights organizations estimating that between 150,000 and 500,000 children were living in restavek conditions across the country.
While some children in such arrangements experienced relatively benign treatment and gained access to schooling, many restavek children — disproportionately girls — faced exploitation, abuse, denial of education, and conditions that human rights organizations classified as a form of child trafficking. The children, far from their families and in subordinate positions in households, were particularly vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse.
The political and economic crisis of 2019 worsened the conditions that drove families to place children in restavek arrangements in the first place. As rural poverty deepened and urban parents lost income, both the supply of children sent out as restaveks and the demand for cheap domestic help increased.
Child rights organizations called for stronger enforcement of existing laws against child exploitation, expanded social protection programs for vulnerable families, and sustained public education campaigns that challenged the cultural normalization of child domestic labor. They argued that ending the restavek system required addressing both its immediate manifestations and the deep poverty and inequality that perpetuated it.