The United Nations Secretary-General’s Annual Report on Children and Armed Conflict included Haiti for the first time in 2023, documenting 383 verified grave violations against children and reflecting a determination by UN officials that the scale and systematic nature of violence against children in Haiti had reached a threshold that required the same level of monitoring and reporting applied to active armed conflicts.
The inclusion of Haiti in the report — alongside countries like Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Ukraine — was both a statement of fact about conditions on the ground and a political signal that the international community was reclassifying Haiti’s crisis from a governance and humanitarian problem to something closer to an armed conflict with specific implications for international legal obligations and accountability.
The grave violations documented included killing and maiming of children in gang violence, recruitment of children into armed groups, sexual violence against children, attacks on schools and hospitals, and abduction of children. Each category reflected a systematic pattern rather than isolated incidents, with children being targeted deliberately as part of gang strategies of territorial control and community intimidation.
Child protection advocates welcomed the inclusion of Haiti in the report as an important step toward the international accountability they had been demanding, noting that the report’s listing of perpetrators created obligations for UN member states to act and provided a foundation for potential accountability mechanisms. They argued that the documentation of violations, while important, needed to be followed by concrete action to protect children and hold perpetrators responsible — a step that remained to be taken.