Introduction
This report is an analysis of the overall findings from the research project on Haitian child domestic workers. The research was initiated by UNICEF, the Haitian Ministère des Affaires Sociales et du Travail (MAST), the Institut du Bien-Etre Social et de Recherches (IBESR), ILO, IOM, the IRC and the Terre des Hommes Lausanne Foundation. Additional organisations joined during the course of research, and eventually a group of 28 different organisations supported the research and made up a Technical Committee.
Representations of child domestic work in Haiti seem to fall into two camps. On the one hand, a rights-based media discourse tends to homogenise different practices under a stigmatising label of slavery, and focus on curtailments of children’s freedoms. On the other hand, academic literature draws attention to the logic of child rearrangement solutions that grow out of rural poverty, high fertility, and parenting stress and weakening of the caretaking structures in the larger lakou residential units. In the latter context, children’s agency is also emphasised. In the latter context, however, the specificities of the conditions faced by many children in domestic work arrangements in Haiti in the bad end of the continuum are not made subject of further elaboration.
Aiming to move beyond a narrow conception of “agency”, and the concomitant distinction between children’s agency and victimisation, we approach child domestic work by putting agency in relational perspective. We explore the many social connections and movements that define working childhood and the specificities of Haitian children’s volatility. We argue that the nature of children’s social relationships and exclusion better convey the particularities of Haitian child domestic work, in contrast to lack of independence or free will. “Agency” in this Haitian setting, rather than constituted by the degree of freedom to act independently, is the relational dynamics of the multiple social attachments that define children’s living conditions. By the same token, local perceptions of agency and action are defined by the nature of social connectedness, and caretaking, loyalty, collaboration and/or resistance to domination in each of these relationships. Our approach also results from a local emphasis on social mobility in these networks that appeared in our conversations with children and youth, child domestic workers, and rural parents. Moreover, we show some ways in which mobility exposes children to risk, focusing on how children in new homes are treated in relation to other children and how these particular social placements give intakes to children’s experiences.