Word: romers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...scourge was thought to have been left behind in Haiti. But as more young people like Michele emerge from the refugee shadows, they have exposed the problem of slaves being kept in the U.S., undetected by local authorities amid the two-decade-old wave of Haitian migration. Says Danielle Romer, director of the private social services agency Haitian Support Inc. in Miami's Little Haiti: "It's much more widespread here than any of us wants to admit...
...late 1990s, Haitian-American community activists like Romer had begun to detect the presence of restaveks in Miami. When the activists began to broach the issue on Haitian radio shows and at church gatherings, they first faced denial and even veiled threats of ostracism from some of the community's old guard. But the phenomenon could no longer be covered up after Oct. 2, 1999, when Florida officials working on a tip from neighbors removed a 12-year-old Haitian girl--filthy, unkempt and in acute abdominal pain from repeated rape--from the affluent suburban home of middle-class Haitian...
...impossible to estimate how many others like the Pembroke Pines girl, nicknamed Little Hope in the Haitian community, are laboring in American households. But Romer and other Haitian- American social workers report that current and former restaveks are coming to them in greater numbers now for help, largely because the Pembroke Pines case galvanized support for such victims. Several organizations have set up hotlines for kids seeking help; they offer ex-restaveks assistance in finding homes, jobs and opportunities for schooling...
Restaveks who do get away have grim stories to tell. A young man recently went to Romer with hideous burns from an iron, a punishment by his West Palm Beach, Fla., "host" family whenever he didn't press their clothes correctly. Aside from losing their childhood, restaveks suffer separation from their own families. At the Maurice Sixto shelter in Port-au-Prince, Ania Derice, 18, recalls how her parents in rural central Haiti, who couldn't afford to feed and clothe her, sent her to a house in Port-au-Prince to be a restavek. When Ania was 12--after...
...privation--that allows their masters to rationalize the practice as more benevolent than benighted. "She's like a member of our family," insists Micheline Dornevil, 43, whom Ania serves as well as Dornevil's five children. "No, none of this restavek stuff. What we've done is help her." Romer often gets the same response from restavek "hosts" in Miami. "They actually think they're doing a positive thing for these children," she says. "And if they bring them to the U.S., ooh, then they really think they're doing a good deed...