Reply #1: Pines couple charged with enslaving Haitian girl

[seemslikeadream]

Pines couple charged with enslaving Haitian girl after smuggling her into


The case came to light when the girl befriended three employees of a Fort Lauderdale modeling school after responding to a television ad for the school. During daily calls, details of the girl's life slowly emerged.

She said although she shared the house with the Pompees and their four children, she slept on the floor and was forced to clean the house from the moment she returned home from school until she went to bed. She said she was not allowed to have any personal possessions and was hardly fed. Then, as she held her abdomen in pain, details of the alleged sexual abuse came out.


The U.S. Attorney's Office said human trafficking is a modern form of slavery. According to recent government estimates, as many as 20,000 people a year are brought into the United States for forced labor or sexual exploitation.

Child slavery is an entrenched tradition in Haiti where, according to some estimates, there are as many as 300,000 child slaves, called restaveks. Restavek means "to stay with" in Creole, and children on the impoverished island sometimes are referred to as "animals."

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-censlave24mar2...


Of Haitian Bondage


Friday, May 4, 2001, Time Magazine, TIM PADGETT/MIAMI AND PORT-AU-PRINCE


By the 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-American merchants Willy and Marie Pompee in Pembroke Pines. The girl, a restavek, said she had been forced to have sex with the Pompees' 20-year-old son Willy Jr. since she was nine. The father and son, who police say are on the lam in Haiti, have been charged with slaveholding and sexual battery, respectively. Marie, who would not take repeated phone requests for comment, remains under investigation.

It is 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.
http://www.racematters.org/ofhaitianbondage.htm