A Kenyan police officer, part of a UN-backed multinational force, runs to take cover from an exchange of gunfire between gangs and police at the Kenyan base in the Delmas neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Thursday, Dec. 5, 2024. (Odelyn Joseph/AP)
(Tribune News Service) — The nine-year-old boys wearing matching knapsacks walk down the street in the morning light, but they are not going to school. In their hands are loaded guns, and the boys know how to use them. One aims his pistol at the Haitian police officers engaging them in a firefight a few hundred yards away. The children are members of one of the gangs that control at least 80% of Port-au-Prince, where they have effectively replaced the government. The knapsacks are for goods they find or loot.
In a country where the United Nations estimates 5,000 people have been killed by gangs this year alone, and more than 700,000 people have been forced to flee their homes, children have become a largely voiceless victim of the crisis. Orphaned, left homeless, or abandoned by families that cannot afford to care for them, many youth roam the streets of the capital before being recruited by gangs that are a rare source of ready cash.
The boys might be used as lookouts or runners to buy cigarettes before being given weapons themselves, said Mary Durran, Haiti program director for Development and Peace— Caritas Canada, a Montreal-based Catholic charity. “The girls are used as sex slaves or as cooks and cleaners.”
The U.N. estimates that the number of children in the ranks of Haiti’s gangs has increased by 70% in the past year, and that children now make up roughly half of the gangs’ fighting force.
The use of child soldiers is considered a war crime by the International Criminal Court.
“As the situation in Haiti unfolds, it appears that individuals under the age of 18 are becoming involved in irregular armed forces,” said Theresa S. Betancourt, Salem Professor in Global Practice at the Boston College School of Social Work and author of the forthcoming book Shadows into Light: A Generation of Former Child Soldiers Comes of Age. “So yes, I would say that the situation meets the definition.”
Haiti has spiraled into a state of bloody anarchy since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021.
Shortly after Prime Minister Ariel Henry was barred from the country by threats of violence from the gangs while he was abroad this March, the country was nominally placed under the control of a transitional council with the blessing of the regional Caribbean Community bloc known as CARICOM.
But governmental power on the ground is virtually absent. No elected officials remain in office, the largest prison was virtually emptied in a jailbreak during the gangs’ uprising, and the national police are widely perceived as ineffective, corrupt and brutal.
A UN-authorized police force largely composed of Kenyans has been in Haiti since June but a promised 2,500-officer coalition has never numbered more than 416. They have made no major arrests and seized no gang territory.
Even before the escalation of violence in the past three years, millions of impoverished Haitian youth faced grim prospects thanks to a “very, very poor educational system with very little investment from the government,” said Durran of Caritas Canada.
Children sent by poor rural families to work as domestics in the cities were sometimes effectively enslaved by their employers.
Services for children have been gutted since gangs took over. About 1,000 schools have been closed to use as shelters for displaced persons, or because gangs occupied the area. The pediatric ward of a prominent Port-au-Prince hospital was burned by gangs with Molotov cocktails in mid-December.
Several orphanages in the capital were forced to relocate to the north of the country when armed groups captured their neighborhoods, said Hunter Picken, an executive with HERO Client Rescue, the armored ambulance and helicopter service that evacuated many orphans.
The gangs don’t spare children in their violent rampages. Amnesty International decried an October massacre in the Artibonite region in which 70 people were killed, including minors.
The enlistment of children as perpetrators of violence is, of course, its own kind of violence. No child joins an armed group voluntarily, said Emmanuel Camille, director of the Haitian child advocacy group KPTSL. Some are forced to join gangs at gunpoint while others are forced by circumstance, but they have all been “manipulated” in one way or another.
The militias use various forms of deception and coercion to enlist young members. A typical recruitment strategy might involve offering a young boy a motor bike or cash, before threatening to denounce him to police or vigilante groups if he ever threatens to defect. Other gangs will give boys more alcohol than they can handle, sometimes laced with drugs, and then film the children in compromising situations to use as blackmail, Camille said.
In a practice seen as particularly horrifying by a country where slaves were once branded with the names of their masters, young members of armed groups are often required to have the name of their gang leader tattooed on their bodies, “like in the time of slavery.”
Extracting children from the clutches of gangs is extremely difficult, Camille said. Her organization is working with 30 to 40 children who seem like candidates for defection but has only successfully freed one, a boy of 16. He was from a middle-class family who were determined to save him; he and his parents eventually fled their home for another region of the country with the help of funds from KPTSL. The boy only recently broke off contact with his former bosses in the armed group.
Today he is back in school, said Camille, but involvement in brutal violence often leaves children traumatized in a lasting way.
“He has a life,” she said, “more or less.”
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