ABSTRACT
While the nation of Haiti is widely known for its revolutionary history in which slaves led the world’s first successful rebellion, abolishing slavery and gaining national independence from French colonial powers, it is increasingly being associated with a persistent form of child domestic slavery known as the restavèk system. This chapter discusses the conceptual realities of restavèk children’s lives in order to understand their position in society, identifying them as occupants of a borderland space, existing in the margins of spheres of protection which ought to be offered by families, communities, and the state. Identified as a female-dominated system, the restavèk practice emerges from the marginalisation and disenfranchisement of women in the Haitian context and we look at how women, in a similar vein to restavèk children, also occupy their own borderland spaces, as evidenced through their gendered roles and responsibilities and the challenging environment in which they are expected to fulfil those. This inevitably leads to a discussion on gender-based violence from a physical perspective as well as within the wider context of ‘symbolic’ and ‘structural’ violence, as felt through patriarchal social structures in an unstable environment where poverty has a major presence. The former and the latter both point to men as vessels of patriarchal oppression of women; however, this chapter goes further to examine how men themselves, even through their exertion of power and dominance over women, are victims of patriarchal, colonial global mechanisms that establish unattainable gendered expectations and contribute to the same frustration and violence that is both exerted onto women and shared by them. Thus, the association of borderlands is made relevant not only to restavèk children, but also to women and men in turn.
