A Girl’s Escape

By NICHOLAS KRISTOF

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — She was a 13-year-old girl who said she was beaten daily by strangers who forced her to work unpaid in their home, and she wanted to escape.

Marilaine was one of 200,000 or more Haitian children called restaveks, typically serving as unpaid maids in strangers’ homes, working for room and board. It is a vast system of child trafficking that is often characterized as a modern form of slavery. I followed Marilaine for a week in Haiti as she tried to flee, find her parents and start life over — and this is her story.

Marilaine grew up in a remote village where no family planning or public schooling is available, one of 12 children to impoverished parents who later separated. As Marilaine tells the story, one day when she was 10 years old, she walked to her father’s house to ask him to help pay her school fees. Instead, he dispatched her here to the capital to work as a restavek, a Creole term used to describe child laborers, without even telling her mother.

“My father didn’t want to spend money on my school fees,” Marilaine explained.

As is common for restaveks, Marilaine slept on the floor and woke up at 5 each morning to clean the house, fetch water and wash dishes. She says she was beaten daily with electrical cords.

Marilaine was allowed no contact with her family. Once, she says, she tried to run away but was caught and beaten. At school, she often cried, and she had scars on her arms and legs from beatings.

Yet the restavek system isn’t always slavery. Sometimes the child gets more food and education than would have been the case in her own family (two-thirds of restaveks are girls). Marilaine says that she was fed properly and that she was also allowed to attend a free afternoon school.

Many Haitian restaveks are treated much worse. One 12-year-old restavek I interviewed said that she rises at 4 each morning to get everything ready for “the princesses,” as she calls the teenage girls in the house. Everyone in the house beats her, she says, and they refuse to let her see her mother for fear that she might run away.

An aid group called the Restavek Freedom Foundation helped Marilaine escape her home and find refuge in a safe house for restaveks. The mood was festive in the beautiful home as the dozen girls living there cheered Marilaine’s arrival and hugged her.

Marilaine picked up a book, telling me that she wasn’t allowed to touch books at her old house. She tried on new clothes. She slept in a bed.

But the family that Marilaine had been working for was furious. I visited the woman of the house, and she insisted that she had never beaten the girl and that Marilaine had in effect been kidnapped from her.

The leader of the neighborhood association, Junior Pataud, offered a conflicting defense. “In Haitian culture, it’s normal to beat a child,” he said. “But that’s not the same as mistreatment.”

The next day, the neighbors gathered angrily outside the school Marilaine had attended, blaming it for the girl’s escape and threatening to set fire to it unless Marilaine was returned. After hours of tense negotiations, the police averted a riot.

A few days later, I drove for several hours with the police and the Restavek Freedom Foundation to Marilaine’s village. When Marilaine stepped out of the car, family members and neighbors were stunned. They had assumed that she had died years ago.

Yet the reunion was a letdown. Marilaine’s mom didn’t seem at all thrilled to see her daughter again, and Marilaine quickly made it clear that she wanted to return to the safe house in the capital so that she could attend a good school. The police told Marilaine that she would have to stay in the village with her family, and she burst into tears.

The authorities will probably eventually let Marilaine return to the Restavek Freedom Foundation safe house, but the episode was a reminder that helping people is a complex, uphill task — and that the underlying problem behind human trafficking is poverty.

One way to fight such human trafficking would be to provide free and accessible birth control, so that women like Marilaine’s mother don’t end up with 12 children that they struggle to feed.

Another would be to provide free public education, so that parents don’t feel that the only way to get schooling for their children is to send them off as restaveks.

That’s why what’s at stake in fighting global poverty isn’t just poor people’s incomes. It’s also dignity and freedom — and the right of a girl to grow up in something better than quasi slavery.

My New Year’s wish: May Marilaine in 2014 finally find freedom and an education.

For Prostitutes Jailed in China, Forced Labor With No Recourse

By ANDREW JACOBS

Bathed in the fluorescent pink light that signaled she was ready for business, the woman rattled off the occupational hazards of working as a prostitute in China: abusive clients, the specter of H.I.V. and the scathing glares of neighbors that tear at her soul.

“My life is so full of anxieties,” said the woman, known as Li Zhengguo, between customers one recent evening. “Sometimes my heart feels rotten for having given away my body.”

But her greatest fear is a visit from the police. The last time she was hauled into the local station house, Ms. Li was sent without trial or legal representation to a detention center in neighboring Hebei Province, where she spent six months making ornamental paper flowers and reciting the regulations that criminalize prostitution. Her incarceration at the Handan Custody and Education Center ended with a final indignity: She had to reimburse the jail for her stay, about $60 a month.

“The next time the police come to take me away, I’ll slit my wrists,” said Ms. Li, 39, a single mother with two sons.

Advocates for legal overhaul claimed victory in November after the Chinese government announced that it would abolish “re-education through labor,” the system that allows the police to send petty criminals and people who complain too loudly about government malfeasance to work camps for up to four years without trial.

But two parallel mechanisms of extralegal punishment persist: one for drug offenders, and another for prostitutes and their clients. “The abuses and torture are continuing, just in a different way,” said Corinna-Barbara Francis, a China researcher at Amnesty International.

The murky penal system for prostitutes, “custody and education,” is strikingly similar to re-education through labor. Centers run by the Ministry of Public Security hold women for up to two years and often require them to toil in workshops seven days a week for no pay, producing toys, disposable chopsticks and dog diapers, some of which the women say are packaged for export. Male clients are also jailed at such centers, but in far smaller numbers, according to a report released last month by the advocacy group Asia Catalyst.

Women who have passed through some of the nation’s 200 custody and education prisons describe onerous fees and violence at the hands of guards.

As with re-education through labor, the police mete out custody and education sentences without trial and with little chance for appeal. “It’s arbitrary, abusive and disastrous in terms of public health,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, which issued a report last year on the perils faced by women working in China’s booming sex trade. “It’s another rotten branch of the Chinese legal system, and it should be abolished.”

The Asia Catalyst report portrays custody and education as a vast moneymaking enterprise masquerading as a system for rehabilitating women. Established by China’s legislature in 1991, the detention centers are run by local public security bureaus, which have the final say on penalties. Former inmates say police officials sometimes solicit bribes to release detainees.

The government does not publish regular statistics on the program, but experts estimate that 18,000 to 28,000 women are sent to detention centers each year. Inmates are required to pay for food, medical exams, bedding and other essential items like soap and sanitary napkins, with most women spending about $400 for a six-month stay, the report said.

“Those who couldn’t pay were only given steamed buns to eat,” one woman told Asia Catalyst.

At some centers, visitors are required to pay an entry fee of $33 to see imprisoned relatives.

Those who have studied the system say that local public security bureaus earn a sizable income from what is essentially free labor.

The Chinese government’s approach to prostitution is inconsistent. After the Communist victory in 1949, Mao Zedong made the rehabilitation of prostitutes, whom the Communists saw as victims of capitalist exploitation, a priority. During his first years in power, he effectively eradicated the trade. But the introduction of market overhauls in the early 1980s led to a resurgence in prostitution, and up to six million women were estimated to be working in the sex industry in recent years, according to a United Nations report.

Today, Chinese cities are full of “hair salons” with curtained-off back rooms and no visible scissors; at upscale karaoke parlors, young female attendants double as call girls. The police are often paid to look the other way, many prostitutes say.

But that apparent forbearance evaporates during periodic “strike hard” campaigns in which large numbers of prostitutes are rounded up, often before important political meetings. A police official in Liaoning Province told Asia Catalyst that cities and counties were required to meet quotas, prompting occasional “vice sweeps” to replenish jailhouse workshops.

Legal advocates say the police sometimes use violence to extract confessions and force women to strip for photographs that become evidence of their transgressions. “The way they are treated is such a violation of their dignity,” said Shen Tingting, advocacy director at Asia Catalyst. “The entire system stigmatizes women and sends out a message that sex workers are dirty and need to be reformed.”

Women describe the camp labor as tolerable but tedious. In an interview, a 41-year-old native of southeast Jiangxi Province said she spent her days at one such jail making stuffed animals, sometimes until 11 p.m. “You’d sew so much, your hand would hurt,” said the woman, who would only give her street name, Xiao Lan, or Little Orchid.

She laughed when asked about the program’s education component — mostly long sessions spent memorizing the rules governing behavior at the jail. “We called the guards teachers and they called us students, but we didn’t learn anything,” she said.

Xiao Lan was released after six months, and she immediately returned to her old trade. “So, too, did all the other girls,” she said.

Reached by phone, public security officials in several provinces that operate large custody and education centers declined to discuss the matter, saying they were not authorized to speak to the news media.

Those seeking to abolish the system acknowledge a tough road ahead. There is little public support for reducing the penalties for prostitution, and China’s influential domestic security apparatus is unlikely to give up willingly the power and profits of the current system.

The indignities of incarceration do little to dissuade women who can earn more than $1,000 a month as prostitutes, triple the average income for unskilled laborers in China. Ms. Li, the single mother of two, said she was illiterate and could never make as much money in a conventional job. “I’m an uneducated country girl with no skills,” she said.

A former pig farmer with a giddy laugh, Ms. Li operates out of a cramped storefront in the commercial heart of Beijing. A flimsy wall separates her work space from the bedroom she shares with her sons.

She relies on a steady clientele, mostly married men and lonely migrant workers, but even the regulars sometimes try to leave without paying. Then there are those who claim to be police officers and demand free sex, customers who furtively cut off the tops of condoms, and drunken men who fly into violent rages when Ms. Li refuses to do their bidding.

“I’d call the police, but they always take the customer’s side,” she said.

With that, she excused herself to welcome a client who was waiting outside her door.