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The 10 U.S. missionaries who were arrested in Haiti last month for allegedly abducting children no doubt consider themselves Christian martyrs. When a TIME reporter visited the Idaho Baptists recently in their squalid, rusted jail cells in Port-au-Prince and asked about their predicament, their unsurprising, biblical response was, "The Philistines won, the Philistines won."
On Wednesday, however, a Haitian judge released eight of the missionaries, who according to their lawyers left the country by sunset. Two others -- the group's leader, Laura Silsby, and her nanny and assistant, Charisa Coulter -- remained behind bars for further investigation, but they may eventually be freed as well. Either way, the question now is whether their high-profile detention has put the fear of God into others who might think it's O.K. to take Haitian kids without lawful process -- even if the intent is to give them refuge and more hopeful lives after a disaster as horrific as Haiti's Jan. 12 earthquake.
Marie de la Soudiere wants to make sure that folks like the missionaries don't get many more chances to even try it. As coordinator of the separated-children program in Haiti for UNICEF, the U.N. Children's Fund, de la Soudiere recently initiated a campaign to register Haitian youths, who were among the world's most vulnerable to trafficking even before the quake. The registry will be much like the one crafted in the wake of the tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia in 2004, but its purpose is more far-reaching than reuniting lost kids with relatives. The Haiti list, begun about two weeks ago, is also designed to prevent children from being dumped into the country's scores of loosely monitored orphanages, many of which have long been sources of child trafficking. "Our answer," says de la Soudiere, "is 'no' to orphanages."
That's understandable thinking in Haiti, the western hemisphere's poorest country, where children are frequently given up by their destitute parents. Those kids are all too often funneled to more-affluent families who turn them into slaves, known in Creole as restaveks, or to outright traffickers who force them into lives of prostitution in Haiti and abroad. The Haitian government estimates that there are about 300,000 restaveks in Haiti today. In many cases before and after the quake, parents and orphanages have delivered their kids to well-meaning but naive foreigners like the Idaho missionaries, who were collared on Jan. 29 for trying to ferry 33 poor Haitian children in a bus, without proper documents, into the Dominican Republic for eventual adoption in the U.S.
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