Slavery in America: An Undeniable Truth

July 11, 2008— -- In 1996, when Marie Pompee came to visit her relatives in Port-au-Prince, she offered to take their servant, an orphan named Williathe Narcisse, back to the United States to live with her. To 9-year-old Narcisse, the offer sounded like the answer to her prayers. But upon arrival, Narcisse tells a harrowing tale: her Hole in her new suburban Miami home was to be a domestic slave, forced to work under threat of violence for no pay.

When she did not complete her cleaning duties satisfactorily, Narcisse claims Pompee beat her and sometimes forced her to sleep in the garage.

Tempting as it may be to think of Haitian child slavery at a distance, confined to the troubled island, today an untold number of such slaves — known by the Creole euphemism restavèks, or "stay-withs" — suffer in bondage inside the United States.

Worldwide, there are more slaves today than at any point in human history, and America is not immune to the crime. Restavèks are only a fraction of the estimated 50,000 slaves held in the United States. Each year, traffickers take more people — up to 17,500 according to Justice Department estimates — into slavery in the United States than traders annually took into bondage in colonial America.

The Justice Department has successfully prosecuted sex trafficking cases in record numbers since the passage of the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act. But according to its own estimates, the government has liberated less than 2 percent of the slaves within U.S. borders.

Domestic slaves are the most difficult to discover, let alone free. Recent cases have revealed a pattern of domestic slavery in otherwise "decent" households, often in expatriot enclaves. In those cases, only the intervention of conscientious citizens broke the slaves' chains.

In 2005, a restavèk named Simone Celestin, being held in Broward County, Florida, escaped with the help of a friend of her captors, Evelyn Theodore and Maude Paulin. The women had kept Celestin out of school, forcing her to work for fifteen hours per day, and beating her with a curling iron or a mortar when she didn't clean to their satisfaction. When Paulin's friend reported Celestin's abuse to a community group, which subsequently aided in her rescue, Theodore and Paulin retorted that the young woman had concocted the story to gain permanent residence in the United States. A jury didn't buy it. On March 4 this year, Theodore and Paulin were found guilty of conspiring to violate Celestin's Thirteenth Amendment right to be free from slavery.