'They Put a Few Coins in Your Hand to Drop a Baby in You': A Study of Peacekeeper-fathered Children in Haiti
- Poverty is a key underlying factor contributing to sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeeping personnel.
- The repatriation of implicated peacekeepers often leaves the woman and child in exacerbated poverty.
- Intimate relations with fair-skinned peacekeepers and having fair-skinned children are sometimes perceived as desirable.
- Children fathered by MINUSTAH personnel are typically raised in settings of extreme economic deprivation and are often denied access to education and other basic services.
- In 93.6% of the stories about these children, the peacekeeping personnel were identified by narrators as soldiers.
Sabine Lee of the University of Birmingham and Susan Bartels of Queen's University analyze community narratives collected with the SenseMaker method between June and August 2017. A total of 2,541 self-interpreted stories about interactions between local women and girls and MINUSTAH personnel came from 2,191 community members at seven locations; 265 of them, about 10.4%, were about or mentioned children fathered by UN personnel.
The authors identify three themes: poverty is a key underlying factor in sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeeping personnel, the repatriation of implicated peacekeepers often leaves the woman and child in deeper poverty, and relations with fair-skinned peacekeepers and having fair-skinned children are sometimes seen as desirable. Children fathered by MINUSTAH personnel are typically raised in extreme economic deprivation and are often denied education and other basic services. The authors find that the overarching need is financial and call for research with the children themselves.
How to cite
International Peacekeeping, 2019, 'They Put a Few Coins in Your Hand to Drop a Baby in You': A Study of Peacekeeper-fathered Children in Haiti, https://doi.org/10.1080/13533312.2019.1698297
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- International Peacekeeping