14360: Haitian parents say Florida laws won't let them discipline children (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Sun Sentinel


Haitian parents say Florida laws won't let them discipline children
By Madeline Baró Diaz
Miami Bureau

January 6, 2003

NORTH MIAMI -- It's past 8 p.m. on a Wednesday night and Eugene Colas'
14-year-old daughter is still not home from school. Classes let out about 4
p.m., but Colas says this is nothing new.

"She do that every day," he says.

Colas is angry and frustrated, but he feels his hands are tied. If he
disciplines his daughter, he's afraid she'll end up in jail. It happened
once already when he was arrested after he hit both his teenage daughters
with a belt because they skipped school. He pleaded guilty to child abuse
charges and was put on probation.

"I never had any type of problem in this country and now I have a record,"
says Colas, who was born in Haiti, but has raised four children in South
Florida.

Today, he's afraid of even reprimanding his daughters for fear of being
accused of beating them. In his homeland, he says, if children misbehave,
after one or two warnings, a parent spanks them.

"In the United States, kids got too much power," Colas says.

Colas' belief is one shared by many parents in the Haitian community who are
struggling to apply the lessons they've learned from their own upbringings
in Haiti to children they're raising in the United States. Their children,
in attempts to fit in, have picked up some of their peers' bad habits.
Parents, sometimes working two jobs or more, have little time to supervise
their children and when the kids end up in serious trouble, the parents find
themselves dealing with a juvenile justice system they don't understand.

Adjusting to America

It's a road that immigrant parents from other countries have traveled as
they adapt to life in the United States. Unlike Spanish or English-speaking
immigrants, however, Haitian parents sometimes find that Creole-language
resources are harder to come by or they're just not aware of them. Add to
that the negative images sometimes associated with Haitian-Americans,
particularly refugees who for decades have been referred to as "boat
people."

"When you consider Haitians as boat people, as poor, as coming in as a
destitute community, you have children growing up with a sense of self and a
sense of confidence that is very shaky," said Gepsie Metellus, executive
director of Sant La, the Haitian Neighborhood Center, which is conducting a
combination study-advocacy program on juvenile delinquency, in partnership
with the Miami-Dade Juvenile Assessment Center, which processes children who
are arrested. "That is an added factor that maybe you won't find in other
immigrant communities."

Metellus has seen the reputation of Haitian children, who were once seen as
respectful and polite, deteriorate. In the year since Sant La has been
involved with the JAC program, its staff has worked with more than 200
families.

Marie and Ernst Claude, a North Miami Beach couple raising three children,
say they began having problems with their 15-year-old son about a year ago.
He began acting up in class, so his parents transferred him to another
school. Things got worse. He skipped classes and began smoking marijuana. He
would leave home at 6:30 a.m. and return at 10 or 11 p.m.

When the Claudes' 12-year-old son also came home at 11 p.m. one night, Ernst
Claude attempted to physically discipline the younger boy, but the older boy
threatened to shoot his father, the parents say. The Claudes called police.
Another time, Ernst Claude threw out an iguana tank the 15-year-old brought
home and the teen broke the windshield on his father's car in retaliation.
Again the parents called the police. Recently the teen was arrested for his
alleged role in a fight at a Burger King and is sitting in a juvenile
detention center while prosecutors determine whether to charge him as an
adult.

"As Haitians, we come from a tradition of raising our children a particular
way, and we can't find programs to help us," said Marie Claude, whose family
was referred to Sant La after her son's latest arrest. "If I knew where to
go and where to get help, I would not have gone to police."

Like Sant La, several other organizations throughout South Florida are
providing support for Haitian families.

Minority Development and Empowerment, a Fort Lauderdale-based social
services agency that has been serving the Haitian community for six years,
accompanies parents to court, translates for them when they deal with the
Department of Children & Families and provides in-home counseling, among
other services, said social worker Judith Perry.

The Haitian American Community Council in Delray Beach works with about 90
families a year in its family empowerment program. Through counseling and
workshops, the program seeks to help parents become self-sufficient in
dealing with school officials and others so they can help their children.

"What we do is teach them to cope with the American system," said program
director Gethro Louis-Jean.

Program reaching out

Earlier this year Miami-Dade County launched the Cuban/Haitian Refugee
Initiative, a Department of Children & Families-funded program that came out
of an effort to give Haitian refugees the services they lacked, said project
director Eddy Altine. Family outreach and support, as well as services for
"high risk" youth, are part of the initiative.

The program is also for Cuban refugees, but Haitians are the majority of the
program's clients. The initiative's prevention services include helping the
newly-arrived immigrants learn about U.S. laws, like those involving
domestic violence. It's not that Haitians or Cubans are more likely to abuse
their spouses or children, Altine said. It's that laws governing such abuse
are different in their home countries.

Although Spanish-language resources have been around for years,
Creole-language and culturally-appropriate resources for Haitians have
become more prevalent in the last several years, Altine said. The
availability of services has come as Haitians have increased in number,
becoming the second-largest immigrant group in Miami-Dade county, behind
Cubans, and as Haitians have been elected to political office and
increasingly exercised their growing political clout. According to figures
from the 2000 Census, there are 65,100 Haitians in Broward, about 38,000 in
Palm Beach County and 98,000 in Miami-Dade County. Many in the Haitian
community think those numbers are much higher, however.

As children adapt to life in the United States, they sometimes get further
and further away from their parents' culture, setting up the
intergenerational conflict, said Altine, a former bilingual educator.

"They see their parents as different," Altine said of Haitian-American
teenagers. "The parents keep their culture and they continue to raise their
children based on that culture."

Discipline varies

One cultural difference is the use of corporal punishment. In the United
States, parents can be prosecuted for hitting their children to the point of
leaving welts or marks. In Haiti, as is the case with some other cultures,
many parents see strict physical discipline as a necessary part of raising a
child.

"Most people in the Haitian community know that if it's an abusive parent
that is not condoned," Metellus said. "But discipline is discipline and
abuse is abuse. They feel the state has taken away the one tool they had to
control their children."

Eugene Colas' 16-year-old daughter Gina was, by her and her father's
account, a sweet child who made good grades in school. That changed when she
was 13. She began hanging out with a "bad crowd," she says, and going out
with a boy that was six years older than her. Some days she went to her
friends' houses and spent the night without telling her parents. Once she
stayed out all night and the next day and the next night and before she knew
it was two weeks later before she finally went home.

She became pregnant by her older boyfriend and today she's the mother of a
seven-month-old girl. She continues to go to school and is hoping to pursue
a career in medicine.

"I was going through a phase," she says. "I'm over it."

Gina, who briefly lived with a foster family but ran away, says tension
between her and her father led up to the spanking incident. The tension is
apparent months later. Colas thinks his daughter called DCF on him, while
she explains a teacher saw marks on her and called the authorities. Colas
says he gets no respect from his daughters, while Gina says she doesn't feel
disrespectful. Gina says having a baby has slowed her down, but Colas says
she still sneaks out of the house and stays out until all hours of the
night.

Colas, who works two part-time jobs, is fed up. He sometimes talks about
moving out of his own home, leaving his wife and daughters behind, because
he says he can't sit idly by and watch his children do what they want.

"I don't want to go to jail no more," he says.

Madeline Baró Diaz can be reached at mbaro@sun-sentinel.com or 305-810-5007.
Copyright © 2003, South Florida Sun-Sentinel





_________________________________________________________________
MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*.
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail