As a new multinational gang suppression force (GSF), begins its deployment in Haiti, attention is slowly turning to the thousands of children who have been recruited or trafficked into the country’s armed gangs. Of the approximately 10,000 to 20,000 gang members, international organisations estimate that between 30 and 50 percent are minors, though experts say the figure is difficult to verify. In 2025 alone, the recruitment and use of children by gangs nearly tripled, according to a UN report.
Diego Da Rin, a Haiti analyst at the International Crisis Group, traces the roots of today’s crisis to the early 2000s, when politically connected, armed organisations were first provided with weapons by the Fanmi Lavalas party to serve as a counterweight to right-wing paramilitary threats against then president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. After Aristide was ousted in 2004, those groups lost their political attachment and began building transactional alliances with a rotating cast of politicians who used them to control densely populated and electorally coveted poor neighbourhoods.
The withdrawal of the UN Stabilisation Mission in Haiti in 2017 after 13 years in the country allowed gang power to consolidate further. Armed groups expanded rapidly, growing wealthier and asserting control over large parts of the capital Port-au-Prince and key transport routes.
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The situation deteriorated after the assassination of president Jovenel Moïse in 2021, which left the country without a functioning leadership. A Kenyan-led multinational force, authorised by the UN in 2023 and deployed the following year, failed to reverse gang advances and was eventually restructured into the GSF, which is projected to have 5,500 personnel by October 2026.
Within this context, children join gangs rarely, if ever, by choice.
“Haiti has an eminently young population,” Da Rin said, with about 45 percent of the population under 18. “And most of these young people don’t have any way to put food on the table.” According to the UN, around 18,000 schools have been destroyed or are non-functional. Gangs offer hot meals and regular biweekly salaries reaching amounts that children “couldn’t expect to have from any other job,” Da Rin said.
According to the World Bank, nearly half of Haiti’s population lives on less than $3 a day.
A joint report published in February 2026 by the UN’s Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) found that at least 26 gangs operate in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, as well as in several municipalities in the Artibonite and Centre departments, and that the majority are involved in child trafficking.
Haiti’s youth caught in gang violence
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How children are drawn in
Arnaud Royer, a representative of OHCHR in Haiti, identified three distinct reasons why children are drawn in. The first is coercion through threats against families in neighbourhoods under gang control. The second is material incentives such as food, money and in some cases, drugs. The third is social since, in communities where family structures have been shattered by displacement and poverty, gangs offer a feeling of belonging and camaraderie to children.
“Often they are children who are at the periphery of families,” Royer said. “When you are a distant cousin who has joined a family that already has several children, you are not protected in the same way and you tend to join the gangs quite quickly when they offer you a sense of belonging.”
The process of involvement is typically gradual. Children begin as informants or couriers, carrying messages or monitoring the movements of security forces and rival gangs. Over time, some, most of the time boys, are forced into more serious roles like collecting extortion payments, guarding kidnapping victims, and eventually bearing arms.
Girls face a different set of abuses. Many are forced into what is known in Haitian Creole as “ti menaj” (literally “little sweetheart”), meaning relationships with gang members, sometimes as a survival strategy encouraged by parents who see it as the only way to shield their daughters from group rape.
“Some parents who do not have the means to relocate their daughters outside these neighbourhoods push or encourage their young girls, some as young as 13 or 14, to enter these ‘relationships’,” Royer said.
Rawya Rageh, a senior crisis adviser for Amnesty International and author of a report on children facing violence in Haiti, said the use of sexual violence is sometimes used a deliberate tool to instil fear in communities. Gang members also forced girls into domestic labour for gang members and their households.
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“Of all the children we interviewed who were exploited by the gangs, none expressed willingness to partake in these activities. The sense of fear, the sense of compulsion was absolutely palpable,” Rageh said.
Challenges to reintegration
The Haitian government, in collaboration with UNICEF, has begun laying the groundwork for solutions. A programme called PREJEUNES (Programme de prévention et de réhabilitation des enfants et des jeunes – Prevention and rehabilitation program for youth and children) launched in July 2025 envisions a network of “transit and orientation centres”, or CTOs, where minors leaving gangs would be hosted and supported to transition out of the armed groups. The first centre is being established in Les Cayes, in the south of the country, with more planned in other localities – but the program faces obstacles. Da Rin said a persistent challenge is to get young people to even consider leaving the gangs, as they could face severe retaliation for doing so.
“The question is, are these minors going to be able to leave these groups without the government or UN agencies engaging with these groups, to be sure that the gangs will let [them] leave safely?” he said. Such an engagement could also be interpreted as the first step toward a broader demobilisation or negotiation process, something most Haitians firmly oppose.
Meanwhile, the conditions in which the state is currently holding children it detains are themselves generating new dangers. The CERMICOL facility (Centre for Education and Social Reintegration of Minors in Conflict with the Law) in Port-au-Prince, historically a rehabilitation centre for juvenile offenders, has become a de facto prison. Following gang attacks on adult detention facilities, CERMICOL began receiving adult men and women alongside children in a space with a capacity of 100 that is now holding more than 700 people.
“In those spaces, you are creating violence and you are creating relationships with gangs,” Royer said. “If children had no links to gangs before entering, they will after.”
On top of all this comes the challenge of community perception. Royer described a growing social fracture between those who lived under gang control and those who did not, with the latter increasingly seeing anyone who remained in gang-controlled areas as complicit.
“Even within families, there is a perception: if you stayed on the other side, you chose it,” he said. This fracture will make reintegration difficult, even for children.
Since the end of April, vigilante self-defence groups, collectively known as the Bwa Kale movement, have been documented killing children and adults believed to be associated with gangs.
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Rageh said that no rehabilitation process could succeed without community dialogue, and that campaigns are needed to help communities understand that these children are “first and foremost, victims”. She also pointed to steps that can be taken at the government level, such as a comprehensive child protection plan and broader access to education and mental health services.
According to Rageh, several children told Amnesty International that they concealed their association with gang-controlled neighbourhoods out of fear – not just of gangs, but of police and community members.
“If somebody sees me coming from the direction of [a] particular neighbourhood, they would immediately assume I’m associated with gangs, and my life is at risk,” one child told researchers.
The broader situation offers little relief in sight as the gangs continue to exert their control over large portions of the country. Despite the GSF have curbed the expansion of gang violence in Port-au-Prince, recent clashes between rival gangs in the capital’s suburbs last week killed at least 78 people and wounded 66.
For Da Rin, successfully rehabilitating minors would require addressing the structural conditions that lead to their recruitment in the first place as well as accountability for those who finance and arm the gangs.
Royer said that social protection programmes, which currently cover only about six percent of the population and are concentrated mostly in southern departments rather than the capital, must be expanded and adapted so they can reach communities in gang-controlled areas.
In spite of the situation, Rageh said that every single child her team talked to shared aspirations for a future outside of the gangs.
“One child that I interviewed was around 16 years old, and he was shot in the leg by a sniper from one of the gangs,” she said. “The doctors had to end up amputating his leg but even that child, with how his life has changed on a daily basis, told me, ‘I know this isn’t the end of my story, I know my life can change’.”
