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Response to Trauma in Haitian Youth at Risk
Richard Douyon, PhD
Louis Herns Marcelin, PhD
Michèle Jean-Gilles, PhD
J. Bryan Page, PhD
SUMMARY. In order to characterize undesirable behavior (drug use, fighting, criminal activity) among Haitian youth at risk and determine the relationship between traumatic experience and that kind of behavior, investigators recruited 292 Haitian youths via networks of informal social relations in two zones of Miami/Dade County strongly identified with Haitian ethnicity. Each recruit responded to an interview schedule eliciting sociodemographic information and self-reported activities, including involvement in youth-dominated groups. They also reported traumatic experience. Clinicians administered CAPS to a subset of those respondents who self-reported traumatic experience. Staff ethnographers selected respondents for in-depth interviews and family studies to provide contextual depth for findings of the interview schedule and the CAPS assessments. Although traumatic experience may still play a role in mental health outcomes among children, childhood victimization among Haitian children does not appear to be related to the drug use and undesirable behaviors associated with unsupervised youth, including formation of gangs. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <docdelivery@ haworthpress.com> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com> ©2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]
KEYWORDS. Haitians, trauma, drug selling
INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND
Haitians in Miami have had the misfortune of encountering some of the most daunting barriers ever presented to an immigrant group. Not only have some of them made the trip to South Florida in the flimsiest of craft through dangerous seas, but many have sojourned for months or years under hostile conditions in the Bahamas before finally making their way to Miami. Once on shore in Dade County, the new arrivals have faced a community that has routinely ghettoized populations of color during most of its existence. Urbanized areas have well-defined zones inhabited by people of African descent whether they are North American, Bahamian, Jamaican, or other Caribbean. Although all housing is officially open by law, the population of the County clearly has compartmentalized phenotypes by geographic areas (Dunn, 1997; Peacock, Morrow, and Gladwin, 1997; Portes and Stepick, 1993). In this kind of racialized setting, the continued marginalization of a population descended from enslaved Africans hardly surprises.
Factors that have exacerbated this tendency to marginalize Haitian immigrants in Miami/Dade County include their supposed linkage with disease and superstition, and recently, association with juvenile crime. Just as the population of Haitian immigrants achieved a recognizable size and cohesion, about 1982, they registered on the Centers for Disease Control’s monitors for the newly emergent disease complex, AIDS (Nachman and Dreyfus, 1986). Haitian immigrants’ tuberculosis also brought them unwanted attention from North American health and immigration authorities (Nachman, 1993). Some authors (e.g., Moore and LeBaron, 1986) hinted darkly that Haiti had been a major conduit for HIV into the United States. Later analyses of the pandemic have shown the reverse to be true (Farmer, 1998). Nevertheless, the early indication by the CDC that having Haitian background constituted a risk factor for AIDS did gratuitous and irreparable damage to the Haitian community’s image, especially in South Florida. This blaming of Haitians as unclean, disease-ridden interlopers has led to ongoing prejudice against them, and it has moved them, as a community, to distrust overtures by researchers, especially if the researchers want to study AIDS or tuberculosis (Wingerd and Page, 1997).
Conditions of poverty, unemployment, and underemployment have persisted in South Florida’s Haitian population despite the notable willingness of these newcomers to spend additional energy acquiring schooling that had not been available in Haiti. Although gathering large-scale demographic data on the Haitian population in South Florida presents difficulties (see Stepick and Stepick, 1990), it has become clear that a large proportion of that population still lives in conditions of overcrowding and poverty (Stepick and Stepick, 1992). The location of these Haitian Americans in the mix of ethnicities living in Dade County is contiguous with neighborhoods inhabited by other groups that had been marginalized earlier, including African Americans and African descended Caribbean people. This location is hostile territory, especially for Haitian children trying to attend public schools in these neighborhoods. Furthermore, the lifeways of the “host” cultural context in which these children attempt to learn how to become “Americans” often communicate the futility of education and the attractiveness of “outlaw” or “gangsta” life, perhaps as a reflection of the “host’s” own marginality. Formation of youth gangs has occurred among almost every culturally distinctive immigrant group that has arrived in the United States since 1860 (Goldstein, 1990), but under the conditions described above, the specific adaptations of inner city Haitian youth in the U.S. demand close examination.
The present study of Haitian Youth in Miami/Dade County attempts to define the responses of these youth to a hostile social and economic environment. Although the literature on gangs provides numerous templates for characterizing these responses (cf. Arnold, 1965; Cloward and Ohlin, 1955; Cohen, 1960; Elliott, Ageton, and Canter, 1979; Fagan, 1989; Furfey, 1926; Goldstein, 1991; Thrasher, 1927), we shall attempt here to use self-reported and observed behaviors to define the adaptations of Haitian youth, holding in abeyance our comparisons of these adaptations with those in the rest...
