Restavek arrangements place an estimated 300,000 Haitian children in unpaid domestic servitude. Kennedy reports on a pair of connected qualitative studies that drew on children who had left such placements and on the adults now caring for them.

What emerges is a cluster of difficulties and psychological symptoms that surface after a child gets out. Four are treated in depth: symptoms turned inward and outward, exposure to violence, the cold reception many children meet on returning to their families, and the toll taken by the economic circumstances they come back to.

Kennedy closes with proposals for how services and interventions for these children might be designed.