“It’s not her fault. She’s not even a person yet.”
These words from a Haitian boy came as a shock. A little girl at Espwa Village orphanage in Les Cayes, Haiti, was misbehaving very badly that day. When leaders tried to correct her, however, another child insisted that the little girl could not be held responsible for her actions, because “a child doesn’t get a soul until they’re 2.”
After more than a decade of ministry, this was the first time anyone at Pwoje Espwa had mentioned the troubling superstition that a person is not a person until the age of 2. This false belief encourages some parents to excuse their children’s bad behavior, and it also opens the door to the mistreatment of children.