Despite Haiti’s constant media coverage, the news is almost always terrible. For that reason, I was not surprised at the coverage of the plight of “restaveks."

The term restavek generally refers to a child in servitude, but most often connotes a system when children work their entire lives for families for little or no pay. Many receive no education and live in squalor-like conditions where abuse runs rampant.

Many restaveks are orphans, many due to the high maternal mortality rate or other preventable diseases. Because of poverty and lack of opportunities, some rural parents even send their children to the cities to be restaveks.

In Haiti, solutions are hard to come by. Children die of starvation and many parents have little choice but to hope that the restavek system provides them a way out of certain death.

I had never heard of the system until I moved to Haiti in 2002. Unlike other countries, Haiti did not seem to have the “street children” phenomenon I had seen in so many other countries.

I quickly realized the pervasive nature of the restavek system. Unfortunately, many of the children live in loveless situations where they are given little value or dignity; more often than not, the children are exploited and abused.

International agencies and some charities work specifically with restaveks to help remove them from abusive situations, but the practice is widespread and, after generations, endemic to the culture.

So, I understand why CNN’s Sanjay Gupta is covering the story in such a sensational manner. The system is corrupted and the most vulnerable are being exploited.

But, as usual, the reporting misses the entire point. First, the system is derived from an actual need and a culture of taking care of children that may not be a part of one’s family.

Without a state supported structure, the restavek system for all intents and purposes is the closest thing to a foster care system in Haiti. In a country with virtually no safety net for orphaned, unwanted or uncared for children, this flawed system has been a terrible ”solution”.

Even more unfortunate is CNN’s absolute lack of context. As I watched their coverage, they followed one restavek girl to her home as she carried a jug of water, and I realized the reporting made it seem that it is only restavek children that must carry water or sleep in terrible conditions.

Yet it was clear that the family the young girl lived with was in abject poverty themselves. Virtually all the children in that particular neighborhood are carrying water for miles and miles. Why? Because Haiti’s infrastructure is so bad, 75 percent of the country’s inhabitants don’t have running water!

Without further context, watching this segment would leave one with the notion that restaveks live with rich families who are eating bon bons; the truth is that the majority of the families are abjectly poor themselves.

This omission does not justify the exploitation of the poorer by the poor, but demonstrates that the answer to the problem should be complete economic empowerment and support. The international community needs to take responsibility for the impoverishment and systemic poverty of Haiti, rather than wagging their finger at poverty’s results.

I am not defending the restavek system. In my time in Haiti I saw more bad than good and I believe all children deserve to be loved and treated with dignity. It is slavery more than foster care, exploitation more than a way out. I also know that sensationalizing an element of an extremely dramatic situation distorts the need on ground, and makes the answers to these problems completely elusive.

There is not something distinctly wrong with the Haitian people. These systems have grown out of generations of unmet needs. Until these economic, political and social needs are met by domestic and international allies, no Haitian child can hope to have a dignified loving future.

Lee is an NNPA columnist and executive director of TransAfrica Forum.