In history & current warring parties, political scientists counted a large number of wars and armed conflicts worldwide, almost all of them in developed countries &developing countries. Observers of these current ‘New wars’ or ‘complex political emergencies’ have noted that the main target of the war parties is the civilian population, and systematic atrocities, massacres and bombings are often applied as rational strategies within current warfare. Some believe in witnessing a qualitative change in the way wars are waged and organized violence is exerted; in other words, a transformation in the ‘culture of violence’ cannot be overlooked. Children have increasingly become victims of warfare. Warring factions largely rely on irregular forces, forced recruitments and the use of fear and violence to gain control over the population and to maintain their power within their own fighting forces. Crimes against humanity, like mass rape, mutilations and torture are not an exception, but a way to exert power in this context. Internationally agreed upon undesirable and prohibited war outcomes, which in fact are a hallmark of today’s conflicts, have been defined and the phenomenon of child soldiering is one of them.
The proportion of civilian casualties in armed conflicts has increased dramatically and is now estimated at more than 90 per cent. About half of the victims are children. More than 2 million children have died as a direct result of armed conflict over the last two decade. More than three or four times that number, at least 6 to 8 million & more children, have been seriously injured. In multiple of thousands of hundred children are killed or maimed by landmines every year.
War-related injury in itself is traumatic for children, but additional traumas can also occur from painful and frightening medical treatments and living with disability, especially in resource poor countries. It is estimated that in millions children have become physically handicapped and disabled after they were wounded in conflict over the last two decade.
Among several at-risk populations, children of war and child soldiers are a particularly vulnerable group and often suffer from devastating long-term consequences of experienced or witnessed acts of violence. Child war survivors have to cope with repeated traumatic life events, exposure to combat, shelling and other life threatening events, acts of abuse such as torture or rape, violent death of a parent or friend, witnessing loved ones being tortured or injured, separation from family, being abducted or held in detention, insufficient adult care, lack of safe drinking water and food, inadequate shelter, explosive devices and dangerous building ruins in proximity, marching or being transported in crowded vehicles over long distances and spending months in transit camps. These experiences can hamper children’s healthy development and their ability to function fully even once the violence has ceased. Furthermore, destruction brought by war is likely to mean that children of war and child soldiers are deprived of key services, such as education and healthcare. A child’s education can be disrupted by armed conflict due to abduction, displacement, absence of teachers, long and dangerous walks to school (e.g. landmines, snipers) and parental poverty (e.g. inability to provide school fees and uniforms and a necessity for children to contribute to household income). Schools can be caught up in conflict as part of the fighting, between government forces and rebel groups, or used as centres for propaganda and recruitment. Attacks on and abductions of teachers and students are a frequent phenomenon of global warfare. The same can be observed for hospitals, doctors and nursing staff. Health centres often become a direct target, medical supply is cut off during intense periods
of fighting and health personnel are frequently kept from accessing the sick and injured as a political strategy. Of the 10 countries with the highest rates of under-five deaths, seven are affected by armed conflict. Additionally, the mortality rate of children under the age of five years at the average increased significantly as a consequence of war.
The social consequences of growing up in shattered, war-torn environments include effects, such as alcoholism, drug abuse and early unprotected sexual activity (sex for food and security), which can result in teenage pregnancy and the contraction of HIV/AIDS. The increased likelihood of HIV transmission in conflict zones is mostly due to the breakdown of family, school and health systems, with regulatory safeguards that could counter these risks.
During 1990 and 2005 an estimated 30 million children were forced by conflict and human rights violations to escape their homes and are living as refugees in neighbouring countries or are internally displaced within their national borders. During the flight, families may become separated. More than 2.5 million children have been orphaned or separated from their families because of war in the past two decade. The poor living conditions in which fleeing families find themselves increase children’s vulnerability to malnutrition, diarrhoea, and other chronic diseases and infections. In Africa, crude mortality rates have been as high as 80 times baseline rates among refugees and internally displaced populations. Some camps have been described as “ total institutions”, places where, as in prisons or mental hospitals, everything is highly organised, where the inhabitants are depersonalized and where people become numbers without names”.
Often the period of exile runs into years and decades and in such cases, children may spend their whole childhood in camps and displacement. Today there are entire generations of children who have never lived at home in Africa, Middle East and Asia.
“A child soldier has been defined as any person under 18 years of age who forms part of an armed force in any captivity, and those accompanying such groups, other than purely as family members, as well as girls recruited for sexual purposes and forced marriage.”
Hundreds of thousands of children are conscripted, kidnapped or pressured into joining armed groups. The proliferation of lightweight weapons has made it possible for children under the age of 10 years to become effective soldiers. The trend of using children in armed conflict as soldiers is not diminishing, since 2003 a surge in the recruitment of children is observable. Some per cent child soldiers are girls, whose plight is often unrecognized since international attention has largely focused on boy soldiers. Generally, when people speak of ‘child soldiers’, the popular image is that of boys rather than the thousands of girls who comprise the less visible, ‘shadow armies’ in conflicts around the world.
According to the United Nations and Save the Children, key conflict areas where the problem of boy and girl soldiers has been and remains acute today include Colombia, East Timor, Pakistan, Uganda, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and western and northern Africa. However, conflict-induced atrocities against boys and girls are not entirely new. In wars historically and in modern conflicts such as Afghanistan, Chechnya, the former Yugoslavia, Haiti, Liberia, Peru, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone, recruitment and abuse of child soldiers have occurred. Like the boys, typically the majority of girl soldiers are abducted or forcibly recruited into regular and irregular armed groups ranging from government-backed paramilitaries, militias, and self-defence forces to antigovernment opposition and factional groups often based on ideological, partisan, and ethnic or religious affinity. Children are recruited and used in armed conflict in at least 15 countries and territories at present: Afghanistan, Burma (Myanmar), Central African Republic, Chad, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), India, Iraq, Occupied Palestinian Territories, Philippines, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Thailand, and Uganda. In the DRC, at least five parties to the armed conflict are known to use child soldiers. These include the Congolese Army (FARDC), the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, the National Congress for the Defence of the People, pro-government Mai-Mai groups, and the Lord’s Resistance Army.
Child soldiers are used as combatants, messengers, porters, cooks and to provide sexual services. Some are forcibly recruited or abducted, others are driven to join by poverty, abuse and discrimination, or to seek revenge for violence enacted against themselves and their families. When children are recruited into combat and servitude, they experience sexual violence and exploitation and are exposed to explosives, combat situations and the experience and witnessing of killings. Reports abound from conflict zones of girls and boys being abducted and forced into sexual slavery by militias or rebel groups. Countries especially named for sexual exploitation of child soldiers – this includes boys as well as girls – are Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, Congo, Honduras, Cambodia, Canada, Columbia, Liberia, Mozambique, Myanmar/Burma, Peru, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Uganda, UK and USA.
Blattman summarized several reasons why fighter recruitment may focus on children and young adolescents. These arguments should be interpreted as complementary facets of motivations for child recruitment. Firstly, the current demographic shift in poor countries (in part due to HIV/AIDS) led to the largest population of children and adolescents ever, making this age group most available for recruitment and abduction. Secondly, especially African commanders emphasize the stamina, survival and stealth of child soldiers as well as their fearlessness and will to
fight. This may be due to children’s limited ability to assess risks, feelings of invulnerability, and short-sightedness. It is a fact that child soldiers are more often killed or injured than adult soldiers, being deployed at the front line, to e.g. lay or clear mines, or as suicide bombers because they provoke less suspicion. Thirdly, child soldiers are cheaper for the respective group or organization than adult ones since they need (or can handle) only fewer and smaller weapons and equipment. On the other side, becoming a fighter may be an attractive possibility for children and adolescents facing poverty, starvation, unemployment, and ethnic or political persecution. Facing these problems children are ‘soft targets’ as recruits into armed groups and may be more willing to fight for honour or duty, for revenge or protection from violence. Fourthly, children are also easier to retain in the group. Commanders report that children are more malleable and adaptable. They are easier to indoctrinate and they stick more to authorities without questioning them.
Moral and personality development is not yet completed in children causing differences in decision-making when compared to adults. Interviews with rebel leaders (of the Ugandan Lord Resistance Army) and conscripts revealed that adults have been the most skilled fighters, but also those who were most likely to desert. Despite being weak fighters, young children have been most likely to stay since they were easiest to indoctrinate. Adolescents seemed to offer the best fit between malleability (or likelihood to stay) and effectiveness as fighters. Also, Somasundaram states that military leaders prefer younger children because of their suggestibility and fearlessness or weaker ability to estimate dimensions of danger.
Pertinent Laws of War anonymously state that the enlistment, recruitment, use and/or deployment of child soldiers under the age of 15 is a war crime:
• 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child;
• 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
These two international instruments are however not in line with the Convention on the Rights of the Child anymore, which states a ‘straight 18’ approach to recruitment in the 2002 Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The 1990 African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child supports the age of 18 as a minimum entry age for soldiering.
Reasons as to why children’s choices to join armed groups cannot be considered ‘voluntary’ from a psychological point of view:
• children have no or limited access to information concerning the consequences of their choice; they neither control nor fully comprehend the structures and forces they are dealing with; children do not have full knowledge and understanding of the mid-and long-term consequences of their actions;
• children might be told and believe that they have to ‘stand up’ against an enemy, who would otherwise kill them or hurt their loved ones; they tend to trust and obey caretakers’ and families’ or key community leaders’ judgement on this [34];
• children might believe that they have to take the place of a family member, who would otherwise be enlisted or ‘retributed’ a loved one who has been killed by the ‘enemy’, which might constitute an emotionally perceived life threat for the child;
• conditions of civil war and armed conflict undermine the ability of families and communities to protect the young of both sexes; parents might then be driven to give in to the powerful influence of militia leaders of their ethnic group. Enlistment on the part of the parents or caretakers can never be considered ‘voluntary’ on the part of the child.
• a large number of child victims of social chaos and violence become orphans, and refugees or are only partly protected by the adult scare, as a result being left alone in their struggle to survive social, emotional and economic hardship, a potential push factor into recruitment. Interestingly, it is extremely rare for wealthier children from urban areas to be recruited.
• with systematic indoctrination and acculturation a commander can over time replace the position of a caretaker/parent and serve as an adult role model, which children will naturally accept and need to attach to for mentorship, guidance and survival; fellow child combatants can take the place of siblings and/or replace the community peer group; this ‘surrogate family’ phenomenon does not imply a voluntary choice by the child, but a forced adaptation and is a sign of healthy development in the absence of other choices;
• children might feel that they have to protect themselves, if the official state structure, community, or family can not; by perceiving to have no choice they might try to escape the violence and abuse around them and enlisting might become a perceived survival means; girls might think that joining an army might protect them from being raped or harmed by free-roaming ‘militia groups’;
• during the initial period children who have joined armed groups, whether voluntary or forced are almost always subjected to harsh, life-threatening initiation procedures, such as severe beatings, forced killings, magic-spiritual rituals (e.g.tattooing, scarring, spraying with blood or ‘holy’ water) and forced drug intake to make them ‘proper soldiers’; such practices tend to be forced on the recruit and put children’s lives in danger;
• rarely do demobilised children share with their parents or communities the emotional context of what they have experienced or how they were treated; as a result of the lack of emotional communication, reintegration into local communities is hampered by perceptions of the community’s view of the particular armed group the child was associated with. The individual needs and unique cases of the returning child are rarely considered. Stigmatisation levels are high at time point re-entry into the community of origin and constitute a potential push factor for re-recruitment.
Possible criteria to distinguish between forced and voluntary:
• ask about abduction history;
• ask the child how their enlistment and recruitment came about;
• ask what would have been a likely alternative to joining;
• ask what, in the child’s view is likely to have happened if they would not have joined the armed group.
Known risk factors for becoming a child soldier are poverty, less or no access to education, living in a war-torn region, and displacement, separation from one’s family, with orphans and refugees being particularly vulnerable. Somasundaram lists the following factors as catalysts for children to become LTTE child soldiers in North-Eastern Sri Lanka: death of one or both parents or relatives, family separation, destruction of home or belongings, displacement, lack of food, ill health, economic difficulties, poverty, lack of access to education, no avenues for future employment, social and political oppression, harassment from government soldiers, abductions and detention. He also describes an emerging pattern of youth violence in the general population after two decades of war in the affected communities. After growing up in a war environment, when a natural disaster hit coastal regions, male youth in displaced camps seemed to drift into anti-social groups and activities. Unemployed and left out of school-based programs, some left to join militant groups, and others started abusing alcohol and formed violent groups and criminal gangs. Having grown up immersed in an atmosphere of extreme war violence, many had witnessed horrifying deaths of relatives, the destruction of their homes and social institutions, and experienced bombings, shelling, and extrajudicial killings. A similar pattern of ‘saturation’ can be assumed in children who grow up in conflict-stricken communities that are later recruitment targets of rebel movements. This could constitute a pull factor for joining the movement. Further reasons might be false promises or relatives taking part in the movement.