Children face war and violence
The past hundred years have seen a host of horrors inflicted on children in various parts of the world. Putting the same point another way: many of the very worst aspects of recent history have been visited on children. One need only think of the huge number of children caught up in the Holocaust during World War II, forced into camps, witnessing the degradation and deaths of parents, often themselves killed in the gas chambers. One and a half million children died in the Holocaust, of the estimated 1.6 million Jewish children alive on the European continent (outside Russia) in 1939. They were killed as Jews, of course, in the Nazis’ anti-Semitic frenzy, and not as children, but no beliefs in the special position of children offered them any protection. The many bloody wars of the twentieth century, the displacements of populations including hundreds of thousands of children that continue into the twenty-first century, are an integral part of the recent history of childhood. Contemporary war has blurred the boundaries between civilian and military, and this involves children in many ways. New levels of open hatred, as between ethnic groups, prompt direct attacks on children in ways less common in the nineteenth century.
Children have been victims of collective barbarity in past times. Remember the fate of many of those who went on the children’s crusade: being sold into slavery. Attacks on children, as a mean of intimidating adults or destroying the future of groups that might never seem trustworthy in the eyes of a conqueror, were hardly twentieth-century inventions. The past century, however, stands among the bloodiest, because of the frequency and scale of warfare and internal strife and the new levels of weaponry involved. For many children, the “century of the child” proved to be a bad time to be one.
The process began early, for example with the forced migrations, amid great bloodshed, of Greek and Turkish populations after World War I. It continues today, in civil strife in many parts of Africa and elsewhere.
The subject is an inescapable part of the recent experience of many children, and it moves us a great distance from the lives of most children in more settled societies and the implications of increasing adherence to the modern model of childhood. Without detailing all the episodes, this chapter offers some examples of physical and psychological hardship. It describes some of the most common results of displacement, in exploited labor, sexual servitude, and the emergence of new kinds of child soldiers.
A bit of subtlety is called for. This chapter deals with truly significant as well as shocking aspects of the conditions of many children in the contemporary decades. It shows the inadequacy of many international protective efforts and well-intentioned proclamations. While the conditions are not characteristic of children around the world, they demonstrate that the spread of schooling and consumerism cannot be taken as fully characteristic either. The great variety in children’s experiences, however, needs several further complications. First, some similar horrors lurk in societies that are not obviously torn by war and ethnic hatred, but simply suffer from dire poverty; there too, sales of children’s sexuality, labor and even body parts respond to desperate situations. Several observers have noted that African-American children in violence-torn housing projects in Chicago have experiences not entirely different from children in outright war zones. Second, while there should be no sugar-coating the fate of children in war-torn regions or refugee camps, not all the stories lack some redemption; once in a while, a combination of outside intervention and family ingenuity produces unexpected improvements, including some access to modern schooling. And third, it remains important to remember that children in more stable societies, though sheltered from maimings and massive post-traumatic stress, face drawbacks of their own, some of them seemingly inherent in the modern model and in pervasive consumerism.
There is a division in contemporary global history between societies under siege, with children spared almost no imaginable atrocity, and societies working to install or expand the more widely-recognized modern conditions of childhood. Children in the former societies deserve far more effective attention than they have often received, for despite some powerful commentary the damage to children seems to proceed unabated. The horrors should not, however, distract us entirely from the issues, milder but nevertheless genuine, that children face in other settings.
No single process in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries killed as many children as the Holocaust did, but the pattern of violence seemed to accelerate with World War II and the ensuing decades. Many children, of course, were caught directly in wartime sieges and bombings from 1939 onward, a massive explosion of violence deliberately directed at civilians. Some children were sent out of wartime London, and there was even an effort to evacuate some children from Leningrad (St. Petersburg) before it was surrounded and besieged by German forces. Even evacuated children faced severe problems, in unfamiliar surroundings away from family and suffering massive guilt that they had been sheltered while others were dying. Far worse conditions afflicted children who stayed amid bombings and artillery shellings that could reduce blocks of housing to rubble. Death and injury, loss of family members, inadequate food supplies, and massive psychological stress touched many. The problem was not European alone: children in Chinese cities under Japanese attack, and then children in the Japanese cities targeted by American bombers, had similar experiences.
After World War II, attacks relevant to children eased briefly. The most obvious exception was the violence and dislocation surrounding the formation of the state of Israel and the periodic wars and Palestinian uprisings that continue to this day. Violence on an even wider scale resumed with Vietnam and its aftermath. One of the most powerful photographs in the Vietnam War features a girl, her back aflame from American napalm, running naked down a street (she survived, amazingly). Subsequent civil war in Cambodia brought further massive bloodshed.
Children were heavily involved in the violence in Central America during the 1970s, and more recently in the drug-related strife in Colombia. Civil wars in Myanmar (Burma), including raids on Thailand, constituted another center. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought violence and displacement in several new nations in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Warfare in the former Yugoslavia, compounded by deliberate attacks on certain groups in the name of ethnic cleansing, involved many children. Two rounds of American and allied attacks on Iraq – particularly, the Gulf War of 1990 and then the new invasion of 2003 – and an intervening period in which foods and medical supplies were limited by embargoes, involved many children. Hundreds of thousands were killed or wounded or affected by lack of food and medical supplies. Most tragically, on a large scale, the several trouble spots in Africa, convulsed by civil strife and government counterattack, involved children from Sudan and Uganda to Congo and the dreadful genocide in Rwanda, and other places in the center and west.
It has been estimated – and estimates are all that can be offered – that 150 million children have been killed in war and civil war since the 1970s, around the world, and another 150 million crippled or maimed. It was as if every North American child born in the same period had been killed or injured. Further, estimates calculate that 80 percent of all people killed in late twentieth and early twenty-first century conflicts have been women and children, in struggles that have relatively rarely involved extensive engagements between conventional armies of adult males.
Sometimes, children have been deliberately targeted. In the 1930s and early 1940s Japanese troops seized young girls in Korea, using violence to force them to become sex slaves; in one military brothel, 400 girls serviced 5,000 Japanese troops on a daily basis. Forty years later, Cambodian forces might club children to death in front of their parents, or hammer a 3-month-old against a tree. Death pits could contain hundreds of bodies of children. African combatants have killed their share of children in recent decades – a third of all those dead in the Congolese bloodshed in the 1990s were under five, but still more frequent have been maimings – an arm sliced off with a machete –- and frequent rapes of young girls, deliberately designed to hurt and degrade. From yet another site of battle: 58 percent of the Palestinians injured in clashes with Israelis have been under 17.
The aftermath of war could be dangerous as well. Many twentieth century struggles have involved land mines, easy for children to explode after the battles ended. A Cambodian boy loses a leg to a land mine on his way to get water from a well; it will be a year before he qualifies for a crude replacement, because the list of eligibles is so long.
Much of the world knew that these episodes were wrong. One of the most common impulses of people under attack, including Iraqis protesting American invasion, was to highlight pictures of dead or injured children, knowing what resonance this would have when projected to world opinion. But the sense of horror did nothing to break the pattern.
Throughout the century, but again particularly from World War II onward, children were often forced to flee the scenes of war. Millions of children, in various places, have lived in refugee camps during the past 60 years, amid varying conditions but always facing considerable stress. As many as 4 percent of all people on earth have had to flee their homes at least once in the past century, including over 20 million children. A 17-year-old in Azerbaijan explained his flight simply: “We left our village when the bombs began falling…. The bombs were like earthquakes that didn’t stop. You spend many years building up a home, and then, in one moment, it is destroyed.”
The worst camps are those still perched on the edge of violence. A camp in Thailand is shelled by rebel forces. Two boys lose their mother in the attack, seeing her die before them; one will also die because of wounds to vital organs; the other has had his stomach replaced by a plastic bag.
Outright violence aside, most refugee camps have been woefully short on food and medical supplies. Many children in the camps suffer medical problems, including sexually transmitted diseases contracted from earlier rapine. Malnutrition is rampant, outright starvation all too common. In one Cambodian camp, children could qualify for extra food only if they were in the lowest 25 percent of their weight category – in other words, suffering already from serious malnutrition – and they lost their rights if their weight rose above that level. Many camps on many continents have featured children dying from hunger, incapable of caring for themselves.
Many children in camps or related institutions have lost their parents, sometimes forced to watch them die at the hands of rebel forces. In Cambodia in 1970 – a country where, traditionally, parentless children were cared for by other relatives or fellow villagers – there were three orphanages, with 1,600 children. Then war tore tradition apart: by 1974 there were 3,000 orphanages, with 250,000 inmates, often living in appalling conditions because needs had so far outstripped resources. Because of deaths of parents, or simply losing track of them during the long flight from violence, as many as 65 percent of the inhabitants of some refugee camps can be children. This was the figure, for example, of a camp in Afghanistan filled by people fleeing the Taliban regime. In Rwanda in 1994, 100,000 children were separated from their parents, though aid officials later helped reunite some families.
Always, in the camps, there was immense stress among the displaced children. Often they were living in a region where they did not know the language and where they had no sense of control over their lives. In a refugee camp in the nation of Georgia, 83 percent of the displaced children were diagnosed as suffering some degree of psychosomatic stress.
Prolonged life in a camp splintered families, even when they had arrived intact. Parents, particularly fathers, possessed no resources, and so had no traditional bargaining power with their children. Not surprisingly, large numbers of children tried to fend for themselves, ignoring parental pleas. Some girls sold their bodies. Boys and girls both often turned to stealing. Respect for parents dwindled, alignment with other children replaced conventional loyalties.
In other cases, parents themselves pushed their children into prostitution or thievery, as a means of providing some support for the family. Many parents approved of their daughters selling sex for food, if they saved some scraps for other family members. Not infrequently, troops sent in to assure order were eager customers for child sex, a problem encountered in several United Nations expeditions. Children’s lives, in sum, could be disrupted in almost every imaginable way, even if they survived war itself.
Some happier endings were possible. United Nations agencies and private relief groups tried to do more than relieve suffering, though the task was frequently too great. Often the aid workers organized youth groups as a means of providing some order and purpose, and sometimes the skills gained could be applied to life outside the camps. Youth councils played a significant role in recovery in Kosovo, in the former Yugoslavia. The youth groups were sometimes able to help younger children. Many agencies tried to establish schools, though supplies were an obvious problem. Again in Kosovo, the Save the Children Fund managed to set up outdoor schools for over 40,000 children.
By the 1990s, some criminals against children were put on trial before international tribunals. A man in Rwanda was convicted for encouraging and tolerating violence and the rape of children; several war criminals were also identified in the former Yugoslavia, again in part because of actions against children. There were, in other words, international standards, and occasionally they displayed some teeth.
Occasionally also, children (often with some family members) made their way out of camps to a better life. After months, even years, many Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees were admitted to the United States, and some built positive lives despite the hardships they had endured. Jewish children who survived the Holocaust and subsequent camps for displaced persons, and managed to get to Israel, were also often able to rise above their pasts. In both these cases, opportunities for later schooling played a significant role in recovery.
Sometimes, finally, if a bit more modestly, children might be saved by their enemies. Some Rwandan Tutsi tribespeople, under attack by the Hutu tribe, simply sent their children to their Hutu neighbors, who did in fact take care of them. The parents cited a local proverb, “He who wants to punish an assassin trusts him with his own child.”
War and flight contributed also to the spread of child soldiers, directly involved in war, often against their will, but often also desensitized to the violence that surrounded them. It was estimated that, in any given year in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, some 300,000 children were bearing arms, particularly in parts of Southeast Asia and Africa but also in Latin American battlegrounds like Colombia.
A bit of historical perspective is vital on this widely-lamented phenomenon. Children have often served in military forces. A 13-year-old boy, fighting for the French revolution and killed by royalist forces, was praised as a martyr to the cause, with no sense that his military participation was unusual or inappropriate. A good portion of the soldiers in the American Revolution – on the patriot side, but also among German mercenaries serving Britain – were boys of 14 or 15, and some children were involved as young as eight. Some, undoubtedly, were pushed into battle against their will, but many fought willingly. In the conditions of agricultural society, war might seem a desirable alternative for many youth, a chance for excitement and escape from the family economy.
So what was new about the child soldiers? Different international standards, for one thing. It no longer seemed proper, according to dominant world opinion, for children to be involved in military service; the United Nations emphatically agreed.
But it was also true that contemporary child soldiers were dealing with far more lethal weaponry than their earlier counterparts. More of them, almost certainly, were forced into battle than had been true in past conflicts. More of them suffered dire consequences, as in sexually transmitted diseases that could themselves kill. The furor over child soldiers reflects a complex mixture of new (if ineffective) global standards and a real deterioration in many children’s lives.
Most child soldiers are in their early teens, but some are under 10. Most are boys, but girls are often recruited for supporting roles, including forced or willing sex, and some combat. In the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines, for example, girls are used to prepare food and provide medical care, but each leader also is assigned a girl for sexual pleasure.
Force is often central to service. The UNITA rebel group in Angola forcibly recruited child refugees from Rwanda, seizing them in the Congo. Many child soldiers ended up facing violence not only from their captors but also from opposition forces, who often tortured them for information and as retaliation. The Tamil rebel group in Sri Lanka seized children from orphanages for its all-child “Baby Brigade”; the same children were often brutally treated if they fell into the hands of the government. Some child soldiers were deliberately exposed to extreme violence, even forced to attack their own families, to initiate them into a life of bloodshed.
There were other reasons for service, of course. Families sometimes approved, as did wider communities. Many Palestinian children were drawn into formal or informal fighting because of what they perceived as Israeli attacks on their society.
And the child soldiers could be inspired fighters. An adult soldier from Myanmar commented on the children he fought: “There were a lot of boys rushing into the field, screaming like banshees…. We shot at them but they just kept coming.” By the same token, many child soldiers, once initiated into war, could become quite brutal, delighted in their gun-induced power, frequently killing, maiming and raping for no apparent reason other than to demonstrate their dominance. Children who did serve often found it hard to go home, even if they had been forced to fight: home seemed tame, parents had often disappeared, communities were understandably hostile.
War, flight, and soldiering were not the only afflictions for masses of contemporary children. At the end of the twentieth century another new scourge appeared, in the form of AIDS. Disease had continued to play a role in the lives of many children in the twentieth century, but the big story had been its progressive retreat, as immunizations and public health measures improved this aspect of children’s lives. AIDS, in some regions, provided the first counterthrust. By 2000, the disease had directly killed 4 million children and had orphaned another 13 million. Africa, particularly southern and eastern Africa, suffered the most. By 2001, teenagers were contracting the disease at a faster rate than other age groups in Africa, as a result of ignorance or defiance. Many men insisted on sex without the protection of a condom, and many young women, eager to please or dependent on male favor for their own upkeep, felt they had to oblige. War, with its frequent sexual attacks, facilitated the spread of the disease in some regions as well. But the child deaths occurred almost entirely from transmission from the mother at birth. As high rates of the disease spread to other relatively poor regions, there were understandable fears that one of the great gains of modern childhood might be rolled back by the new scourge.
Work conditions worsened for many children at various points and in various places during the past century, another trend running counter to the modern model and affecting a substantial minority of those children in the labor force. Deterioration is often associated with migration, particularly from countryside to city, a process which – even when not tied to war – can both reflect and cause new problems for children.
The emphasis here is on change. Since the arrival of agriculture, most children have worked, so the mere fact of work, often hard work, is not new. And part of the perception of deterioration results from new global standards based on the modern model of childhood: to many journalists and scholars, children simply should not be working, beyond some assistance around the house or in a family business; they should be going to school. This modern evaluation is important in its own right, but it sometimes complicates a judgment about the novelty of the economic exploitation of children. For even in traditional societies, some children might be exposed to very poor working conditions, including outright slavery; beatings at work, atrocious housing on the work site, very low pay for child labor – these are hardly brand-new inventions of the modern world.
Here’s the basic picture: though more and more children are not in the labor force, an increasing percentage of those who are find themselves in exploitative situations, in jobs that often endanger them and certainly offer no real preparation or training for adult work life. Though they are often trying to work to help the family, and are often placed in their situation by impoverished parents, they are largely cut off from the kind of guidance and protection the traditional family economy used to provide. Again, the result is not in fact entirely novel, for children had suffered at work in the past as well; but it has become increasingly common among laboring children in the contemporary world.
A related comment involves social and geographic place. The vast majority of work-exploited children are in the world’s poorer regions, not in the world as a whole. Even in their locations, they typically come from the lowest social groups. Working children in Peru, for example, are Amerindians or mestizos, not white. Children laboring in India’s rug shops are drawn from the traditional lowest castes, not from the population more generally. Exploited labor increasingly reflects and confirms inferior social place, both in the global community and in one’s own society.
The root cause of heightened economic exploitation of child labor has been the increasing dislocation of many children from traditional family economies in the countryside. Population growth and competition from other sources of supply prevent many families from using child workers in customary ways. The carpet industry in India is a case in point. Children have long assisted in carpet production in Indian villages. Increasingly, however, carpet production has moved to urban factories. Children are widely employed in these factories because of their extremely low wages – well below the presumed national minimum wage. Many child rug workers are migrants from the villages. Some have been kidnapped outright; many are beaten, particularly on face and hands, as part of work discipline, and a few are branded. Their work can run up to 15 hours a day.
Children in many cities in Africa and Central America, again including many migrants from the countryside, work as domestics. They carry packages and do other street errands. They help bag groceries. They beg. They do street entertainment, like the child fire-eaters in Mexico – here and elsewhere, child entertainers are often at the bottom of the heap. Many of them sleep on the street as well. They are subject to various diseases, related to both work and housing; some get involved with drugs; they are also exposed to considerable police violence.
In Togo, a former French colony on the West African coast, the nature of apprenticeship has changed, again reflecting new problems in the traditional economy. The lack of adequate jobs in the countryside forces families to seek more urban programs for their children, so the number of apprentices grows rapidly – up to 23,000 by 1981 in the country’s cities, in fields like clothing and construction. Growth means a new upper hand for employers, who charge more to families for the positions and who use children increasingly as sources of cheap, unskilled labor, ignoring training goals. So apprentices end up doing housework for their employers; they are required to keep watch in the shop overnight. Some small businesses have as many as 80 apprentices, some under 15, almost all of whom have dropped out of school. This number precludes any pretense of training: the goal is a low-paid labor force, often beaten to stay in line. Another case of brutal childhoods with no clear springboard for adulthood. The argument for exploitation is strong.
Many children during the past hundred years have been victimized by several interconnected factors. Moving to cities, many children lost the protection of extended families and close-knit communities. More of them, particularly women, might find themselves engaging in casual sex or outright prostitution. This, of course, put them, and any children they might have, at greater risk of disease. Orphaned children often had fewer economic choices available, which again could drive them toward dangerous or degrading work. When war or dislocation was tossed into the mix, the situation could become truly hopeless.
The numbers of children caught up in one or more of the modern world’s disasters is impossible to calculate, in part of course because many of them died before reaching adulthood, victims of violence or disease. Rates have been estimated for each kind of problem, from war to AIDS. Cumulatively, only a minority of the world’s children have been trapped in the worst horrors. For them, clearly, the modern model of childhood, whatever its problems and promises, has been largely unavailable, often indeed contradicted by rising mortality rates or more intense labor. Contemporary conditions have divided childhoods into two very different kinds of experience, with admittedly some intermediate conditions between the two extremes. A few children – the lucky ones schooled or rescued in the refugee camps, for example – have managed to move from one type of childhood to the other; but some, victims of unexpected conflicts like those in the former Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, have been plunged just as abruptly from expectations of schooling to a life on the run.
One final factor demands consideration. In the last decades of the twentieth century, new levels of contact among almost all of the world’s societies, often summed up as globalization, added important new elements to childhood. We turn to the consequences in the next chapter. Unfortunately, while globalization added some interesting ingredients to the modern model of childhood, it could also intensify economic deterioration for many children as well, and it had not, at least to date, healed the inroads of war and disease. Divided childhoods persist.
James Garbino, Kathy Kostelny and Nancy Dubrow, No Place to be a Child: growing up in a war zone (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1991); James Marten, ed., Children and War: a historical anthology (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Graca Machel, The Impact of War on Children (New York: UNICEF, 2001); Marc Vincent and Birgette Sorenson, eds., Caught between Borders: response strategies for the internally displaced (London: Pluto Press, 2001); Bernard Schlemmer, ed., The Exploited Child (London: Zed Books, 2000); Rachel Brett and Irma Specht, Young Soldiers: why they choose to fight (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004). See also the Human Rights Watch website on abuses of children, http://www/hrw.org.campaign/crp/promises/index.html.