If there is any lesson that we can draw from the experience of the past decade, it is that the use of child soldiers is far more than a humanitarian concern; that its impact lasts far beyond the time of actual fighting; and that the scope of the problem vastly exceeds the numbers of children directly involved.
—KOFI ANNAN, UN secretary general1
The rise of the child soldier phenomenon portends a number of changes for both the manner in which conflicts are carried out and the consequences that they will have. Unfortunately, none of these new dynamics can be considered positive.
As a new source of fighters, children multiply the potential military capacities of groups that choose to adopt the child soldier doctrine. This eases the difficulties groups often face in force generation, thus increasing the likelihood of rebellions and wars. Children’s recruitment also allows a proliferation of armed opposition groups with weakened or nonviable ideological bases, which would have prevented their survival just a few decades ago. Moreover, the way in which child soldiers are used means that those conflicts are inherently “messier,” featuring atrocities and attacks on civilians. At the same time, child soldier group leaders consider children’s lives cheaper. Subsequently, they deploy their recruits on the battlefield in a manner that leads to a higher casualty ratio.
The ultimate result is that, when children are present, violent conflicts tend to be easier to start, harder to end, and greater in loss of life. They also lay the groundwork for conflict recurrence in following generations.
Children are targeted for recruitment because they represent a quick, easy, and low-cost way for armed organizations to generate force. Any organization willing to use children as fighters will usually be able to field a force well beyond what they would be able to do without them. With this, the balance of potential forces in a war is shifted. Equally, armed groups’ calculus of when they should initiate or end a war is also altered.
In economic terms, the use of children lowers the “barriers to entry” into conflict. By lessening the costs of assembling a force, groups that would have been easily defeated in the past now can emerge as very real contenders. Organizations that would be little more than gangs become viable military threats.
It is no coincidence that 60 percent of the nonstate armed forces in the world today deliberately make use of child soldiers. For rebel groups, using the child soldier doctrine is a way to overcome their weak starting point as far as recruiting, organization, and other state-centered systemic barriers to their growth. Indeed, the practice becomes a model; the more armed factions in a conflict, the more likely that they will use child soldiers. One illustration was the rapid proliferation of armed groups in Liberia once children became a part of the fighting.2 For smaller rebel groups, the gains from using children are a multiplication of their fighting numbers. The LRA, which used children to go from 200 core members to an army of 14,000 soldiers, is the classic example.
Child soldiers thus become one of the many forces lessening civil order and undermining weak state institutions, leading to what has become known as the “failed state” phenomenon. The rise of new armed groups in the context of weakening state institutions has repeatedly been the spark for coups, revolts, and other political and ethnic struggles to secure control over resources. As the recent collapse of the DRC illustrates, warlords, plunderers, and other violent actors then often emerge to fill the void left by a failing government. These groups all recruit children to help them build their personal power. That the child soldier phenomenon is concentrated in areas that are undergoing tenuous political transitions, such as Africa and Southeast Asia, only heightens its threat of instability and state failure.
It is important to add that, while the West often imagines itself able to stand aside from failed states, the realities of the global system no longer permit this. Since the 1990s more than eight million people have been killed in failed states like Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the DRC (all where child soldiers were present) and millions more have become refugees. Within these countries, hundreds of millions more have been deprived of basic human needs, such as security, health care, and education, which then feed back upon the problem.3 For many, the resulting scenes of chaos and tragedy create a moral imperative to take action.
These occurrences may create a strategic mandate to act as well. The failure of local states can destabilize entire regions, create refugee flows that wash upon our doorsteps, or sometimes even endanger valuable financial or political assets. Some claim that the United States, for example, has equal or greater economic investments in areas in Africa that are at risk than either in the Middle East or Eastern Europe. These include critical supplies of oil (roughly one fifth of all U.S. oil imports) and strategic minerals.4
More important than lost investments is that these weak or failed zones tend to become havens for transnational terrorist groups. The collapse of governance in Afghanistan may have mattered little to the United States in the late 1980s and 1990s, but it was an issue that came back to haunt us on September 11, 2001. As the UN Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi noted, the 9/11 attacks were “a wakeup call, [leading many] … to realize that even small countries, far away, like Afghanistan cannot be left to sink to the depths to which Afghanistan has sunk.”5 The decay of local law and order in these states gives outside extremist groups freedom of operation. These zones then become a magnet for global terror groups that are seeking to take advantage of the local void in governance. As al Qaeda’s basing in Afghanistan illustrates, terrorism tends to thrive where failing or failed states are too weak to stamp it out.
Indeed, even state failures that are seemingly disconnected to this threat can still have dangerous consequences. For example, policymakers in Washington were unconcerned by Sierra Leone’s collapse in the 1990s, as they saw little strategic value in the tiny country. Its state failure also had more to do with the child soldiers of the RUF than al Qaeda or any other terrorist groups. Nonetheless, the tiny West African country served as a critical node in the fund-raising efforts of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network. The group used the chaos of Sierra Leone’s war to hide its own activities, including the conversion of al Qaeda cash into more easy to smuggle diamonds in the period just before the 9/11 attacks. In addition, three al Qaeda members reputed to have been involved in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania also took refuge in Charles Taylor’s Liberia in the summer of 2001.6 This illustrates that stability even in far away West Africa, which child soldier groups endanger, should be a concern of American national security.7
The ease of force generation through a child soldier doctrine not only increases risks of more wars and state failures, but also affects how long these wars last. Organizations that use children are sometimes able to endure conditions that would break forces that do not. In turn, “as conflicts drag on, more and more children are recruited.”8
Often state militaries will deploy massive numbers of child soldiers as a stopgap measure, in order to delay defeat or create valuable breathing space for their regular army to regroup and rebuild. The Ethiopians successfully utilized such a strategy in 1998 in their war with Eritrea. After their original operations against the Eritreans floundered, they placed recently recruited teenagers to act as a skirmishing force to break up Eritrean attacks. The Ethiopian army was able to recover and reconstitute its force, ultimately winning the war a year later. Similarly, whenever its fortunes were failing in the Afghan civil war, the Taliban would bus in madrassah students from across the Pakistani border and plug them into the front lines. Ultimately, this strategy gained them control of 95 percent of the country before U.S. intervention in late 2001 turned the war for its Northern Alliance opposition.
Likewise, rebel groups that depend on child soldiers can easily regenerate and rapidly replace battlefield losses. Many of the missions assigned to child soldiers do not require lengthy training and indoctrination. Quick turnover of personnel is possible, meaning that one advantage of using the child soldier doctrine is that only a small core of adult fighters is needed to maintain the organization. Thus, just when it seems that their fighting ability has been defeated, a rebel force can disappear into the bush and quickly build itself back up again. The RUF in Sierra Leone was completely routed in two separate instances in 1995 and 1997, first by the South African private military firm Executive Outcomes and later by the West African ECOMOG force.9 Each time, however, it used abducted children to return back to strength and carry on the war. Likewise, just when the power of the LRA in Uganda had seemingly been broken by the army’s Operation Iron Fist in summer 2002, the group was able to reconstitute its forces through the abduction of another 8,400 children over the next twelve months.10
The result is that outright victory over child soldier groups appears to be harder to achieve. These groups will often find a way to persist despite attempts to stamp them out, sometimes for years. As long as they are able to maintain a small organizational foundation, they may never be strong enough to win, but they will also be more difficult to kill off.
The presence of child soldiers also can create added difficulties for any peace process, as illustrated by the repeated breakdown of settlements in places ranging from Sri Lanka to Sierra Leone. Their ability to help conflict groups rapidly return to the field makes promises of disarmament and demobilization less tenable. These commitments, though, are often the key to successful negotiated settlements of war.11 In short, children make wars easier to start and harder to end.
Besides the increase in the amount and persistence of conflicts, the use of children means that a group’s agenda becomes less important to its ability to generate force. That is, the connections between the group’s purported cause, the underlying motivations of the group’s leaders, and its likely success in fielding a combat organization are broken. By pulling in their recruits through abduction or indoctrination, groups that have causes that enjoy no grassroots support are still able to mobilize. They are also less likely to die out because of their unpopularity. For instance, the RUF in Sierra Leone had no discernible popular following and no real social program.12 This, however, did not prevent it from launching a vicious civil war that lasted for almost a decade. Instead, it acquired child combatants either by terror tactics or by appealing to disenfranchised youth.
By using children as fighters, the philosophy behind an organization becomes almost irrelevant. Most child soldiers are not motivated by any internal belief in the rightness of their cause. Interviews with child soldiers typically reveal that they are unable to articulate any specific program their group stands for. Some organizations are even notable for their very lack of ideological training. In fact, many child soldiers are beaten or threatened with death if they begin to question the tenets of their group too closely.13
I don’t know what I was fighting for. The rebels just told us that we were fighting for the people. I don’t know what the war was all about because at the time, I was not really old enough to understand these things.
—L., age twelve14
With this change, there is also less of a need for payoffs and bargains between leader and followers. Adults might balk at the proposition of risking their lives at no gain to themselves in order to win diamond mines for a warlord. But the very processes that put child soldiers in that position prevent them from doing so. The groups, in turn, have less incentive to establish systems of good governance, as they do not depend on the prosperity or compliance of their host communities.15 Instead, they become more predatory and destructive.
Such agendas also make it more difficult for a society under siege to respond appropriately. The lack of agenda or political demands by a rebellion often offers no negotiated solution. As one local journalist described the beginning of the fighting in Sierra Leone, “From the taxi driver to the government minister, nobody seemed to have a clue of what the fighting was all about. Nobody knows what the rebels wanted.”16
The result is that, with children present, political ideology is less necessary to the maintenance of warfare. Indeed, many conflicts fueled by child fighters have been simply about personal greed and the seizure of valuable mineral assets. When Foday Sankoh, a failed commercial photographer, took over the RUF, he first killed off its original political theorists, then he operated the group with an essentially gangland mentality. There was a focus on making money by seizing diamond mines, looting villages, and exacting protection money, but there was little effort to cultivating popular support or enacting social change.
Similarly, fringe religious movements and cults that would have been marginalized in the past can now use child soldiers to become quite powerful forces. These include even the most bizarre and internally inconsistent. The result is that within weak states, cult leaders on par with a Jim Jones or David Koresh can now present serious dangers to societal stability.
For instance, the leader of the LRA in Uganda, Joseph Kony, first emerged at the age of twenty-eight claiming to be possessed by the Christian Holy Spirit. With a few loyal followers, he took to the bush and launched his war. Allegedly, his group is fighting to bring back respect for the biblical Ten Commandments. Under his interpretation, however, this includes the abduction, torture, rape, and killing of children, the use of sex slaves, and the prohibition of living near roads or riding bicycles.17 Kony also has allowed himself to have sixty-seven wives, because, as he says, King Solomon had more than six hundred.18 Ironically, the LRA’s closest ally has been the militant Islamic government of Sudan, so it once even amended its “Christian” doctrine to include the requirements that prayers be made toward Mecca and that pig farming be banned.19
At face value, such a group would appear to lack any sustainability. And unlike rebel groups of the past, it has not even bothered to create a political wing, let alone a discernible ideology or program of any sort. Yet, by using child soldiers, Kony has been the force behind a ten-year civil war that has killed more than 100,000 and left another 500,000 as refugees.20
Thus child soldiers allow groups lacking clear, popular agendas to thrive. This not only mutes the possibility of any positive political change emerging from war, but also can exacerbate the violence that takes place within conflicts. In most cases, such conflicts tend to quickly degenerate into rapacious affairs that concentrate their violence on civilians. Regardless of the groups’ motivations, though, the presence of children on the battlefield generally adds to the confusion and chaos of war, increasing both the levels of atrocities and killing. This higher level of bloodshed, in turn, makes the conflict more difficult to end and more likely to recur.21
The use of children as combatants is a violation of the laws of war in and of itself. However, the doctrine behind the use of child soldiers institutionalizes heightened levels of violence and atrocities. While mass killing, rape, and torture have certainly been used by groups without child soldiers, the manner in which children are recruited, trained, and deployed makes these violations an inherent part of the conflict. Additionally, this violence is not just directed outwards at the opposition, but directed inwards as well, at the children within the force.
The intrinsic methods of recruitment and indoctrination involved in child soldiering entail massive violations of the laws of war. Armies, militias, and rebel groups must often use brutish methods to forcibly recruit children and break down community resistance to their conscription. Atrocities also play a central role in the methods used to turn children into soldiers. Children are often forced to commit heinous acts against POWs, fellow soldiers, their neighbors, or even their own family, such that the child is stigmatized and implicated in the violence.
I was forced to do amputations. We had a cutlass, an ax and a big log. We called the villagers out and let them stand in line. You ask [the victims] whether they want a long hand or a short hand [the amputation at the wrist or elbow]. The long hand you put in a different bag from the short hand. If you have a large number of amputated hands in the bag, the promotion will be automatic, to various ranks.
—A., age sixteen22
Children’s presence as fighters also affects the norms of good behavior in war. The protections typically afforded to wounded soldiers and prisoners of war are often ignored in lieu of indoctrination needs. Rebel groups with child soldiers tend not to take prisoners. Instead, they typically kill the POWs on the spot or bring them back to camp to kill as instructive victims. Likewise, even the force’s own wounded children are subject to being executed by their fellow fighters, as leaders see them as needless drains on the organization and easily replaced. One survey in Colombia found that more than a third of former child soldiers admitted to having directly participated in out-of-combat killings. Another third volunteered that they had not been personally involved, but had witnessed others carry out such killings (indicating that the figure may be even higher).23
Other aspects of traditional laws of war, such as respect for neutral humanitarian groups, international organizations, or reporters, are also generally ignored. Multiple child soldier groups are also endemic users of antipersonnel land mines, considered illegal by international law. For example, the FARC and AUC in Colombia both include mine laying in their child soldier training programs.24
On the other side, treatment of captured child soldiers by opposition forces is often brutal. They are considered to be criminals, traitors, or terrorists and held in military prisons. Captured child soldiers of both sexes are often subjected to abusive interrogation procedures, torture, isolation, rape, and death threats.
Because we’re in the bush and there was no food. And on top of that we were made to kill the enemy, the officers we captured, the government. But the most bad thing is that we were told to hate. We were told that if we touched these people they can’t feel pain. They were different from us.
—C., served age nine to fifteen25
A related concern is that the active participation of some children in a war carries a wider risk for other children in the conflict zone. It exposes any child to the suspicion that they, too, are involved in the conflict. Identifying who is a threat and who is not is a particularly hard dilemma in civil wars, where rebel forces tend not to wear uniforms in order to blend into the civilian population. This makes all children potential targets for attack, interrogation, or other harassment.26 The resulting mistakes can be quite tragic. A typical example occurred in Colombia in August 2000. A group of elementary school children age six to ten were walking along a trail guarded by a Colombian army unit. Wearing backpacks, they were mistaken for a FARC guerrilla unit. The soldiers laid an ambush and six of the children were killed before the confusion was sorted out.27
In general, civilians tend to bear the brunt of the atrocities committed by child soldiers. They are targeted because they are less likely to offer substantial resistance and thus represent softer targets for inexperienced fighters. However, there are also a number of institutionalized reasons for why organizations with child soldiers target civilians. Child soldier groups are often unpopular or predatory in nature. Thus, terror aimed at local communities prompts acquiescence or can be used to punish any communities that have been reluctant to provide assistance. In these cases, refugees will sometimes be deliberately allowed to escape in order to spread the message and inculcate further fear among the populace and opposition forces. Lastly, civilians are targeted for reasons of organizational growth. Their communities represent a ready source of additional recruits. These effects often spiral outwards, creating massive flows of refugees and internally displaced persons. In Uganda, for example, nearly half the population (over 200,000) has fled their homes in the Gulu district, where the LRA is active.28
There is also a higher level of sexual violence caused by child soldiers’ presence in wars. For instance, a shocking 53 percent of all women who came into contact with the young fighters of the RUF in Sierra Leone experienced rape or some form of sexual violence. About 33 percent were gang-raped.29 Not even the highly organized ethnic cleansing campaign of the Bosnian Serbs, which even included rape camps, ever reached this level of disturbing efficiency.
Sexual abuse has a long history in warfare. However, in these cases it is no longer incidental to the conflict or carried out by soldiers against their commanders’ orders. Instead, it is utilized as a strategic and indoctrinating weapon, specifically planned by the organization. Sex abuse offers a means for the groups to terrorize civilians and further bind their soldiers to the organization.30 Many child soldier groups have also used rape as a sort of reward to young pubescent soldiers who have been inculcated into a culture of violence. For example, one RUF operation in Sierra Leone was even called “Operation Fine Girl.” Its specific aim was to find and abduct pretty girls, especially virgins, the younger the better.31
When we attacked a town, we would rape people. When we saw a lot of girls, we’d rape. Even I had a woman. I was 12 at the time. She was about 15. Our commanders said that all of us had to have a woman. If we didn’t, they’d kill us.
—D., age sixteen32
So, on our way to be killed, we were taken to a house with about 200 people held in it. My older cousin was sent to go and select 25 men and 25 women to have their hands chopped off. Then she was told to cut off the first man’s hand. She refused to do it saying that she was afraid, I was then told to do it. I said I’d never done such a thing before and that I was also afraid. We were told to sit on the side and watch. So we sat. They chopped off two men’s hands. My cousin couldn’t watch and bowed her head down to avoid the sight. Because she did that, they shot her in the foot. They bandaged her foot and then forced her to walk. We left the two men whose hands had been cut off behind.
We were then taken to a mosque in Kissy [Sierra Leone]. They killed everyone in there.… They were snatching babies and infants from their mother’s arms and tossing them in the air. The babies would free-fall to their deaths. At other times they would also chop them from the back of their heads to kill them, you know, like you do when you slaughter chickens.… One girl with us tried to escape. They made her take off her slippers and give them to me and then killed her … one time we came across two pregnant women. They tied the women down with their legs eagle-spread and took a sharpened stick and jabbed them inside their wombs until the babies came out on the stick.
—K., age thirteen33
In addition to these atrocities aimed outwards, there is a prevalence of such crimes committed against girl soldiers by their own compatriots. For example, in the RUF, rape was often used as a punishment for military failure.34
A number of rebel organizations, such as the LRA, RUF, and in Angola, UNITA, even treat young female soldiers as commodities and force them to serve as the “wives” of adult leaders. Often given as rewards to successful commanders, the girls are then traded by the organization if the first recipient is killed. Documents seized from an LRA camp reveal that Kony even kept a written record of his “presents.”35 Beatings, rapes, and often pregnancy ensue. When this is not in line with the group’s plans, some organizations, such as the FARC, force young female child soldiers to have abortions or use contraceptives, often by ordering an intrauterine device inserted regardless of the girl’s wishes.
You have to use birth control, even if you are not part of a couple. The nurse inserts an IUD. It’s painful. Every eight days they check it. Eight days after I arrived, they inserted one in me.
—M., age fourteen36
This broad range of atrocities breaks almost all the age-old norms of approved behavior in warfare. However, the involvement of children in these extreme acts of violence is a deliberate method used to desensitize them to the suffering of others. Many are taken at such a young age that they do not know the basic moral codes of right from wrong. Such experiences further disconnect them from their moral base. Add the presence of drugs and the fear of being killed by their own leaders or the enemy and it all makes children more likely to commit such acts in the future.
The result is that when children are present in a conflict, experience has shown that they are among the most vicious combatants in the war. As one UNICEF worker put it, “Boys will do things that grown men can’t stomach. Kids make more brutal fighters because they haven’t developed a sense of judgment.”37
Indeed, the younger child soldiers are, the more vicious they tend to be. In Sierra Leone, in fact, teenage rebel units were often scared of younger “small-boy units.” These units were considered far more cruel and unpredictable, such that elder child soldiers would often steer clear of them.38
Sometimes, when I was angry, I’d kill some of my fellow rebels. If we fell into an ambush and these bigger boys made a mistake, we’d kill them.
—P., age twelve39
Child soldiers are deliberately recruited by groups for the very reason that their lives are considered to be of less value than fully trained adult soldiers. Child soldiers are thus “spent” by commanders in that vein. They are typically used in ways that subject them to risks above and beyond the normal dangers of war.
The first use of child soldiers that heightens their casualties is the exploitation of children as shields. They are deployed in such a manner to protect the lives of organization leaders and better trained, and thus considered more valuable, adult soldiers. This makes child soldiers particularly vulnerable to being charged with tasks that entail greater hazard. For example, when children are present in an organization, they are most often the personnel used to explore suspected minefields, usually through simple trial and error. In fact, this was the original motivation behind the use of children in the Iran-Iraq war, to clear paths for follow-on assault forces.40 In Guatemala, underage soldiers were even termed “mine detectors.” The results of these tactics are damning, as a principal cause of death and injury of minors in conflicts is land mines.41 In Cambodia, for instance, 43 percent of all the land-mine victims in military hospitals had been recruited as soldiers between the ages of ten and sixteen.42
In other cases, commanders use children as direct shields at checkpoints or when ambushes or battles loom. The children are exposed at the front to test whether there is a real threat or not, while their commanders remain safely hidden in the rear. At times, the children are deliberately ordered not to take cover, and are beaten or killed if they attempt to duck or crouch behind trees or buildings.43
The second scenario is the use of children as cannon fodder. For the same reason as their use as shields (their relative cheapness to recruit and utilize, compared to adults), they are also commonly employed in what are termed “human wave” attacks. The tactic is designed to overpower or wear down a well-fortified opposition through sheer weight of numbers. The very value of children is that they are extra targets for the enemy to deal with and expend ammunition upon. In Uganda, new LRA recruits are forced to the front lines, regardless of whether they are armed or not. In the words of one commander to his child fighters, “Even if you don’t have a gun, you must go and take part in the fighting by making noise.”44 Those who do not run in the direction of gunfire are beaten or killed. Similar situations are reported in the DRC. There, unarmed child soldier units have been ordered to advance on opposition forces while beating trees with sticks to make their presence known. Their aim is to distract the enemy from the real attack coming from another direction. Their ensuing losses are obviously high.45
Some commanders view children as mentally predisposed for such duty in that they do not have the same awareness of the full consequences. In other cases, as in Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar, child soldiers were often given drugs, such as amphetamines and tranquilizers, to blunt fear and pain.
While they may not be the most sophisticated of tactics, these attacks can often be quite effective in overwhelming even a well-prepared and fortified force. As noted in Chapter 5, the LTTE Operation Oyatha Alaikal (Ceaseless Waves), aimed at the Multavi military complex, proved prophetic in its name. Assault waves of children were able to overrun a key strategic site in Sri Lanka.
At the same time, though, these tactics entail massive casualties. Ceaseless Waves left over three hundred LTTE child soldiers dead and more than a thousand injured.46 In most cases, though, commanders see children as expendable resources whose losses do not destroy and may even benefit the cause. One KLA officer in Albania bluntly described his own poorly trained teenage troops: “They are cannon-fodder. In the bush, they would not survive more than 48 hours.”47
The results are often terrible losses among child soldiers, much higher in proportion to equivalent adult units. Almost 70 percent of young KLA recruits referred to above were killed when they tried to go from Albania to Kosovo. Since 1995 about 60 percent of LTTE personnel killed in combat in Sri Lanka have been children age ten to sixteen. Roughly 20 percent of the total were girls less than sixteen.48 In Mozambique, children were around a quarter of the combatants, but roughly 60 percent of the total casualties.49
These losses are particularly high in conventional battles, when the children face professional opposition units. One seventeen-year-old Ethiopian who was forcibly recruited at the age of fifteen, describes how his unit was used in a stopgap measure in a 1999 battle with Eritrean army forces. Equipped with just small arms that they had minimal training on, they were ordered to hold a trench line while the regular army forces pulled back to regroup. “It was very bad. They put all the 15- and 16-year-olds in the front line while the army retreated. I was with 40 other kids. My friends were lying all over the place like stones. I was fighting for 24 hours. When I saw that only three of my friends were alive, I ran back.”50
The added tragedy of child soldiers is that the doctrine’s implications do not stop at the conflict’s termination. Rather, the use of underage combatants lays the groundwork for future violence and instability. The experiences that children come away with from participating in war can have a devastating effect both for them and for the broader society. The cumulative effect of these traumatic experiences will color and inform their choices, opinions, and perspectives for the rest of their lives.
By exploiting youth for political purposes, child soldiering violates the most fundamental rights of a child. It exposes them to the dangers of conflict while plunging them into a system where killing is sanctioned, at a time when they are mentally and morally unprepared to deal with the consequences. It inculcates a culture of impunity that is hard to reverse. Plainly put, children who have grown up fighting often find it difficult to imagine exactly what peace is and how they should function in it.
This may be perhaps the most pervasive effect of soldiering on children, though it is never identified as a violation in any international treaty and certainly not mentioned in security studies. In pediatric psychology, it is known as the “Destruction of Childhood.”51 While hard to define in exact terms, it is best characterized by the losses a child faces when he or she is thrust into the realm of war. These may be loss of self, of family, of community, of health, of security, of recreation, or, perhaps most important of all, of future.
The results for the broader social order are dangerous as well. It is becoming apparent that the past use of children in war breeds the conditions for future war. As one psychologist writes, “A society that mobilizes and trains its young for war weaves violence into the fabric of life, increasing the likelihood that violence and war will be its future. Children who have been robbed of education and taught to kill often contribute to further militarization, lawlessness, and violence.”52
In a sense, the phenomenon of child soldiers feeds upon itself. Each round of fighting creates a new cohort, traumatized by the war and bereft of hope and skills, who then become a potential pool and catalyst for the next spate of violence. Indeed, in some areas, such as Sudan, we are even seeing children of child soldiers becoming soldiers.53 In Liberia, social workers described the thousands of ex–child soldiers from the first war who received no psychological counseling as “ticking time-bombs.”54 The result in 2001 was that thousands of street children who had fought for Charles Taylor just a few years earlier switched sides and went to war on behalf of the new LURD opposition group. Thousands more were remobilized and fought for the regime. Others worry that, given the large numbers of former child soldiers, the same type of instability will plague Sierra Leone for decades to come. In describing the child fighters of the RUF, one local observer commented, “You won’t believe how isolated they are, how little they know of the outside world and how many of them know nothing outside of war. They are asking what will happen to them if there is peace. They don’t know life without a gun.”55
This dark aftermath of the child soldier doctrine is not constrained by sovereign borders. Often child soldiers are recruited from second countries, among refugee communities or ethnic diasporas, and trafficked across borders. For example, children from Angola, Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda have fought alongside their adult sponsors in the civil war in the DRC. Children have also been recruited from global diaspora communities by Kurdish and Kosovar armed groups. In each case, the impact of violence in one country then reverberates back to their homelands.
In fact, as a look at the map on this page demonstrates, there are geographic clusters of wars where child soldiers are located, perhaps indicating cross-border regional spreading of the instability. The legacy of the peace agreement in Liberia, for instance, was an outflow of fighting into Sierra Leone, also carried out by children. The fighting there soon spilled over into Guinea. The Guinean government directly blamed the clashes, which left almost five hundred dead, on “lost defrocked soldiers, fearing neither God nor man, a rebellion that has become, for many youths of the region, both a way of life and a means of survival.”56 Soon after, Côte d’Ivoire was the next neighbor to succumb to child soldier–led chaos. Roughly three thousand underage recruits reportedly participated in the fighting there. Many of these young fighters spoke English, indicating that they were from Liberia and Sierra Leone (the local dialect in Côte d’Ivoire is a form of French).57
Indeed, the presence of child soldiers may mean that a neighbor’s peace agreement, which used to be good news, could portend a direct threat of war. For example, the fighting in the DRC created literally thousands of socially disconnected youths who have known only a life of killing and looting. These semi-literate boys and girls did not care for whom or where they fought. Many have simply moved on into other countries, in search of the next war to fight. The outcome is that cease-fires in the DRC later led to outbreaks of violence in the Central African Republic and Congo-Brazzaville.58
Part of why the legacy of child soldiering is so dangerous is that, in many ways, children bear greater burdens from war than their adult counterparts. Many child soldier veterans have physical disabilities and/or psychological scars that are heightened by their youth. Most have special rehabilitation needs. Or, because they were removed from school at an early age, they may have no skills other than killing and being able to fieldstrip weapons.
The very nature of their use means that child soldiers are more likely to have been injured or disabled in war. The most frequent permanent injuries they suffer are loss of hearing, blindness, and loss of limbs. Health care for wounded child soldiers is always problematic, particularly as the countries where most of them are found are least likely to have top medical facilities. At times, the only medicine available is herbal.
Disease rates are also much higher among ex–child soldiers, due to the stresses and malnourishment that they often face. Drug addiction is a common affliction as well, with resulting implications for their future health and development. Even the process of withdrawal from the addiction can be a grueling experience.59
A particular problem is sexually transmitted disease (STD). The prevalence of STDs is thought to be far higher among child soldiers than the general population or their adult soldier equivalents. While the data is limited (testing is often unavailable and sometimes discouraged, as it can create a lifelong stigma for children), what we do know from isolated testing is highly disturbing. At repatriation camps in Uganda, 70 to 80 percent of the female child soldiers and 60 percent of the male child soldiers tested positive for one or more STD.60 Likewise, 70 to 90 percent of rape survivors in Sierra Leone tested positive for STDs, while roughly 50 percent were positive for HIV, indicating high rates among male child soldiers, who are thought to be among the prime transmitters.61 In Mozambique, where there are more than one million AIDS cases, the provinces where child soldiers were deployed have the highest concentration.62 This feeds back into the security problems that the epidemic presents down the line.
These physical maladies carry greater emotional, psychological, economic, and social disadvantages for children, which endure for the rest of their lives. For example, a land-mine explosion is likely to cause greater damage to the body of a child than to that of an adult. For those children who do survive, the medical problems related to amputation are far more severe than for adults. The limb of a child grows faster than the surrounding tissue. It thus requires repeated amputation. Children also need new prostheses regularly, about every six months for those in puberty. Such injuries, in particular the loss of sight, hearing, or limbs, can also present severe obstacles to a child’s social and educational development, particularly if occurring in communities that lack the resources to aid handicapped people in rejoining society.63
I would like my arms and hands to be mended. I am in great agony and a terrible situation. I don’t have hands. I can’t eat my food, I have to be fed by someone else. I would like to see my hands working. I want peace and the war to be stopped. I want to go to school and get an education. If the hospitals were working I would like my hands to be treated. If it was up to me, I would say that no child of my age should ever lose his hands. I would like to say to the militia, look what you have done, you have destroyed my hands. Please don’t continue to blow off children’s hands. Please stop the fighting.
—S., age twelve64
The doctrine of child soldiers also creates many of the same problems among the wider population, who will have suffered from their atrocities. It thus has additional wider social effects, hindering economic and social development for years to come.
For instance, the inherent nature of child soldier recruiting and activity will damage the future educational prospects of not just individual children who were soldiers but also children in the wider region where they fought. Attacks on schools are an efficient way for groups to abduct many children at once. Additionally, many groups specifically target schools and teachers as potential points of resistance to their programs. The result is that formal education completely stops in susceptible regions, often for years, and is difficult to restart once the war is over. In Uganda, for example, more than seventy-five schools were burned down and 215 teachers killed during the LRA rampages—in just one province, in just one year.65 The same pattern holds in other areas, such as health care and refugees. In Sierra Leone, for example, 62 percent of the rural health units were so destroyed by the war that two years later they were still not functioning.66 In the LRA regions in Uganda, more than 70 percent of the population (1.2 million) has been driven into refugee camps, with tens of thousands more children “night commuting” (they sleep in protected towns to avoid recruiting and abduction raids in the rural areas at night).67 Thus, future life prospects are dimmed not only for the children who were fighters but also for their entire generational cohorts.
The final long-term consequence of the use of the child soldier doctrine is how it disrupts children’s psychological and moral development. Child soldiering is a form of child abuse, which we do know has potential neurobiological effects on brain development and long-term distress to the child’s personality, sometimes leading to antisocial behavior.68
The numbers that underlie children’s experiences in war illustrate just how devastating the practice can be on the individual level. For example, in one survey of child soldiers in Africa, 77 percent witnessed someone being killed, 63 percent were abducted from home, 52 percent were seriously beaten, 39 percent killed someone else, 39 percent helped abduct other children, 35 percent were sexually abused, 6 percent saw their parents or sibling being killed, and 2 percent had to kill a family member.69
Thus, the cumulative involvement of children in the violence of war can be destructive on numerous psychological levels. It desensitizes them to suffering and often eliminates the sense of empathy. This may occur either from witnessing horrible scenes of violence or from having been participants. In either case, the effect is to “harden” their psyches.70 Their new moral code is dominated by fear of further violence or aggression from those around them. This makes it difficult for them to disengage from the often violent behavioral norms they established as child soldiers.
The modes of their recruitment, transformation, and use in warfare make children not only more likely to commit severe acts of violence during the fighting, but also afterward. The experience can create deep emotional and psychological scarring. “The child’s understanding of power may become distorted. Survival becomes equated with aggression, with a sense of control over other people. The social modeling these children received for months or years is one of fear and brutality. The children may still have difficulty facing the consequences of their actions.”71
Most worrisome is that childhood is the period of identity formation. Childhood is meant to be a period of development that involves interaction with family and establishment of interpersonal networks that enhance children’s understanding of their social surroundings and how to act within them. The use of violence during this stage can become a central element of a child’s sense of self and even carry over into adulthood, long after any of the original motivations or contexts behind that behavior have disappeared.72 While the scarring is not necessarily permanent, it certainly creates great difficulties both for the children and their interface with society.
This is complicated by the fact that many former child soldiers find that any return to their pre-recruitment lives is often highly problematic. The modes of recruitment and indoctrination often meant that children were forced to commit atrocities against their own families and communities. Others may have fought on the losing side. In either case, their home communities often consider them beyond redemption. It is very difficult to convince family and community members who witnessed the children taking part in the destruction of their towns and villages that they must now be forgiven.
Thus, gaining back a lost childhood is difficult. The result is a potential mass of disaffected children, often disconnected from society, who have but one viable job skill: killing.
There is no work for me. I have few skills except using a gun and it’s easy money … I used to be FRELIMO [the government army], then joined RENAMO [the rebel army], then joined FRELIMO. I have played war for both. Now I work for myself and my group.… We try not to kill people, but accidents can happen during confusion.
—A., age nineteen (describing his turn to crime in postwar Mozambique, years after his military service)73
These tendencies toward further violence contribute to the difficulty that many countries—and outside peacekeeping forces—face in post-conflict situations, particularly when trying to integrate formerly hostile groups into a united society. One former British peacekeeper described it as a “nightmare scenario.” His unit found it nearly impossible to try to keep order in such situations, surrounded by “savage little hooligans with no sense of right or wrong or value for life … armed with high velocity rifles and … normally high as kites on cannabis, cocaine, or palm wine—usually all three.”74
Thus, even after the initial conflict ends, the use of child soldiers can haunt societies for generations to come. Although child fighters are far from the only ones who are afflicted as a result of their experiences in war, they suffer the most and have the least capacity to recover. “Reviled by their families and communities, traumatised by the memories of the atrocities they committed, thousands of former child soldiers … are being left to their own devices. And many complain of being hungry. These are all potential ingredients for a new war.”75