Background: The Use of Child Soldiers
Prepared by Dominic Nava
Today in some of the poorest regions of the world, children are being used against their own will on the battlefield, serving as worthless pawns in battles for power and influence. Most are stripped away from their families and past lives in order to become mindless killing machines, trained to obey even the most ruthless and violent commands. Such was the case with child soldier Ishmael Beah, who at 12 years old first encountered violence from recruiters in Sierra Leone. Although initially scared and unwilling to kill, Beah under the influence of corrupt officers and drugs began to relish the life as a soldier and the power it afforded him. Luckily UNICEF was able to extract Beah—he was lucky. Many thousands of children today continue to be used for the purposes of war, and our justice issue aims to better reveal their plight.
The most obvious evidence of injustice with child warfare is the physical harm that children are exposed to during battle. Recruiters target children for an array of reasons, one being their false impression of war as a place for personal glory, when more often than not it is actually a place of devastation and death. Because they are so young they are easy to control, and are forced risk their own lives for the causes of conflict groups. Over the past twelve years there have been armed conflicts involving child soldiers in at least thirty-six countries around the world. Among such a large scope of violence, over “two million children have been killed in conflict,” and “over six million have been seriously injured or permanently disabled. Entire generations have been eliminated, and as time passes the problem only becomes only more widespread and harder to stop.
One of the relatively hidden atrocities that are attributed with child warfare is the sexual abuse many female soldiers are exposed to. It’s terrible enough that girls are expected to perform the same fighting roles as boys, but additionally they are expected to provide sexual services or even become soldiers’ wives. Additionally, if a girl becomes pregnant, she is often either forced to abort the child or give the child up to eventually become a soldier (Singer 34). Some reports have even detailed women fighting with their children strapped to their own backs. This is a recent development in child warfare, but currently about thirty percent of the world’s armed forces that use child soldiers also use females (Singer 32). Like their male counterparts, female soldiers forced to become fighters and sexual slaves are deprived of their own life and dignity, the first catholic social teaching. This is an important issue that again, only grows exponentially over time and leads to more women who are abducted into the fighting forces of conflict groups.
The injustice of child warfare that has the longest and most profound effect is the psychological harm children are exposed to. As conflict groups abduct children at a young age, many groups also kill the families of the children. The goal is to completely eliminate a child’s past life in order to establish a new one whereby the child is completely committed to war. In many cases children grow up without a true feeling of family, ever going to school, or functioning regularly in society without violence. The effect of this on their psyche is especially significant, as the violence takes place during the period when personalities are being developed. In conjunction with their lack of coping mechanisms, one study even found that “as many as 97% of child soldiers may suffer from PTSD” (Singer 194). This mental disorder untreated severely inhibits children from ever growing up to lead regular, functioning roles in society away from violence. Uncontrolled conflict groups from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia have devastated generations of children in a vicious cycle that needs to be halted.
Those responsible for abducting children and developing them into soldiers are often members of conflict groups, or groups that use violence to gain power and respectability or simply to create mayhem. When many of these groups are initially formed they are usually unpopular with their local people, but through abducting children are able to gain manpower and greater influence over locals. The LRA (Lord’s Resistant Army) in Uganda, for example, used children “to go from 200 core members to an army of 14,000 soldiers” (Singer 95). Children are assimilated into the warrior culture by completely separating from their past lives. Soldiers often kill off every child’s family in order to create a scenario where the child has no life to escape to. One child when interviewed said “that sight of blood and crying of people in pain, triggered something inside me that I didn’t understand, but it made me past the point of compassion for others. I lost my sense of self” (Singer 84). This sort of episode occurs every day, and the sooner it is stopped the better.
Some of the social systems involved when children are used in war include national governments, and conflict groups. Conflict groups are the biggest source of evil when it comes to the use of child soldiers. Some examples of these groups include Sudan’s People’s Liberation Army, the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, the Afghan Taliban leadership Quetta Shura, and the New People’s Army in the Philippines. As previously mentioned these groups have abducted thousands of children from their homes, and continue to force them to experience brutal violence in power struggles for money and influence. Even state governments in regions such as Africa, the Middle East, and Asia themselves use child soldiers to bolster their ranks. The Islamic government in the north, for example, has used boys as young as twelve in their army and paramilitary Popular Defense Forces since 1995 (Singer 24). Even if they do not use children in their ranks, some national governments have corrupt members and continue to allow conflict groups to use children in their armies. The general public recognizes the evil in these social systems but cannot do anything to alter them. These systems are far too powerful and hold too many resources, influence, and more importantly fear over the public for anything to be changed without outside influence.
The issue of using children as soldiers has long been a problem, but only recently has caught more attention from the outside world. Many organizations from around the world are beginning to pool their efforts for this issue. Some groups include UNICEF, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, International Save the Children Alliance, the Jesuit Refugee Service, and SOS Children’s Villages. SOS Children’s Villages is an especially unique group in that it focuses almost entirely on the rehabilitation of child soldiers. It focuses on this rehabilitation by building entire villages where children reside in order to slowly relearn the social skills needed to function normally in society without violence.
Children are the future of our world. Every child has a basic right to live a healthy, happy life along with every other human being as is outlined by the first catholic social teaching. Unfortunately in some of the poorest regions of the world, children are robbed of their childhood innocence in order to serve as meaningless foot soldiers, slaughtering others and suffering as sexual slaves for the sake of power and influence for their captors. The physical violence that these young children are exposed to has enormous effects on their psyche, and commonly leads to further violent and emotionless behavior as adults. Without help and rehabilitation the futures of these children are bleak, and help from outside influences is required in order to break the continuous chain of violence that remains unbroken to this day.
