Child Soldiers: The Destruction of Innocence

Michael Wessells is professor of psychology at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. Through the Christian Children’s Fund, an international non-governmental organisation, he works with programmes for assisting war-affected children and families in countries such as Angola, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Guatemala and Colombia.

Each year since the end of the Cold War there have been approximately twenty-five to thirty-five armed conflicts worldwide, most of which have been fought within states along ethnic lines. They embody a shift in war fighting that increasingly damages civilians, mostly women and children. At the beginning of the twentieth century, wars were fought primarily between states on well-defined battlefields and over 80 per cent of the casualties were combatants. Now, nearly 90 per cent of the victims of war are non-combatants. As evidenced by the conflicts in Kosovo and other parts of the former Yugoslavia and by the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, intra-state conflicts make civilian populations the primary targets of war, genocide and terror. They are characterised by butchery, gender-specific violence and personalised atrocities, committed in some cases by former neighbours. There are no well-defined battlefields, as fighting at the community level and the use of landmines turn ordinary agricultural communities into killing fields.

 

Contemporary armed conflicts violate children’s rights on a massive scale. The 1996 United Nations study, Impact of Armed Conflict on Children, reported that children are under holistic assault in war zones from a deadly combination of poverty, hunger, attack, sexual assault, abduction, displacement, health and infrastructure destruction and landmines. In conflict-torn countries, children grow up in systems of violence where violence is normalised, war and its violent aftermath are woven into the social fabric and children have dim hopes for a positive future. This systematic shattering of children’s rights is not accidental but often part of planned attempts to terrorise civilians. Child soldiering is one of the most deplorable abuses of children’s rights, and it is part of the wider mistreatment and exploitation of children in situations of armed conflict.

Children as Soldiers

International law defines a “child” as someone under eighteen years of age. Current international standards, primarily the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, establish fifteen years as the minimum age of military recruitment, although most signatories to the convention support an optional protocol that sets eighteen years as the minimum recruitment age. Despite these standards, it is estimated that there are approximately three hundred thousand child soldiers involved in conflicts in over thirty countries worldwide. Child soldiering either occurs now or has occurred in recent conflicts in areas such as Afghanistan, Angola, Burma, Cambodia, Colombia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Kosovo, Peru, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and Sudan, among many others.

   

Although accurate statistics are difficult to collect in war zones, most child soldiers are between sixteen and eighteen years old, followed by those aged thireen to fifteen. It is not uncommon, however, to find much younger child soldiers. In countries such as Uganda and Sierra Leone, children aged ten and under have entered military activity. In June 1998, a thireen-year-old Ugandan boy told me of his abduction at the age of eleven by Joseph Kony’s “Lord’s Resistance Army”:

 

The soldiers took me from school. They had guns and the teachers couldn’t stop them. They took me to the bush and made me carry rifles and other things—really heavy loads. Many boys died of hunger and thirst. Then they taught me how to shoot. One day, a boy tried to escape but they caught him. They ordered us to stand around him in a circle and beat him. If we did not beat him, they would beat us. They would kill us. So we beat him. Again and again until he died. The next time a boy escaped, each of us had to run him through with a bayonet. I still see his face. Then they made us fight in battles—shoot guns at soldiers. Life was hard and many children died.

 

This regimen of progressive exposure to and involvement in violence is calculated to prepare children for killing and to quell any moral angst they might experience.

 

In the military, children serve as cooks, porters, spies, bodyguards, messengers and mine detectors, as well as combatants. Soldiers include girls, who in Ethiopia constituted as many as 25 per cent of the troops. Typically, girl soldiers are sex slaves or “soldiers’ wives”, showing that sexual violence is woven into the fabric of contemporary armed conflict.

 

As combatants, children are used as regular fighting troops. Some commanders prefer child rather than adult soldiers because children can be made more obedient and willing to take on the most dangerous assignments. Perhaps less fearful and less aware of their own mortality, children can be manipulated in highly objectionable ways. In countries such as Burma and Sierra Leone, commanders have plied children with drugs such as painkillers and even gunpowder (which is snorted and presumably acts as a stimulant and pain suppressant) and then ordered frontal wave attacks known to carry very high casualty rates. Children have also been given sacred rituals that supposedly protect them from harm in combat. In countries such as Mozambique and Peru, children have been used as executioners, and some children report that they find excitement in combat, killing and the sight of blood. Images of child killers, however, should be tempered with understanding that it is adults who start wars and are responsible for children’s behaviour.

 

To control children, commanders use a mixture of brutal intimidation, harsh training and methods of breaking bonds between children and their communities. In the most recent fighting in Sierra Leone, some children have been forced to kill and mutilate people from their own villages. This practice implants deep, realistic fears of what might happen if they returned home, making the military seem the only viable path for survival. Once inducted, children are often forced to endure painful activities such as rolling on gravel or staying in difficult postures for prolonged periods. Typically, commanders mete out severe punishment to anyone who shows pain or weakness, while they praise and reward those who engage in “brave” behaviour.

 

In countries as diverse as Peru and Angola, some recruits have drunk the blood of animals or of people who have been killed, and commanders may encourage the belief that this practice aids survival. Psychologically, it builds machismo, normalises killing and the taking of blood and destroys respect for living beings. Not infrequently, commanders justify their actions through an ideology that portrays “our” cause as good and just while denigrating the “other” as subhuman, demonic and untrustworthy. The power of state-legitimated ideology was evident in Rwanda, where the Habyarimana regime used hate radio to prepare young paramilitaries for genocide against Tutsis and their moderate Hutu supporters.

Causal Factors

Child soldiering is not a new phenomenon. Warrior cultures have long groomed youths for combat and many armies in different historical eras have included youngsters. Nevertheless, new pressures and considerations enable the widespread, systematic exploitation of children as soldiers. In the aftermath of colonialism and the tensions of the Cold War, which restrained many conflicts in regions such as Africa, power vacuums and failing governments invite armed struggles. Amid the fighting, troop-hungry commanders often find it convenient to ignore the age of potential combatants. Few accurate birth records are kept in sub-Saharan Africa, making it easier for commanders to go after any youth of considerable stature. Consistently, the international community pays less attention to human rights violations and wars in Africa than to those in regions such as Europe. While the tragedy of Kosovo rivets international attention and commands extensive relief efforts, the enduring problems of countries such as Sudan, Uganda, Sierra Leone and Angola receive little attention. The inattention of the international community to violations of children’s rights in Africa encourages commanders to use child soldiers because the risk of getting caught or punished is so low.

 

Changes in weapons technology and availability and in the nature of warfare have also facilitated child soldiering. In previous eras, the role of children in combat was curbed by their small stature and their limited ability to use weapons such as swords or spears. The advent of lightweight automatic weapons such as the AK-47 and M-16 assault rifles changed this. A ten-year-old wielding an AK-47 can be an effective fighting force, a point not lost on local commanders and warlords. Although the world’s attention often focuses on high-technology wars fought with computer-guided missiles and precision-guided munitions, most contemporary wars are fought using inexpensive lightweight weapons. At present there are an estimated five hundred million lightweight assault weapons available.

 

The dynamics of intra-state conflicts also contribute extensively to child soldiering. Rebel factions may have leaders for whom the abduction of children is the primary source of troops. The paradigm example currently is northern Uganda, where Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army obtains its troops by abducting boys and girls from villages in the Gulu and Kitgum districts. Since Kony has no political constituency among the Acholi people, child abduction is his only means of maintaining his military force. Governments, too, in intra-state conflicts face increased pressures that lead to child recruitment, as internal divisions frequently carve the national army in half and shrink the pool of potential recruits at a moment of crisis for government sovereignty and authority.

Recruitment

Children enter military activity through many paths, the diversity of which challenges the idea that “child soldiers” is a monolithic category. In Northern Ireland or contemporary Palestine, youths often view the conflict as a liberation struggle and see violence as the only instrument available for ending the oppression of their people. The same was true in apartheid South Africa. As in many situations of political violence, the line is blurred between military and civilian life, and much of the violence is organised outside official military channels. In other contexts, impoverished children may join a military group in hope of earning a regular salary, winning glory or preserving family honour through revenge. Youths often face strong peer pressure to fight and exhibit macho values and behaviour. Television images and war toys frequently send powerful messages about the acceptability and manliness of violence.

 

Seduced by these pressures and messages, youths may enter the fighting of their own accord. The lack of obvious coercion creates the image of voluntary activity and leads some thoughtful observers to ask what is wrong with child soldiering. Indeed, people in the United States, remembering the call of patriotism and the willingness of youth to serve in conflicts such as the First and Second World Wars, may see voluntary soldiering through the lens of their own national experience as positive, even heroic. This parallel, however, is misleading. Globally, the primary routes into child soldiering involve coercion, abduction and force. In Uganda, children have been forced at gunpoint to come with the military and resisters have been cut with machetes. In Angola, rebel commanders have recruited youths by arriving heavily armed in a village and demanding that the local chief deliver a quota of “recruits” lest the village be attacked and destroyed.

 

Images of voluntary recruiting are also at sharp odds with the realities of daily life in developing countries. Many children become soldiers because they have lost their parents, are hungry and have no means of getting food, or see the military as the best means of obtaining wealth or health care they could not access otherwise. Ultimately, it is victimisation, desperation and the failure of adults to meet basic needs that drive many children into soldiering.

 

Children’s decisions to enter the military should be viewed in an ecological perspective that recognises the profound impact of armed conflict on families, schools and communities. Community-level fighting destroys many homes and families, leaving children unprotected and in a situation in which the military may seem to be their best option for survival. In addition, war-stresses get played out in families, and family violence propels many children into the streets, where they may participate in crime and learn to wield the power of guns. Living in crime-saturated communities, children come to view violence as normal, a development strongly reinforced by government involvement in protracted conflict. In schools, ethnic tensions and polarisation set the stage for violence against the out-group, and a climate of fear and hostility may occasion frequent fighting and carrying of weapons.

 

In addition to these micro-level pressures, strong macro-social pressures encourage violence. Chronic poverty and economic desperation breed crime and may lead youths to join the military to earn a salary or meet basic needs. Oppression of one’s identity group is viewed as a warrant for using violence to achieve a modicum of justice. In this context, it is misleading to talk of voluntary entry. Behind apparently voluntary entry lies a set of unmet needs and difficult circumstances that compel young people into soldiering.

The Human Toll

Armed conflict inflicts huge physical damage on children. Unicef estimates that the wars of the 1990s have killed two million children, disabled four million, left twelve million homeless and made one million orphans or separated from parents. Child soldiers endure some of the worst physical suffering. Many have been shot, beaten or otherwise wounded, and many have lost limbs to landmines. Large numbers of child soldiers suffer hunger, thirst and long forced marches carrying heavy loads under threat of severe physical punishment for stopping. Sexually transmitted diseases and other health problems are pervasive. In northern Uganda, when former child soldiers come out of the bush they are often in need of immediate physical aid and medical intervention.

 

The psychological and social wounds are also very deep. Although child soldiers often demonstrate remarkable resilience, they may be affected by trauma and its associated problems of sleep disturbance, flashbacks and upsetting memories, excessive arousal and avoidance of situations like those that caused the trauma. Trauma is often the tip of the iceberg: larger issues concern personal loss, fear and anxiety, poverty and inability to meet basic needs, depression and futurelessness. Having been deprived of education and job training, they may feel hopeless and see little opportunity for a positive future. When they return home, they may face stigmatisation, social isolation and difficult issues of identity and social integration.

 

One fifteen-year-old boy from northern Uganda told me he had tried to go back to school following his abduction into soldiering and subsequent return home. But the problems he encountered were enormous and eventually led him to withdraw. He said he had trouble concentrating, a problem often associated with traumatic experiences. Other students called him “rebel”, isolating him socially and making his military identity seem immutable. In addition, he felt little willingness to follow the orders of a teacher who had never seen combat, when he himself had been a commander who had made many life-and-death decisions. The boy spent much of his day idling in town with other former soldiers, and community elders said they were concerned that he might re-enter the military or get involved in trouble.

 

Problems of social isolation and social reintegration are particularly severe in contexts such as contemporary Sierra Leone. Although a fragile cease-fire has been signed and the agreement calls for the demobilisation and reintegration of underage soldiers, it is uncertain how communities will react to the returning children. Those who were forced to kill or mutilate members of their own village may be unable to return owing to fear of retaliation. In these situations, living with foster families outside one’s village may be a reasonable alternative. Further, the rural Bantu peoples of sub-Saharan Africa believe that a child who has killed is haunted by the unavenged spirits of his victims. It is believed that if the child returns home he will bring spiritual contamination to the community, causing a variety of problems. In such contexts, where spirituality is at the centre of life and where events in the visible world are explained by reference to events in the ancestor-realm, spiritual wounds may be the greatest source of distress.

Social Consequences

The toll of child soldiering, however, cannot be measured individually. Child soldiering contributes to societal damage by reducing human security on a wide scale. First, dangerous, unacceptable regimes that threaten human wellbeing and regional stability often exploit children as a means of gaining strength or cementing political control. Although the situation in northern Uganda is the most publicised example, the same pattern is evident in cases such as the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which the Habyarimana regime trained youths as paramilitaries, preparing them to help carry out the genocide that not only killed nearly eight hundred thousand people, but also badly destabilised the Great Lakes and surrounding regions. Children, particularly those who are unaccompanied or who live in camps for displaced people, provide easy targets for recruitment and manipulation by rogues and by regimes that trample human rights on a massive scale.

 

Second, child soldiering contributes to continuing cycles of violence, worsening the situation of societies already in crisis. Since child soldiering stems from systemic problems such as poverty and the failure of political institutions, it is a symptom of deeper societal problems. But it is also an amplifier of societal problems. If children are socialised for fighting and war, war is likely to become their script and the fighting they help to propel will damage lives and infrastructure, increasing poverty. Not only do some children remember what happened in previous rounds of fighting and seek revenge, but they are also at risk of re-recruitment in future conflict. Even if they do not take up arms again as soldiers, they may contribute to deadly criminal violence, a wave of which often follows on the heels of political violence. Children who have fought and who have had no education or job training will probably continue to use the means they know best, violence, to meet their needs in a situation of economic desperation. This continues to be a major problem in South Africa.

 

Third, child soldiering impedes the establishment of law and order, limiting post-conflict reconstruction for peace. The abduction of children for soldiering represents the height of lawlessness and itself sets a horrible standard for society. Further, societies that allow child soldiering rob their children of pathways for the development of nonviolent behaviour. Simultaneously, they establish violence as a social norm. After the fighting has ended, former child soldiers may have difficulty fitting into civilian life. For many of these individuals gang activity provides an attractive option. With violence held up as a model or a necessity, with constraints against violence weakened and with few positive options available for children socialised into a system of violence, it is very difficult to build or maintain law and order. Adults’ failure to protect children eventually puts society at risk.

 

Fourth, child soldiering limits economic development. Drawing children into war perpetuates armed conflict, damaging life-support systems and diverting to the military precious resources that ought to be used to meet basic human needs. After the fighting stops, large numbers of children may have had little education or job training, been affected negatively by their war experiences and need assistance to become functional, contributing members of society. Those who retain identity as warriors or who resort to crime to meet their basic needs will probably make it difficult for society to rebuild for peace. Child soldiering does not cause these problems but is an important element in systems of violence that are antithetical to human wellbeing and peace.

Rehabilitation

Although children are affected powerfully by their experiences as soldiers, they are survivors and should not be thought of simply as victims. Unfortunately, the mass media have sometimes portrayed former child soldiers as damaged goods or a lost generation, as young people whose traumas and experiences have made them beyond repair. In fact, former child soldiers show considerable resilience and mounting evidence from the field attests to their ability to make the transition back to civilian life and to lead normal, productive lives.

 

To make this transition, however, youths need assistance that helps them to meet basic needs and achieve social integration with their communities. Few roadmaps exist for the long-term rehabilitation and reintegration of former child soldiers, although several lessons from the field are well established.

 

First, assistance should be holistic, linking economic and educational opportunities with opportunities for coming to terms with one’s war experiences.

 

Second, high priority should be given to reuniting former child soldiers with their families, recognising that returning youth may encounter a variety of difficulties and adjustments and that ongoing support for families is crucial.

 

Third, to address psychological wounds the emphasis should be on social integration rather than on individual healing. Many war-torn societies are collectivist and are ill suited to approaches such as individual or small-group counselling of the kind popular in the United States and Europe. To promote social integration, local cultural resources such as healing rituals are useful and may be interwoven with techniques derived from Western contexts.

 

Fourth, placing returning child soldiers in residential centres may be useful as an interim measure to provide basic health services and support for activities that promote healing and constructive, pro-social behaviour; but the emphasis should be on community reintegration, which requires working in advance with members of the community who may fear the children or view them as troublemakers. Work on community reintegration should be long-term and requires follow-up support for the ongoing reintegration process.

 

Fifth, protection for children should be provided throughout as the risks of reabduction often remain unacceptably high.

Reintegration in Angola

To illustrate an effective case of rehabilitation and reintegration, consider the case of Angola, racked by a thirty-five-year conflict in which two generations experienced as a daily reality war between the forces of the government and the opposition movement, Unita. When the Lusaka Protocol was signed in 1994, the armies registered over 9,000 minors, of whom 5,171 were selected for demobilisation. These youths, most of whom had been recruited forcibly at the ages of thirteen or fourteen, were at high risk of reabduction and/or participation in crime and banditry. In rural areas, beliefs about spirituality and the need for spiritual healing were strong.

 

To assist these youths, the Christian Children’s Fund (CCF), a non-denominational, non-governmental organisation headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, developed an all-Angolan team that implemented in partnership with Unicef a “Reintegration of Underage Soldiers” project from 1996 to 1998. Working in the most severely war-affected provinces, CCF/Angola used province-based teams to assist former child soldiers through a network of approximately two hundred activists. Many of the activists were connected with the local church and were recognised by their communities as being in a good position to assist returning youths. The provincial teams briefed the activists on the psychosocial impacts of child soldiering and on methods of reintegrating former soldiers. Following the training, the activists conducted their work in three steps: preparation, re-entry and reintegration.

 

While the former soldiers were in quartering areas, the activists traced and notified their families. The activists listened to the concerns of family members, educated them about the situation of child soldiers and advised them on how to aid family and community reintegration. They also sought to increase understanding of the fact that problems such as disobedience might stem not from bad character but from war experiences. In the community, activists worked to raise awareness of the needs of former child soldiers, to reduce stereotypes and to hear concerns about their return. They also worked to gain the support of local officials by conducting meetings with sobas (traditional chiefs), government leaders and influential community members.

 

Recognising the risks of reabduction, and viewing family reunification as one of the most basic forms of psycho-social assistance to children, the activists accompanied the child soldiers to their rendezvous points and arranged temporary foster care when it was impossible for the families to meet the children. Of the 4,104 youths demobilised into the CCF/Unicef project areas, over 50 per cent were successfully reunited with their families. The activists also arranged community receptions, which were important in reconciling former child soldiers with their communities. Families and communities greeted the returning youths with great relief and joy that occasioned singing, dancing and traditional re-entry rituals in which adults sprinkled the youths’ faces and heads with flour or water.

 

To aid social reintegration, the CCF teams worked extensively with local cultural resources. With the aid of ethnographic training, the teams documented traditional healing practices and their surrounding belief systems regarding life and death, illness and health. This documentation was a key part of the mobilisation process since it validated local practices and boosted the self-esteem of people whom colonialism had taught to regard their own culture as inferior.

 

Although the evidence is preliminary, traditional purification rituals appear to have powerful effects on individuals and communities. If a returning child soldier is deemed to be contaminated spiritually, then the local healer arranges a communal purification ritual to restore spiritual harmony with the ancestors. The rituals vary according to the ethnic group, situation and other factors. Typically, they include a purifying diet; demarcation of a space that the bad spirits cannot enter; use of special herbs for fumigation and bathing; offerings to the bad spirits; and a symbolic action such as stepping across a threshold and not looking back.

 

Such actions indicate a break with the past, and the healer may announce as they are performed that the young person’s life as a soldier has ended and that he is now born again as part of the community. These types of ritual enable the community to accept the young person back without fear of spiritual reprisal. Although long-term follow-up studies of psychological adjustment have yet to be conducted, the youths who participate in these rituals seem to function remarkably well. There is great need for additional research on the nature and efficacy of these rituals.

Prevention

Prevention is the key to addressing child soldiering, as both morally and pragmatically it makes little sense to allow the systematic abuse of children and try to pick up the pieces afterwards. Comprehensive measures are needed to prevent child soldiering. They include poverty reduction, compulsory birth registration and individual identification, universal education, reduction of violence and of its glorification in the mass media, family reunification and extensive protection of displaced and unaccompanied children.

 

It is also vital to strengthen international norms against child soldiering. Recruitment of child soldiers should lead to swift and strong punishment, possibly by the International Criminal Court. There should also be an increase in the minimum age of military recruitment. At present, a UN working group, established in 1994, seeks to establish an optional protocol to the children’s rights convention that would boost the minimum recruitment age to eighteen years.

 

Several compelling reasons support raising the bar to eighteen years. The increase would fit in with the practice of giving people the right to vote at eighteen and make it more difficult for rogue leaders to recruit thirteen year olds and pass them off as being over the legal age limit. Although cultures differ in how they define childhood, there is a broad international consensus that developmentally, younger children are at greater risk of damage from the ravages of combat. Coupled with other measures, raising the recruitment bar to eighteen would reduce the exploitation of, and damage to, very young children.

 

Unfortunately, current US practice and policy are highly problematic with regard to the prevention of child soldiering. The United States currently enlists seventeen year olds, contingent on parental consent, although troops do not participate in combat before the age of eighteen. The Department of Defence maintains that the recruitment of seventeen year olds provides an “edge”, but this position is tenuous since seventeen year olds constitute less than one-half of one per cent of active-duty troops and only four per cent of new recruits. Other venues exist to ensure the steady flow of recruits. They include the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps, which enrols three hundred thousand young people on college and university campuses to prepare them for military service.

 

The larger problem, however, is that the United States has positioned itself in ways that are obstructionist, that weaken emerging international norms and that tacitly strengthen the hands of warlords and rogues. Although the United States signed the children’s rights convention in 1995 it has not ratified it. It thus stands alongside Somalia, a troubled state which lacks a functional government. The failure to ratify the convention makes the United States ineligible to sign the optional protocol. Yet the US delegation to the working group on the optional protocol has obstructed movement towards a universal standard of eighteen years as the minimum age of recruitment. Correcting this stance is a high priority.

 

Ending child soldiering, however, is the responsibility of all states and peoples. Adults have a moral duty to protect children, to stop the slaughter of children and to prevent the trampling of children’s rights. On the eve of a new millennium, it is appropriate to think about the future, to remember that children are our collective future and to take steps to end the exploitation of children in war.