Recruiting or using child soldiers

Children are uniquely vulnerable to military recruitment and manipulation into violence because they are innocent and impressionable. They are forced or enticed to join armed groups. Regardless of how they are recruited, child soldiers are victims, whose participation in conflict bears serious implications for their physical and emotional well-being. They are commonly subject to abuse and most of them witness death, killing, and sexual violence. Many participate in killings and most suffer serious long-term psychological consequences.

Fighting groups have developed brutal and sophisticated techniques to separate and isolate children from their communities. Children are often terrorized into obedience, consistently made to fear for their lives and well-being. They quickly recognize that absolute obedience is the only means to ensure survival. Sometimes they are compelled to participate in the killing of other children or family members, because it is understood by these groups that there is "no way back home" for children after they have committed such crimes. In an interview with United Nations staff in Liberia, a boy of 13 years admitted that he felt that he could not return to his family because he knew that his father would be angry with him for bringing men to the village who had raped and killed his mother in front of the whole family. He said that he had brought the men to the village because the commander had told him that he was going to be taken back to his family -- "after that the rebels became my family and I did everything to please my father [the commander]".

The considerable challenges in healing and reintegrating children into their communities in the aftermath of conflict is sometimes further compounded by severe addiction and dependency of children to hard drugs such as cocaine. In Sierra Leone, for instance, a volatile mixture of cocaine and gunpowder was often given to children to make them fearless in battle. And, because children are now also the instruments of brutality, sometimes committing the very worst atrocities, reintegration is often a complex process of community healing and atonement, and negotiation with families to accept their children back. All these dimensions of the experience of child combatants carry significant implications and challenges in terms of design and resources needs for psychosocial and other reintegration programming. The Paris Commitments and the Principles and Guidelines on Children Associated With Armed Forces or Armed Groups provide guidelines on the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of all categories of children associated with armed groups.

In 2000, the United Nations in Sierra Leone demobilized a boy, “Abou” who had been abducted by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) from his school in Kenema. He was only 11 years old at the time of his abduction. Four years later, by the age of 15, Abou had become a killer — a known and feared commander of the RUF rebels — one of the youngest. Abou, together with many other child soldiers, received amnesty for atrocities committed during the conflict in Sierra Leone. And although his community accepted Abou back, it was clear that many in the community were still afraid of and angry with the boy and he was quite isolated. Six months after being reunited with his family Abou disappeared. In 2003, Abou was among a number of children disarmed and demobilized in neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire. He told a story of leaving his community in Sierra Leone because he was “haunted by bad spirits”, and of being re-recruited to fight for the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rebels in Liberia. He later went as a mercenary to Côte d’Ivoire together with other LURD fighters. In an interview with United Nations staff, Abou explained, “I left because what I really know how to do is fight and be a soldier, but there is peace in Sierra Leone”.

Abou’s story illustrates a terrible tragedy: of the trauma of children and the communities that they have been forced to brutalize; of the tremendous challenges to successful healing and reintegration of children into communities in the aftermath of conflict; of the recycling of children into conflicts that shift rapidly across borders; and, of children and young people who take up lives as mercenary fighters because war has become one of the only viable economic options in many of the situations around the globe that have been ravaged by long periods of conflict. These are our children, on whom all hopes for the future are pinned.