Child Soldiers

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/rescued-boy-soldier-is-stoned-to-death-8612993.html

A child soldier is defined as someone under the age of 18 targeted for military practices. Every year, hundreds of thousands of children under the age of 18 are forcefully recruited to serve in government forces and armed rebel groups. Children are specifically targeted for these missions because of how uniquely vulnerable they are to military recruitment. Because of their emotional and physical immaturity, they are easy manipulated and can be drawn into violence that they are too young to understand or resist.

Children are usually involved in three distinct positions when they are recruited. Majority of the time, children are handed a gun and directly start out in combat, and are forced to start off in the front lines and enter dangerous environments in front of the older troops. There are different roles of the children as well, once recruited, children may serve in support roles such as cooks, caretakers, guards, messengers or spies. The third role of children in war is they can serve as political advantages either in propaganda or human shields. Some youth have been said to be involved with suicide missions.

To ensure that children cannot return home, the children are often forced to commit atrocities against their own family members and friends, such as killing or torturing them. This is used to break the bond between them and their community, so they are ostracized, and cannot go back. Because of this, if the possibility arises of them escaping, they have no place to turn back too and are orphaned. This results in children willingly staying recruited, because they have nothing left. Most children have not received an education from being involved in the war, so with no future prospects or plan for their life, they stay in the war simply because they have no other way of feeding themselves and creating a substantial way of living.

There is a huge demand for girls involved in war. There are said to be approximately

250 000 recruited child soldiers and it is said that about 40 percent of that number is said to be girls under the age of 18. Girls are often forcefully used as “wives” to the soldiers, and sex slaves with no method of contraception. This is another part of being a child soldier; it does not only refer to a child baring arms. If the girls ever manage to escape, when they return home the community members often ostracize them because they are pregnant by men from the rebel groups. It is difficult for girls in war because they are often used as objects for the men as opposed to participating in war. They considered useful, so they are degraded to an extreme extent.

 Africa is said to hold 50 percent of the children soldiers’ population. The most youth soldiers that are used in armed conflict in Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and Sudan. These children are considerered to be “invisible children”orphaned by AIDS, violence and war. Children as young as 6 years old are forced into armed conflict due to poverty, kidnapped, manipulated into joining and many are sold by their own parents in order to accumulate some sort of income for their family. They are often abudcted  from the comfort of their own homes  by rebel groups, in murderous killing  sprees in their villages.

 

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Many means of rehabilition for refugee child soldiers have been available. Children are direct participants in horrific and gruesome events in war. They are denied a childhood and a family and they often have no other place to turn to except for the charities involved in rehabilitation. One organization that is available for child soldiers is ‘War child”. This organization focuses on helping  reintegrate children back into society and education. They aim to remove military uniforms and replace them with school uniforms to teach the children the importance of education. One main focus for this organization is to rehabilitate girls in  Northern Uganda and Eastern Congo. The girl soldiers are often more marginalised and frowned upon than boys after they have escaped. The girls are often viewed as “damaged goods” by family and community members, especially after enduring sexual assualt and pregnancy.

Children soldiers seems to be a concept that isnt adressed very often and a lot of the time, people adress it as merely a child holding a gun, but there is so much more horror behind what these children have to endure. War is no place for a child.