Child Soldiers In The Civil War

We have all seen or read about the political and social upheavals caused by war. Some may have even experienced it first-hand. Throughout history war has had negative psychological implications on those effected. However, there is no greater negative impact of war than the psychological and emotional turmoil that it causes individual soldiers.

Wars take lots of things from the soldiers involved. Some things, more than others are more significant and meaningful to the soldiers daily lives. Many soldiers were drafted, and forced to go into the war whether they wanted to or not. They would leave nearly everything behind, but they would carry with them their memories, worries, and their innocence. Unfortunately, nearly every soldier would lose this innocence during their time at war.

Being involved in war will scar someone for the rest of their life. The novel A Long Way Gone shows the effect on children and how they lost their childhoods. Adult soldiers are too corrupted by the evils of war. When they come home they are not the same person. Many are diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. PTSD is a mental health condition that is causes by a terrible experience. One in five of the more than two million United States service members who have fought in either Iraq or Afghanistan have returned with symptoms of post-deployment syndrome.

Furthermore, the lack of proper rehabilitation or care programs post-war will also reflect the state of the nations. After the catastrophes of war have subsided, the affected areas are left in not only physical ruin, but also mental and emotional ruin. Child soldiers, who have been separated from their families, are stuck between not knowing if their other family members were

War is hard on anyone involved; however, it is especially hard on the children who are forced to live with it or in close proximity to it. Children typically lack the worldview to process the level of violence that occurs during war. The Nigerian children who were rescued from the refugee camp lived in extremely poor conditions and before arriving there were subjected to serious events that may change them forever. They are likely suffering from some severe psychological effects of war-time violence that need to be addressed in order to break the cycle of violence they may be in, but also to ensure their mental health both now and in the future. There are several aspects of psychological recovery that need to be

Already physically and emotionally defeated, they can’t seem to pick up their lives where they left off. Even in instances of supportive partners, the inevitable horrors of the war haunt them in sleep or come back to them in daydreaming. They all came back with multiple disorders, PTSD with the common symptoms. "The war was over and there was no place in particular to go" (131).

Imagine having to fight in a war you don’t want to fight in, seeing friends and family die all around you, but no matter how far you run you can never escape. Child soldiers in Sierra Leone do not have to imagine this - for them, it is reality. Ishmael Beah, who became a soldier at just age 12, as well as researchers such as Christophe Bayer, Fionna Klasen, Hubertus Adam know too well that the events in the war can never be forgotten. The story Beah told in his memoir A Long Way Gone captures the inhumane events that take place in Sierra Leone and tells of a story that many children have to endure. Sources like Harvard claim “among the 87 war-torn countries...300,000 - 500,000 children are involved with fighting forces as child soldiers.” Many of those children are being forced into the war without any choice at all and having to kill others as well. With this information we’re forced to ask the question: how are these children being affected by the war?

If those people offer help, support, love, and are selflessness child soldiers can return back to a normal society. In the book “ A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael

Imagine being forced out of your home with a gun to your back. All your muscles are tense making, sure that you don’t make the wrong move. Stepping out of your house, you see the people who invaded your home point a gun at your parents. You scream for them to stop, but they ignore you. You want to do something about it but your body won’t move. Tears roll down your eyes because you know what they're about to do. In a blink of an eye they do it. They kill your parents to make sure that you can never come back to your home. You’re now stuck in the war, someplace you never wanted to be. This is what happened to many child soldiers. They were taken out of their homes and forced into the war. During the war, commanders would force drugs into their

As with any victims of trauma, child soldiers experience post traumatic stress disorders, but they may also experience withdrawal if drugs were used to keep the child soldiers in line. In A Long Way Gone, Beah describes his experience with withdrawal: “My hands had begun to shake uncontrollably and my migraines had returned with a vengeance… No one paid any attention, as everyone was busy going through our own withdrawal stages in different ways” (140) and post traumatic stress disorder: “Whenever I turned on the tap water, all I could see was blood gushing out… Other times, the younger boys sat by rocks weeping and telling us that the rocks were their dead families” (145). The wounds these children gain might be physical as well, as children were often used to clear minefields or as cannon fodder (Child Soldiers

Children went into war as young as ten years old. Children usually went into war because of losing their father due to war. Tens of thousands of children lost their fathers in war. There were orphanages opened for children who lost their parents. These children went to war and did not care if they came back, if they had no parents there was no one to care for them. The children were usually drummer boys and were the first ones to get killed.

This is mainly because if these kids do not get enough help emotionally and physically after the war then they will be scarred for life and have super bad truma. Which can sometimes in the worst cases result in suicide and physical harm to themselves. A lot of the time the kids are not able to get the help that they need and this results in emotional problems. Studies show that only five percent of child soldiers get the help that is needed to get them back to being completely emotionally stable. Even though that not all of these children can get help it is important to try to help the ones that do make it out of the war because they deserve a chance at a civil life just as much as you and

In order for child soldiers to move on from their past life, they need

"The brothers, who escaped after one of them was brutally beaten for secretly calling his mother on a mobile phone, said they found it easier to adjust to the violent lifestyle after they took certain pills they were given. The drug might have been fenethylline (sold under the brand name Captagon), a stimulant popular with ISIS that fosters energy and feelings of strength and invincibility" (Marans 1). Warlords use drugs to make the child soldiers fight better so they have an edge over their enemies. The children aren't allowed any contact with their parents and there is even an example of a child soldier trying to call his mom and he was immediately beaten. The children are treated very poorly being beaten and even some died of starvation or thirst "Witnesses said the boys were trained and sent into battle, at times unarmed and often numbed with opiates. Many of the boys were beaten and some died of starvation or thirst, these people said. Their individual accounts couldn't be independently verified but are consistent with information gathered by researchers and military officials, both in terms of timing and specific details" (Witte, Raghavan, McAuley 1). The people responsible for taking the children from their family are not being punished so they continue recruiting children for their purposes. "In many camps, boys hardly old enough to hold guns were taught how to shoot. Thirteen-year-old Modu said that in his former camp, they practiced firing at planks of wood. Elsewhere, boys shot cows or goats. In Rachel's camp, older militants took young boys on trips into the countryside to rob herdsmen of their cattle. For even minor infractions, militants beat boys nearly unconscious, or denied them food and sleep for days, former captives say" (Hinshaw, Parkinson 1). This just proves that boys that can barely hold up a gun are already being trained at a young age to kill

Children recruited into the armed forces in these countries are forced by their commanders to commit atrocities against other soldiers and villagers. They may also suffer through punishments themselves. Commanders have been known to force their child recruits to witness and/or commit abuses against their own families or captured prisoners (“Coercion and Intimidation of Child Soldiers to Participate in Violence” 1). For instance, child soldiers recruited into Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army have been forced to tie their parents to trees and club them to death or be killed themselves (Taylor 1). Physical