Child Soldiery Epidemic

As this quote from Riyad Al-Najem states, “In some areas the main reason of child recruitment is poverty, parents can’t find food for their kids, so they push them into armed groups to get money and food.” (PBS 2016) This shows how through being poor extra income is needed to have a good life. Other children are fighting because they have nothing to make money and no one to give them food and provide necessities. A boy named Charlie who was highlighted in an article by NPR interviewing Alexandra Zavis, “....his only source of income was a stall that was attacked and destroyed when his town was invaded by rebel troops about a year ago. And he made the decision to join the same rebels that had destroyed his livelihood because he needed a way to survive.”(NPR 2014) As you can now clearly see when nothing is left for you to live you are almost needed to find a way to make money and for these kids, it is through war. One kid also was fighting to provide yet again, this becomes especially evident when he says, “... I would be beaten up by people my age who were part of the Al Shabab… They made me want to join the TFG so I can defend myself.”(The New York Times 2010) As you can see all kids want to do is provide, and they sometimes choose the only option, and this is one of the main reasons why the world is still teeming with child

“Youth are a vital site for understanding nation and globalization.” (Shepler, Youthscapes, p. 122) One of the topic is child soldiers. Some people believe that child soldier is just a tragedy of wars. However, “understanding the war as a crisis of youth does not mean just understanding RUF rebels and their reasons for revolt. We must strive to understand the situation of a whole generation defined by political and economic disenfranchisement.” (Shepler, Youthscapes, p. 125) In A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beach was joined the rebel to “avenge the deaths of (my) family and to survive.” (Beach, A Long Way Gone, p.199) Similar to Ishmael, “some children joined the rebels as a means of assuring their own survival.” (Shepler, Youthscapes, p. 124) However, there are many causes beside the survival. To find out whether the use of child solider will end any time soon, identify the causes of child solider is essential.

Every day, thousands of children around the world wake up in the morning, grab their shoes and backpacks and head to school. Thousands of other children pick up their AK-47s and head to battle. The issue of child soldiers is as complex as it is atrocious, and its heinous nature has prompted the international community to pour vast amounts of time and resources into finding a solution. Despite humanitarian and government organizations’ best efforts, the numbers have remained relatively static over the decades, with over 300,000 underage combatants worldwide (Vautravers 96). Many scholars have declared the U.N.’s current policy as a failure and offered up proposals of their own, ranging from placement of sanctions to international

My name is Abida and I am a student at Wayzata West Middle School. Imagine you, an innocent five year old, playing on the soccer field. Then, in an instant, you are blindfolded, and you feel hands on your back. You have been taken, no abducted. There is something heavy placed in your hand. It's a gun. A booming voice commands you, “Shoot,”. So, fearfully you do. You had killed your best friend that day. Fromm them on out, you are a spy, endure the worst physical torture, and are even sent out on the first lines of war. There are currently thirteen countries that use over 33 thousand child soldiers. Children as young as four can be apart of the military. Many of the children have been forced to join or join as a last resort. After these children

A. Over 250,000 children are being used as soldiers for warfare. Many of them are under the age of 18, the minimum age for recruitment of soldiers. Over 20,000 children were abducted from their families and communities. There are still many groups yet to be known. As a child soldier, you are forced to torture others, be tortured, and be sexually assaulted. Even as normal children, they are too immature to realize the rights and wrongs of their actions; therefore they are easier to manipulate. In these armies and conflicts, over 2 million children have died, 4-5 million are left disabled, and 12 million are left homeless and separated from their families. Millions of these children have been abducted or have joined for the promise of food and shelter/protection.

Child soldiers may generally be considered as victims of war because of their vulnerability and the inability to understand their actions3. Given that children are the future of the world, international law has developed an important number of legal framework concerning the prohibition of recruitment of child soldiers, either in the field of general international human rights law, or in international humanitarian law (IHL). Moreover, the international criminal law has also focused on accountability of persons who have recruited or used child soldiers. However, although often seen as victims, child soldiers have voluntarily perpetrated atrocious crimes. They have committed rape, murder and other gross human rights violations in the course of wars in place like Sierra Leone ,Uganda and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This leads us to wonder whether child soldiers should be criminally responsible for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. The position of the international criminal courts regarding this question is divergent whereas there is possibility to prosecute child soldiers in certain domestic laws, for instance in the USA, DRC and Rwanda. In this respect, we have to analyse the legal framework of the international protection of child soldiers on the one hand (I), and to examine the possibility to prosecute child soldiers on the other hand

One of the worlds major humanitarian problems is the use of children as soldiers. Predominantly seen in African countries, the use of these children as soldiers has and will keep changing millions of lives for the worse.

Throughout the course of history, children have been used to do a variety of tasks, from watching their brothers and sisters at home to fighting in wars. Although it seems surprising and unheard of, it is estimated that there are as many as 300,000 child soldiers in the world today. These statistics may seem alarming to you, but that is just a fraction of how many children in general are being exploited as we speak.

There is an estimated 300,000 active child soldiers today, not including the nearly half a million children who serve in armies not in active war. 40% of the world’s armed organizations have children in their ranks. (1) According to the 2004 Global Report of the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, between the years 2001 to 2004 Burundi, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Myanmar, and Uganda were the sources to the majority abundance of child soldiers in the world. (2)

They conclude that psychological trauma and social dislocation are the major consequences of child soldiering. But these studies seldom address impacts other than social/psychological and are often anectotal. They seldom use representative samples or address attrition, selection bias or micro-level impacts. Economists and political scientists have produced little theory or evidence on the economic and political consequences of violent conflict.

In the last decade child soldiering has extended over a large portion of the world. Restrained access to schooling, food and lack of income causes emotional problems. Not only do children have to witness their parents and families being killed but they are also raped, beaten and go through things adolescents should not go through. Being a child a soldier has a negative impact on the child. Separated from their families, facing psychological problems and being brain washed are all issues child soldiers have to face before they even reach puberty. A Child Soldier is under the age of eighteen and can be male or female. Similar to gangs some children leave school because they were lured and promised of a better life. While some children willingly join because they have no other option others don’t voluntarily join; they are abducted by subjection from parents and are used as human shields. Parents are killed by their own children and are nearly threatened and ordered by rebels. Children have to kill their families, or the rebels will harm the children. Parents tell their children to follow the rebel’s instructions to ensure that their children will live because they know pressure brought upon their children so they tell them to do as the rebels say even if it means killing them. The love of the parents is so strong because they risk their own lives by trying to persuade or bribe rebels not to take their children. Parents are outnumbered by rebels and can’t help their children if

A widely misunderstood concept of human security is the existence of child soldiers. Child soldiers are what the United Nations and other international organizations refer to as any person below 18 years of age who is “associated with an armed force or armed group.” They have been recruited or used by an armed force or group in any capacity, including but not limited to being employed as fighters, cooks, porters, messengers, spies or for sexual purposes. It does not only refer to a child who is taking or has taken a direct part in hostilities.”

An cause of child soldiers is they are used as instruments of war, boys are trained in combat and young girls are forced into marriage and more.Children don’t require much food. And even little children can be trained to operate lightweight modern weapons. They are easily controlled b their commanders. After all that children have been thru they can end up dead because they couldn’t have a normal life. “These children may find themselves outcast in their communities especially the girls because they return from conflict with children from being raped” (Child

For most of human history, war has generally been conceptualized as a domain of adults in uniform. However, in the past decades, a disturbing trend has surfaced – children, both boys and girls, are increasingly taking up arms. While this is not an entirely new attribute of warfare, the use of child soldiers in history has been an exception and not a regular feature as it appears to be today. According to international law, a child soldier is defined as any individual who is aged below eighteen and part of an armed organization. A conservative estimate of the number of child combatants stands at 300,000 and this excludes the other half a million children who perform non-combat duties in the army. Approximately 75 percent of armed conflict in the world involves children fighters. The worrying situation is best expressed by Peter W. Singer: “Children, as young as 6 and 7 years old, are serving as combatants on every continent but Antarctica.” Given these statistics, one can speculate that there may actually be underlying military advantages in using children to fight wars, and this is exploited by those who employ them. This is the premise which I base my research on. Adopting the understanding that

During the last 30 years, It is clear that, thousands and lakhs of children, many under the age of 11, have been joined into armies around the world. in country like Liberia, children was found as young as seven have been in battle, in Cambodia, a survey tells the wounded soldiers found in the war places, more than 20 percent are age between 11 to 15. when they were recruited In Sri Lanka, most of the Tamil Tigers, who killed by the Sinhalese military attack, more than half were still in their teenagers, and some were girls. According to a survey the number of child soldiers worldwide between 2 lakhs to 3