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Slavery And Servitude World History

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Marialaina Carter
Dr. Sinegal-Decuir
Slavery and Servitude World History
March 15, 2015

The One In Front of the Gun

According to the Webster dictionary, a warrior is “a person who fights in battles and is

known for having courage and skills.” Skill is attained through the repetitious performance of a particular act that can be further developed by means of an apprenticeship or cognitive reading. When the word warrior is merged with child, many humanitarian and educational boundaries are crossed because an adolescent’s mental and physical capacity, by no means, are suitable for the acquisition of the intense psychological and physical skills required for armed defense. A weapon has the power of severing a human to the point of his …show more content…

As a result of the extreme upbringing within the realm of combat, child soldiers tend to “fall within the messy, ambiguous, paradoxical zones of all three: [extreme victims, extreme perpetrators, and extreme heroes]” (Denov 2).
A child is an extreme victim because one day he or she may be sharing a meal with his or her family and the next day becomes branded by the emblem of guerrilla warfare. He or she is a perpetrator because, once the child is handed the gun and learns how to use it, the power rests in his or her hands. And, finally, the child is a hero fighting for a cause that is mostly likely incomprehensible to his or her developing intellect and is ready to die for the sake of its duration and influence. All three of these positions can be wrapped into a sphere of extremity because there is always one goal emphasized through a glorified, tunnel vision: to kill or be killed. Most concisely, a child soldier can be defined as a slave because he or she, upon initiation, has offered to the recruiter an oath of obedience and, unknowingly and without will, the opportunity for the recruiter to manipulate his or her mind under a system of pure, unyielding weaponry. As a form of modern slavery, the forced recruitment of child soldiers is congruent with the notion that slaves are considered property. An armed child is only a free pawn in the war for the rise of some political message. For

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