Small Soldiers
Why are children recruited?
Where does this happen?
What can be done about child soldiers?
Internationally:
In Canada
Where to find more information
Ten things you can do
Links to organizations seeking to protect child soldiers
To learn more about child soldiers, visit these sites:
If you were playing a word association game with your friends, or checking out an Internet message board, what do you think would come up for “soldier”?
- Canadian soldier?
- Coalition soldier?
- Buffalo soldier?
- Universal soldier?
- Dog soldier?
- Toy soldier?
Two children stand guard outside a looted shop
that serves as headquarters for child soldiers
in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Both girls and boys, as young as
seven years old, are recruited as child soldiers.
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Would you have thought of “child soldier”? Right now, more than 300,000 persons under the age of 18 are fighting in armed conflicts in over 30 countries worldwide. Most child soldiers are between 15 and 18 years old, but many are 10 years old or even younger. Both boys and girls are child soldiers. In fact, CIDA-funded research has found that girls are used in fighting forces far more widely and in more diverse roles than was previously thought.
Some children join armed forces to escape poverty, to find a new ‘family’ if they have been separated from their own through conflict, or to avenge a dead relative. There are many countries where children have simply picked up weapons and gone off to fight.
But many children become soldiers after being kidnapped by rebel forces. Some are used to carry supplies and act as messengers, lookouts, or servants for their captors. Some are driven onto minefields to find buried explosives by stepping on them. In a technique used by groups such as the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, a village is raided at night and children are terrorized and forced into killing friends and relatives.
All these children, whether slaves or despairing killers, experience unforgettable violence. Desertion, failure to obey, or mistakes are punished severely. During training regimes, children are frequently injured and sometimes killed. Daylight and darkness are full of nightmares.
“I’ve seen people get their hands cut off, a 10-year-old girl raped and then die, and so many men and women burned alive... So many times I just cried inside my heart because I didn’t dare cry out loud.”
14-year-old girl, abducted in January 1999 by the Revolutionary United Front, a rebel group in Sierra Leone
Source: Human Rights Watch
 Why are children recruited?
Because children are smaller and physically not as strong as adults, they can be intimidated more easily than grownup recruits. They eat less than adults and are cheaper to have around. The widespread availability of cheap, lightweight automatic weapons means that strength is no longer a prerequisite for combat: even a 9-year-old can shoulder an AK-47.
The smallest boys and girls are usually placed closest to the enemy as they are the most expendable. Drugs are often forced on captive children to help them overcome their fear and reluctance to fight and to numb them to their involvement in atrocities.
Where does this happen?
Approximately half of the members
of the armed groups in eastern
Democratic Republic of Congo
are child soldiers.
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Child soldiers are being used in more than 30 countries around the world. The use of children as soldiers on such a large scale is a phenomenon that emerged during the conflicts of the 1990s. The problem is most critical in Africa and Asia, though governments and armed groups in the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East also use children as soldiers.
There are more than 30 active wars in the world today, many of them civil wars. These conflicts are fought for the same reasons as the wars of hundreds of years ago: for power, over land or other resources, over people’s rights, over ethnic, religious or racial differences. Natural environments have become degraded, limiting resources and the chance to make a living for growing populations. While globalization presents more economic opportunities, it also increases the gap between rich and poor. All of these situations augment tensions and weapons like the AK-47 are cheap and easy to get.
What’s different in today’s wars is that the majority, up to 90 percent of those killed are civilians, rather than soldiers. Half of those civilians are children.
What can be done about child soldiers?
“I don’t see how we can make treaties on weapons and on prevention of war, and we can create an international court, yet not move in a cultural sense to develop repugnance about children as combatants.”
Lieutenant-General (Retired) Roméo A. Dallaire, Special Advisor on War-affected Children to CIDA and to the Minister of International Cooperation, quoted in Forced Migration Review, Issue 15 (Oct. 2002).
Consult http://www.fmreview.org
Because of their vulnerability, child soldiers suffer higher casualties than adults. Think of small boys and girls in the front lines. They may be left physically or psychologically scarred after the war is over, or once they have escaped their captors. Trying to fit into society afterwards is very difficult, as these children often have no education or job training, and may no longer be welcome in their home communities. Knowing only war, former child soldiers can be easily re-recruited, or become criminals.
There are a number of efforts underway to stop the use of children as soldiers:
Internationally:
- The new International Criminal Court will treat the use of child soldiers as a war crime.
- The International Labour Organization (ILO) has defined child soldiering as one of the worst forms of child labour.
- The United Nations (UN) Security Council, the UN General Assembly, the UN Commission on Human Rights, the African Union, the Organization of American States and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, have all condemned this abuse.
Increasingly, governments around the world are raising the age of military recruitment to 18. This is now the minimum age for UN peacekeepers. In February 2002, the UN recognized the need to increase the protection of children in its Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict. This Protocol also endorses 18 as the minimum age for combatants.
An important means of breaking the cycle of child recruitment is to reintegrate them into society. CIDA gives financial support to programs of the World Bank, several UN agencies, and other non-governmental organizations, to demobilize and reintegrate child soldiers
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The Convention on the Rights of the Child puts children's rights on the world's agenda; it is the most widely ratified treaty in the world. Adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on November 20, 1989, the Convention and its Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (2002) promises children around the world the right to protection in armed conflict, in addition to many other fundamental protections. Despite the Convention's near-universal ratification, children are still denied their human rights.
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In Canada
Where there are wars, there are children, sometimes as combatants, always as victims. In September 2000, CIDA and the Department of Foreign Affairs jointly hosted The International Conference on War-affected Children. The conference was the first global meeting on war-affected children, and it succeeded in galvanizing the international community on the issue of children and armed conflict. A number of former child soldiers and other youth affected by war attended the conference as delegates and youth played an important role in the deliberations that took place. They took part in the Experts and Ministerial-level meetings and set a good example for youth engagement for other international conferences.
A year later, CIDA launched its Action Plan on Child Protection. The plan outlines the Agency’s programs over a five-year period for children in need of special protection measures. It has a strategic focus on supporting children in every phase of armed conflict, plus other children at risk such as child labourers, street kids, disabled children, children facing discrimination due to their ethnic or religious identity, sexually exploited children, and children in conflict with the law or in institutional care. Over the five-year period, CIDA has set aside $122 million to address these issues.
Additionally, through its Peacebuilding Fund, CIDA supports conflict prevention and conflict resolution initiatives in various countries, including Uganda and Sierra Leone. The fund also supports the disarmament, demobilization, and rehabilitation of children as well as providing support to elections and police reform. In Somalia, CIDA supports the reintegration of child soldiers by providing them with access to vocational training, conflict-resolution skills and psycho-social counselling. In Angola, CIDA supports community-based and non-governmental organizations to provide basic school facilities for war-affected children.
Through its Youth Participation Pilot Projects, CIDA works with war-affected children in Kosovo, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sri Lanka, and Mozambique on a number of different issues such as teacher training, rehabilitation of former child soldiers, formal education, life skills, psycho-social support, and child rights.
Where to find more information
Ten things you can do
Links to organizations seeking to protect child soldiers
The Watchlist is a network of non-governmental organizations working
to protect the security and rights of children in armed conflicts. The site has news and country reports on children in armed conflict.
The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers provides information on child soldier news, appeals, and international laws and standards. There are several publications and documents available as well.
To learn more about child soldiers, visit these sites:
Government of Canada site on War-affected Children
Canadian Peacebuilding Coordination Committee's Children and Armed Conflict Working Group
Human Rights Watch
Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers
United Nations CyberSchoolBus
Center for Defense Information
Project Ploughshares Armed Conflict Report
IRIN Web Special on Child Soldiers
Office of the Special Representative on Children and Armed Conflict
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