Up until about 2000, or shortly after, when CIDA started funding work on girl soldiers, the girls were totally neglected in the international eye. That means that people did not acknowledge that they existed. The consequence of that is that they have been left out of DDR, which is the demobilization, disarmament and rehabilitation/reintegration processes, which have focused almost totally on boys and men—sometimes women, but they have also been marginalized. Girls have been left to fend for themselves. And these girls, as well as the boys, are the future generation who will be leading this country. So many have been involved in the fighting in these armed opposition battles in the countries where I have worked, which are Mozambique, Sierra Leone and northern Uganda, that it undermines the society and its development—to have these children subjected to so much trauma and then not even acknowledge that they exist, which has been the case especially with girls. In the last five years, I’d say even four years, the international awareness that girls are present in fighting forces has increased a great deal.

I think there has been a real emphasis in the last year or two on prevention. There is going to be a meeting in Winnipeg in August that is going to be dealing with that. I haven’t been involved in that so much, except to try and think through some of the ways that prevention might occur. It’s very difficult because if you think about the countries where I have worked, for the most part the girls and boys have been abducted into the fighting force. And they have been abducted from places that theoretically should be safe for children, such as schools, which is a primary place, marketplaces and directly out of their homes, or walking down the road to get water. So you start thinking about the difficulty of preventing that kind of abduction from occurring, because you can’t shut everybody up and guard them. And so prevention, which is extremely important, is also extraordinarily difficult from my perspective.


Number of Child Soldiers

The commonly used number of child soldiers, globally, is 300,000. From everything I understand, that is kind of a made-up number. When I first started my research in 2000, I asked some people at UNICEF, who were very knowledgeable, about the 300,000 number. And what they told me was, “Well, it was just kind of taken from here and here.” I’ve been concerned recently, because I think that now that the awareness of girls has increased, there is also a tendency to create a number out of nothing. I’ve read in a couple of places in the last year that 40 percent of child soldiers are girls. Well, we don’t know that. What has happened further is that some people—not very many and I’m hoping it won’t continue—but some people have taken that 300,000 number and then figured that 40 percent of that is 120,000; therefore, we have 120,000 girl soldiers. We absolutely don’t know that.

I spent some time talking the other night with colleagues from Angola who really know the situation, including Vivi Stavrou, who knows the situation of girl soldiers in Angola. They said that even in the context of Angola, where they have done so much study, it would be almost impossible to put a number on it because in some places, every child was involved in the conflict in some way. In other parts of the country, or in certain families, some children were exempt, while others weren’t. So trying to put a number on it is difficult even when you know the context, let alone to generalize. I think probably some of the reason for that is to raise awareness, but as hyperbole. And I think there can be some backlash from that hyperbole, where we don’t realistically gauge what we need to do and where we need to work. In some fighting forces, few girls are used. In some fighting forces, girls are not abducted at all. In many government militaries and certain liberation movements, the girls join—they want to be a part of that. Their problems really occur more after the fighting stops, when they try to reintegrate into a society which doesn’t know what to do with strong, independent women who have been in a fighting force for a long period of time and are used to a lot of agency [ed. power]. 

But back to the original question about what we should do. I think it’s time that we started developing really rigorous epidemiologic, population-based studies. A little bit of that has been done, which is very significant and important work, in war zones. It’s hard to do that in war zones because it’s very dangerous. But it has been done. Even in Iraq, there is a very well done study that was population-based, and I think that’s the kind of work that needs to be done to get more accuracy in some of the data that we have. We have lots of qualitative work, like interviews and discussions with people. That’s the kind of work I did too, and I kept thinking, “We need more data.” But it needs to be epidemiologic data, and public health people are very well equipped to do that kind of work.


Importance of Community Involvement

Girls exist in fighting forces—it’s not very widespread, even though I don’t want to say a percentage—and they are suffering a great deal. There are not adequate international initiatives on their behalf, although some governments are starting to help, for example in schooling. They really need to be recognized as present, and recognizing their presence means that when they leave a fighting force, they get systematic assistance. The problem is that you have girls coming out of a fighting force that need assistance, and you have people who are very impacted in the communities the girls came from that need assistance too. So one of the areas that is being developed, and I think it’s really important, is not to target girl soldiers as a separate vulnerable group apart from other girls in a community. They all need help, and programming should be developed at community levels to work with them. We have to recognize that the children are traumatized. The girls are traumatized, as are the women, the men, and the boys.

We have to think about solutions—and by “we” I don’t mean Western people so much as people who are working in the communities, in tandem with, for example, non-governmental organizations: helping communities to become empowered and know how they can help themselves as well as the girls and boys that are child soldiers. These societies—most of the societies where I work in Africa but also, I would say, in general internationally—are very community oriented rather than individualist. So the solution is not to do individual psychotherapy, which is ridiculous because it’s not possible, but it’s to work with communities to help them gain strength so that all the members in the community, including those child soldiers, can be helped. I think that’s rather foreign to the Western notion of individualism, but we have to do the work differently in most of the settings where child soldiers are.

Where the NGOs have gone in and worked with the communities—and I do mean working with them, interacting with the community leaders, finding out ways to get the community involved, but letting the decision making come from the community—that’s the best way to do it. There were many projects that were superb that I went to, and other communities where that work hadn’t been done yet, because NGOs can’t even start to deal with all the communities that need assistance. But there were projects, for example sexual violence projects, that involved all girls that had been raped or experienced sexual violence. Maybe it happened even in their own community. And these committees were set up by members in the community to work with the girls and help them heal. That’s one example. Other communities, with the help of NGOs, had set up vocational training programs, where the girls (there were programs for boys too, but I’m talking mainly about girls) were learning tie-dying and soap-making. The main problem with some of those programs is that they tend to be discriminatory by gender, and often when the girl has finished the program there may not be any work for her. Whereas in the construction trades, if she would learn plumbing, carpentry and welding, she might have a much better chance to get some kind of work. But that takes a brave girl to enter a male-dominated field.