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Deseree Tuttle
Professor Presnell
English 1102
March 30, 2014
Child Soldiers
My junior year in high school my Human Geography teacher came into class and
said “I want to show you guys a video today”. She went to Youtube and found this specific video entitled Kony 2012. As I sat and watched this video, I was shocked, baffled,
and slightly confused. Why would someone want to use children as soldiers, I kept asking myself, they are just kids. When the video shut off, I sat there puzzled. I wanted to
know what more we could do, there had to be something to stop this man from taking
children and training them to be killers and sex slaves. I didn’t know much of anything
about child soldiers, but I knew I wanted to find out.
CHILD SOLDIER GENERAL
When I first began researching child soldiers, I really just wanted to zero in on Africa. Yet, the more I looked the more I realized so many more countries used child soldiers than I expected. I wanted to more and just plain out why they were being used,
due to the fact some kids aren’t kidnapped like Kony was doing, some voluntarily want
to do it.
There are over 3,00,000 child soldiers, nearly half of them girls, in over 41 countries around the world. The latest report by Save the Children gives an overview of why
countries are using children, both male and female. A child soldier is any person under
the age of 18 engaged in deadly violence (non-criminal) or "combat support" as part of a
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state armed force or non-state armed group by conscription (compulsory/obligatory military service), voluntary enlistment or forced recruitment. Apart from the direct combat,
children are used as spies, messengers, sentries, servants, porters, for laying and
clearing land mines, and in suicide missions. As for young girls, besides performing the
functions listed above, they act as sex slaves.
There are two major factors behind why children are preferred for soldiering. The
first being, recruiting and maintaining children is cost-effective. They eat less, wear less,
and are paid less. The expenditure on child soldiers is less than half of what is spent on
their adult counterparts. Yet, when it comes to work, fighting, carrying heavy war supplies, cooking, cleaning, etc., they are treated like adults. “The fearlessness and ignorance of children are manipulated to employ them on the most hazardous tasks.” Secondly, grooming children into soldiers is not difficult. They are highly motivated for one
reason or another. This being for the ones who are not taken from their homes and
forced to become soldiers. The Save the Children report stated children can be easily
intimidated and are most obedient. Of course they can, they are kids. I believe kids
aren’t meant to be fighters, they are still developing and growing. Killing, sex, and war,
does not need to be instilled in their brains right when they are practically able to walk.
AFRICA
This is where my interest of child soldiers sparked, the pits of Africa. Africa has
become the epicenter of the problem since about 1975. Estimates suggest that 120,000
children, 40 percent of all child soldiers, were being soldiering in Africa at the beginning
of the 21st century. East Asia and the Pacific ranked a distant second. Africa has experienced the fastest growth in the use of child soldiers. The average age of the children
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enlisted in some African countries is declining, from their teenage years to as low as 9
years old, which is quite disturbing. In many of these African countries children who escape the armies, or if they were abducted escape the rebels, when they return home
they are shunned from their community. They are considered killers and murderers.
This takes a toll on children psychologically.
- more on psychological state of kids
- war in Uganda
AROUND THE WORLD: MYANMAR
When I first began this project, I originally wanted to just focus on Africa. After
doing more research I found out that there are a lot more places besides Africa that use
child soldiers. One being, Myanmar. A man by the name of Jo Becker has spent more
than a decade documenting the use of child soldiers in Myanmar. He had interviewed
boys who were only 11 when they were forced to join the army. Myanmar’s government
flatly denied any use of children by its army, despite evidence that children were systematically recruited in large numbers. Authorities signed a formal UN agreement to release all children from the forces by the end of this year (2013), but the underground
trade of underage soldiers still remains a serious problem. Becker had interviewed
young soldiers who said recruiters received cash and bags of rice or cooking oil each
time they delivered a new recruit to the army. The longstanding trade in, and systematic abuse of, child soldiers in Myanmar will only end when the Myanmar military itself decides to change its culture and make it clear that it will effectively enforce its own laws.
That can’t happen as long as recruiters receive incentives for bringing in young boys
and receive just a slap on the wrist if they are caught. It’s shameful how these countries
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have laws against the use of child soldiers, yet when the army is recruiting children or
even just taking them, it is being brushed under the table to be dealt with later.
- use information on the UN
IN CONCLUSION
Child soldiering is something that is present all around the world. I believe children
should not be used to fight wars or do the duties some grown men can not even handle
doing. Although some children in certain countries do it as a patriotic gesture, it is still
the principle behind a child fighting behind enemy lines.
If you have a huge chunk of blue, add some red.
if you have a blue and a red, you need some green.
red= direct quotes
indirect= blue
source intro= green
“I”= yellow