The Contemporary Child Solider
Professor Anne Farina
International Child Welfare
George Warren Brown School of Social Work
Washington University in Saint Louis
Introduction
In the contemporary battlefield of today, child soldiers are becoming normalized in the majority of conflicts. Motivations for child recruitment include children’s limited ability to assess risks, feelings of invulnerability, and shortsightedness. Child soldiers are more often killed or injured than adult soldiers on the front line. They are less costly for the respective group or organization than adult recruits, because they receive fewer resources, including less and smaller weapons and equipment. From a different perspective, becoming a fighter may seem an attractive possibility for children and adolescents who are facing poverty, starvation, unemployment, and ethnic or political persecution. In our interviews, former child soldiers and commanders alike reported that children are more malleable and adaptable. Thus, they are easier to indoctrinate, as their moral development is not yet completed and they tend …show more content…
Not only do the survivors have suffer from extensive trauma also the community has changed and has to adapt to the challenge. Reintegration is an integral part of the healing process, however attitudes of host communities to perpetrators of armed conflict are often viewed very negatively. Due to civil war and strife, armed conflicts have decimated communities and the local level, and where before cultural mechanisms would be in place to serve and heal returning child survivors are no more. In places and communes such as this reintegration is often one of the hardest challenges for both the individual and the community itself. Even today, communities across the contemporary still lack the structures in place to adequately reintegrate child soldiers and their host
Professor Anne Farina
International Child Welfare
George Warren Brown School of Social Work
Washington University in Saint Louis
Introduction
In the contemporary battlefield of today, child soldiers are becoming normalized in the majority of conflicts. Motivations for child recruitment include children’s limited ability to assess risks, feelings of invulnerability, and shortsightedness. Child soldiers are more often killed or injured than adult soldiers on the front line. They are less costly for the respective group or organization than adult recruits, because they receive fewer resources, including less and smaller weapons and equipment. From a different perspective, becoming a fighter may seem an attractive possibility for children and adolescents who are facing poverty, starvation, unemployment, and ethnic or political persecution. In our interviews, former child soldiers and commanders alike reported that children are more malleable and adaptable. Thus, they are easier to indoctrinate, as their moral development is not yet completed and they tend …show more content…
Not only do the survivors have suffer from extensive trauma also the community has changed and has to adapt to the challenge. Reintegration is an integral part of the healing process, however attitudes of host communities to perpetrators of armed conflict are often viewed very negatively. Due to civil war and strife, armed conflicts have decimated communities and the local level, and where before cultural mechanisms would be in place to serve and heal returning child survivors are no more. In places and communes such as this reintegration is often one of the hardest challenges for both the individual and the community itself. Even today, communities across the contemporary still lack the structures in place to adequately reintegrate child soldiers and their host