Should Child Soldiers Be Treated As Victims

A very controversial topic is child soldiers and should they be punished for their actions or be treated as victims. While you may think that if a 15 or 16 year old wants to fight why would they be treated as victims, but it isn’t just teenagers. It’s kids as young as 6, and these kids are being forced to join. They are being drugged and threatened. I think these kids are victims because they are punished as adults for doing things they don’t understand as kids, children are easily manipulated to doing things they don’t understand, and they are being forced to fight bying being threatened by drugs and even death.

My first reason why kids should be treated as victims is they are later in life being punished for killing. In the article “Should child soldiers be prosecuted for their crimes?” It states that kids after their crimes of killing the kids are being arrested later as …show more content…
While you might say that these kids volunteer you would be right, but what a lot of people don’t know is that these kids are being taken from their homes and tortured to the point where it’s fight or be killed. These adults are threatening these kids with cutting off their feet and their hand. This is from an anonymous source that used to work with them. She explained that they drugged kids and even went as far as cutting off limbs and in extreme cases death. While you my think it’s just a scare tactic you would be wrong as they actually do go through with these things. Since kids get so scared of getting tortured that they willingly just join to avoid all of the torture. Sadly it has come down to fight or die.

In conclusion, I think these kids that are forced to fight in the war are victims. Even though they have killed people they had a good reason to. This is because they are being forced to fight, they are being manipulated to think fighting is ok, and finally they don't fully understand what they are doing by killing these