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IRIN Web Special on child soldiers
I N T R O D U C T I O N - Continued
Former child soldiers at a transit camp in Bunia
Credit: IRIN
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The effects on children
Child soldiers are subject to ill treatment and sexual exploitation. They are often forced to commit terrible atrocities, and beaten or killed if they try to escape. They are subjected to brutal initiation and punishment rituals, hard labour, cruel training regimes and torture. Many are given drugs and alcohol to agitate them and make it easier to break down their psychological barriers to fighting or committing atrocities.
Some speak of having been forced to witness or commit atrocities, including rape and murder. Others speak of seeing friends and family killed. Susan, sixteen years of age, captures the brutalisation children suffer at the hands of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda in the following testimony:
"One boy tried to escape but he was caught. His hands were tied and then they made us, the other new captives, kill him with a stick. I felt sick. I knew this boy from before; we were from the same village. I refused to do it and they told me they would shoot me. They pointed a gun at me, so I had to do it… I see him in my dreams and he is saying I killed him for nothing, and I am crying."
Many child soldiers report psycho-social disturbances - from nightmares and angry aggression that is difficult to control to strongly anti-social behaviour and substance abuse - both during their involvement in war and after their return to civilian life.
For that reason, according to UNICEF, successful demobilisation and rehabilitation programmes not only involve taking the guns out of children's hands but finding ways to reunite and resettle the children with their families and communities, and provide for their psycho-social care and recovery.
The UN expressed particular concern early in 2003 about "horrendous episodes of terror and deprivation" against child soldiers in eastern DRC, northern Uganda, Liberia, Aceh province in Indonesia, Iraq and the occupied Palestine Territories.
Up to half of the world's child soldiers are in Africa, despite the entry into force - in 1999 - of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, the only regional treaty in the world that prohibits the use of child soldiers. The charter forbids member states to recruit or use children (anyone under 18 years) in a participatory role in any acts of war or internal conflicts.
Asia (especially Myanmar/Burma and Sri Lanka) is another area of particular concern.
Girls suffer particular hardship
Girls - especially orphans or unaccompanied girls - are especially vulnerable because they are often sexually exploited, raped or otherwise abused, subjected to human trafficking and prostitution, and forced to be 'wives' by other combatants. This, in turn, can result in physical and psychological trauma, unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases (including HIV/AIDS) and social stigmatisation.
In case studies from El Salvador, Ethiopia, and Uganda, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers has estimated that up to one-third of child soldiers in these countries were girls.
In most of the armed conflicts in Africa, girls are recruited by coercion (Angola, Uganda and Sierra Leone) and, although most girl soldiers are found in opposition groups, there are some government armed forces that recruit them. Their special needs are rarely provided for in disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programmes.
The particular needs of female child soldiers were emphasised in UN Security Council Resolution 1325, adopted in 2000, www.un-instraw.org  . This resolution reaffirmed that the international community had to pay special attention to women's particular vulnerability during war, given the appalling nature of systematic sexual abuse and the use of rape as a weapon of war in some modern conflicts.
In recent years, the International Criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia (ICTR and ICTY) have successfully prosecuted people for sexual violence and rape, and impunity for such crimes should be further eroded over time with the inclusion of grave forms of sexual violence (including rape, sexual slavery and enforced prostitution) as war crimes that fall within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Society pays a high price
Military recruitment is not only harmful to the children themselves but to societies as a whole. Children's lost years of schooling reduce societies' human and economic development potential. Many child soldiers grow up physically and psychologically scarred and prone to violence, increasing the danger of future cycles of conflict and damaging the chances of peaceful, stable democracy that are demonstrably linked to human and social well-being.
Though child soldiers have committed and continue to commit some terrible crimes in wartime, they are still entitled, as children, to special provision and protection. Somehow, the differing needs for justice and the reintegration in society of former child soldiers have to be accommodated. Children of sufficient age to be charged with criminal responsibility demand special procedures to take account of their youth and developmental state, while those under the age of criminal responsibility require appropriate measures to promote their psychological recovery and social reintegration.
Another issue that arises is the need for the rights of children to be protected in peace negotiations and treaties. After concern that certain amnesty measures have provided impunity for people who abused child soldiers, there has been a strong call from the UN Security Council that peace deals and amnesties should not extend, in any circumstances, to those who commit "egregious crimes" against children.
"Today's warfare… especially the exploitation, abuse and use of children, is nothing short of a process of self-destruction," according to Olara Otunnu. "This isn't a small matter. This goes to the very heart of whether or not… there is the promise of a future for these societies".
Continued 
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