Child Soldiers: Growth of an Economic Atrocity

Bass, Hayden, Kenny, Li

27 April 2015

Wheaton – Economics

Child Soldiers: Growth of an Economic Atrocity

The onset of global communication and technological integration across countries and cultures has given the practice of Child Soldiering a massive stage. Modernized, economically developed countries, which play a major role in the international community, have all been verbal on their official denouncement of this horrific form of abuse. However, international legislation has failed to cut out this method of child exploitation. In recent years, developing countries in the Sub-Saharan region of Africa have been entrenched in intra-state conflicts stemming from organized crime and other non-state actors. Armed conflict between local African governments and rebel militias has given way to a cycle of child enlistment and mental health ailments acquired after having survived, or escaped, the atrocities of war. Child soldiering takes a massive toll on the psychosocial tendencies of young boys and girls, as well as damaging their ability to work and attain a higher level of human capital. Though both international and domestic laws and regulations exist, they have done little to quell this ongoing problem.

There is perhaps no greater atrocity happening in the world today than the recruitment and usage of child soldiers. For citizens in Western nations, the practice of child soldiering is almost universally abhorred. However, in nations of armed conflict like Central African Republic, Chad, Somalia, Uganda, and the Sudan, where civil wars and the HIV/AIDS epidemic have decimated the adult population over the past thirty years, children are often regarded as an acceptable and even necessary element of human labor during warfare. Since 1991, when close to 70% of combatants in African conflict were under eighteen (Jarrett-Macauley, 9), communities have faced the challenge of reintegrating former underage combatants back into society, and repairing the psychological damage that comes from life as a child soldier. International humanitarian organizations like Save the Children Alliance and the International Committee of the Red Cross have worked to both hinder future child soldiering and rehabilitate former underage combatants for decades, but their labors have left little lasting effect. Cultural differences regarding what constitutes a child, lack of international action, poverty, and deep histories of violence, plague the effort to put an end to the military enlistment of children. When conflicts come to an end, the stressed mental health of the young war torn veterans that return continues to toll the society as well as the economy that adopt them. “Child soldiering is as old as warfare itself,” and the problem is unlikely to stop anytime in the near future (Francis, 208).

For citizens of the United States and other Western nations, the conscription of any person under the age of eighteen for military service is abundantly scoffed as unethical. A seventeen-year-old is considered a child, and therefore ineligible for combat. In many cultures, however, a person’s transition into adulthood takes place far earlier. Confusion regarding what age constitutes adulthood is especially complicated “in some African societies [where] the distinction is blurred between the adolescent age of 14 and upward” (Francis, 211). The concept that eighteen equals adulthood is a relatively recent notion globally however, and minimum age of enlistment was anything but regulated before the twentieth century. In WWI, for example, an estimated 250,000 men under the age of nineteen enlisted in the British military (Greg). Though the British government required a citizen to be eighteen-years-old to sign up for service, loose regulation, relaxed physical requirements, and societal pressure that celebrated patriotism led hundreds of thousands of children to slip through the system. The first true minimum age of enlistment under International Humanitarian Law came from Article 77.2 of the Geneva Convention in 1949. According to the Article, “parties to [a] conflict shall take all feasible measures in order that children who have not attained the age of fifteen years do not take a direct part in hostilities” (ICRC.com). The ambiguities of the term “feasible measures,” as well as a lack of acknowledgement by many nations currently, make the law difficult to enforce. Not to mention, fifteen years of age is hardly considered adulthood by present day standards. While advocates of the Straight-18 movement are attempting to enforce the “requirement that existing and competing definitions of childhood be abandoned in favor of a single international standard (Rosen, 296),” the likelihood that militias in hostile states will abide by the law is unlikely. Today, for countries ravaged with low life expectancy due to HIV/AIDS and civil war, premature coming of age is regarded as almost a necessity. In the United States, for example, the average citizen lifespan is 79.8 years of age, meaning American’s have statistically lived 22% of their lives by the time they reach adulthood on their eighteenth birthday. For a war torn country like Chad, where child soldiering is common and the average life span is fifty-one years, citizens reach this benchmark just after their eleventh birthday. Furthermore, of the 620 million sub-Saharan people of Africa, 51% of the overall population would be considered children by Western standards (Francis, 219). These states, consisting of mostly children, essentially depend on citizens to take on the responsibilities of adulthood far earlier than those of more well off nations. Nonetheless, the children that are recruited, be it voluntarily or involuntarily, are becoming pawns in what is arguably the most unethical form of human labor.

Whether the traditional age of adulthood is regarded as eleven or eighteen, younger soldiers are almost always more susceptible to mental health damage than their older peers. Posttraumatic stress disorder as well as depression has induced an epidemic of suicide amongst United States military veterans, and “there is no reason to believe that children are immune to the battlefield traumas that have affected adult combatants in all wars” (Rosen, 229). Furthermore, the young age at which child soldiers are conscripted greatly increases the likelihood that the underage combatant will be abused even after they are abducted. Studies on Ugandan child soldiers note that throughout their time as soldiers, the “majority of these youth are brutalized and cruelly abused by armed groups, and often forced to commit atrocities themselves” (Klasen, 1096). For states where the majority of the population is comprised of children, there is a desperate need for psychological intervention for former child combatants.