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A study in Angola found boy soldiers' median age at recruitment was 13 to 14 years, and they spent an average of 3.8 years with an armed group. Seventy-seven percent had shot someone, 67 percent had lost family members or close friends to the war, 76 percent had seen people being killed, 29 percent had been wounded. Studies of other African wars found similar rates.
New wars are fought with light weapons—M16s or AK-47s, grenade tubes or shoulder-fired rocket launchers, suicide-bomber vests—that can be managed by a child. Many believe that children are ideal recruits. They can be easily dominated by older men, and their minds molded to foolish courage and unprincipled savagery. Many new armies use initiations that separate children from their old community, convincing them they can never go back. New soldiers may be forced to kill someone, even a parent or a sibling. Girls may be raped. In Angola, soldiers were forced to sing and dance all night for days on end. Deprived of sleep and rest, they could be easily manipulated.
Only the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka use females for the bulk of fighters. In most other wars, girls are combatants on a more occasional basis. Still, they are an integral part of the fighting force except in Islamic settings. They are used as porters, domestics, cooks and sexual slaves: "The nights were dreadful because we were there to be used by the soldiers. A soldier per night … . The lucky ones were those who were chosen by an officer who had a hut for them to live in and who protected them as his wives."
Most child soldiers come from rural and traditional societies, which may regard a 16-year-old as an adult ready to assume family responsibilities. Partly for that reason, attempts to eliminate child warfare through international laws that restrict ages of recruitment have had no noticeable impact. The United Nation's pathbreaking Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989)—ratified by almost every nation in the world, except the United States—has failed to protect children from war. Honwana argues that "the definition of childhood used in these treaties is idealistic and inappropriate to the social and economic conditions of these societies, even in peacetime." Further, the new wars are inherently lawless; the "coercive recruitment of underage male soldiers and the abduction and captivity of girls are defining features" of the way these militias make war. Honwana contends for a bottom-up approach: these laws "need to be well understood within the context of local worldviews and meaning systems so they are recognized, accepted, and enforced on the ground, where protection of children from armed conflict begins and ends."
Though these books are quite different, they all tell the same tale. Michael Wessells brings extensive experience with the Christian Children's Fund to provide a painstaking, scholarly overview of the global situation. Honwana, also academic in her orientation, focuses more narrowly on Mozambique and Angola, where she has spent considerable time. Jimmie Briggs writes a much more personal and popular account of his journalistic visits to five countries where he investigated the use of child soldiers.
All three have activists' hearts, but none of them offers a trumpet call to action. That is because none of them knows what to do about this scourge. Total wars that gorge on children grow in conditions of economic and social breakdown. The wars add to the breakdown, contributing to helplessness and desperation. Efforts by the UN, by foreign aid, by the many NGOs that serve in these places, make no great difference. Does anybody know how to fix the Congo, where millions die almost unnoticed in the ongoing scrum of undisciplined militias? Apparently not.
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