CHILD SOLDIERS, A NATIONAL CANKER!

A feature by: Vida-Pearl Atakpa
Social Trafficking Child
The Issue of Child Trafficking in Africa

The use of children as soldiers in armed conflict is among the most morally repugnant practices in the world, Children are combatants in nearly three-quarters of the world's conflicts and have posed difficult dilemmas for the professional armies they confront, including the United States.
Yet moral reasons aside, compelling strategic arguments exist for limiting the use of child soldiers. When conflicts involving children end, experts say the prospects for a lasting peace are hurt by large populations of psychologically scarred, demobilized child soldiers. Parts of Africa, Asia, and South America risk long-term instability as generations of youth are sucked into ongoing wars.
The United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) defines child soldiers as "any child—boy or girl—under eighteen years of age, who is part of any kind of regular or irregular armed force or armed group in any capacity."
This age limit is relatively new, established prior to 2002, fifteen years is set as the minimum age for participation in armed conflict. While some debate exists over varying cultural standards of maturity, nearly 80 percent of conflicts involving child soldiers include combatants below the age of fifteen, with some as young as seven or eight.
Approximately 300,000 children are believed to be combatants in some thirty conflicts worldwide. Nearly half a million additional children serve in armies not currently at war, such that 40 percent of the world's armed organizations have children in their ranks.
“Child soldiers are trusting, vulnerable, and often intimidated, they can easily be manipulated,” experts say. In combat, children can be daring and tenacious, particularly when under the influence of drugs a common practice or when compelled by political or religious zeal.
Child units can greatly add to confusion on battlefields, slowing opposing forces' progress. Children have also been used as scouts, messengers, minesweepers, bomb-makers, and suicide bombers. Child units are also effectively used as advance troops in ambush attacks.
About 30 percent of armed groups using children include girls. In addition to fighting, girls are often subjected to sexual abuse, and in some cases are taken as mistresses by army leaders.
Human Rights Watch reports having interviewed girls who were impregnated by their commanders, then forced into combat with their babies strapped to their backs.
Child combatants have been found on battlefields throughout history. Perhaps the most notable example is the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth) in the closing days of World War II. What is new is the extent to which children can be found on the modern battlefield.
Several factors have led to this rise. First, children in modern conflict zones are more easily recruited as the social structures around them deteriorate. This is particularly the case in long, protracted conflicts and in parts of Africa, where the AIDS epidemic will have created 40 million orphans by 2010.
As soldiers, children often witness or commit horrifying atrocities including rape, beheadings, amputations, and burning people alive. Those who are fortunate enough to survive their military experience are often left with severe mental health problems. Furthermore, they often lack basic survival skills, as the armies using them provide food and shelter. Various human rights groups have set up programs to help rehabilitate demobilized child soldiers, but they can only do so much, says Victoria Forbes Adams of the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers with the entire generations of scarred children heightening the chances of recurring conflict, Adams says more long-term analysis of these programs is needed.
The most effective way to stop the use of child soldiers however is to end the conflicts in which they fight. "Child soldiers will be used by warring parties for as long as the war continues. There must be a political solution," says the International Crisis Group's Senior Adviser John Prendergast.
Beyond this, there are few viable strategies. Efforts to limit the proliferation of small arms have been ineffective, and as Adams points out, "That wouldn't tackle the issue of children who don't have to carry a gun." Governments have responded to both advocacy and the threat of sanctions. As a result, governments rarely include children in their armies. However, government forces are often aligned with militias who do enlist children.
Preventing the use of children by militias and opposition forces is a true challenge, as these groups rarely respond to advocacy and imposing sanctions on them is quite difficult. One approach is prosecution. The International Criminal Court (ICC) recently issued arrest warrants for leaders in Uganda. Though this is taking place after the fact, it may set a precedent for future recruiters of child soldiers.
The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers worked to prevent the recruitment and use of children as soldiers, to secure their demobilization and to ensure their rehabilitation and reintegration into society. Trafficking of children in West Africa is widespread and increasing. The countries involved include Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Benin, Gabon, Ghana, Togo, Nigeria, Niger, and Burkina Faso.
Boys and girls, as young as seven, are trafficked, primarily for their labour. The journeys involved can be dangerous and there have been reports of children dying along the route, particularly when traveling by sea in unseaworthy vessels. The children are smuggled both within national boundaries and across international frontiers, sometimes with the collaboration of border guards.
Poverty is central to why parents send their children to work. The prospect of good wages in a wealthier country, such as Gabon or Côte d'Ivoire, seems an acceptable option. But the realities of what most of these children have to face along the route and once they reach their destination are not widely known. Although many of those who are trafficked ultimately do not earn the money promised and the conditions in which they are forced to live and work range from basic to brutal, the reality of one less mouth to feed for a poor household makes a significant difference.
The lure of well-paid work not only attracts parents, but in some cases children go to 'recruiters' themselves, often believing that they will have a good job in the city. However, a recent UNICEF report found that only 13 per cent of these children went willingly.
Apart from the dangerous journey which most of these children face, they are forced to work long hours in harsh conditions. Their working hours, regardless of age and sex, range from ten to 20 hours per day, up to seven days a week, without any time for rest, recreation or education. Basic food, health, sanitation and clothing requirements are not met, and sometimes they are not paid. In addition, they face beatings and other forms of physical abuse from their employer and, particularly in the case of child domestics, are at risk of sexual exploitation by the family employing them. A significant number run away, but unable to return home or find alternative employment, they resort to prostitution to earn a living.
Because traffickers frequently come from the same region as the children whom they recruit, it is easier for this practice to be hidden as they may know the families and the area. If arrested by police at the border it is not unusual for parents to defend the trafficker saying that he had their permission to take the child across the border for work. Most believe the trafficker's promise that he will find the child well-paid work.
Isolated from their family, community and culture these children are under the trafficker's and employer's complete control, vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Conditions are basic and with no consideration for safety standards. “On plantations they are poisoned by the chemicals used in farming, they suffer skin diseases, heat stroke, increased heart rate, malnutrition as well as physical abuse. “ A research conducted.
'Our day began at 5am. Carrying heavy tools on our head, we had to walk six kilometers through mud and stones in bare feet to reach the fields. By the time we reached them we were soaked through and exhausted. Once we arrived the overseer showed us the area we each had to plant before the day's end. We were afraid of what he would do to us if we could not finish the work. This threat and the threat of being denied food if we could not finish in time forced us to work quickly. The work was hard and bending all day gave us back pains. If we were ill and couldn't work we were afraid that we would be tortured to death. One day I witnessed two of my colleagues being tortured for trying to escape. They became seriously ill and died.' An escapee narrated.