Child Soldiers Essay

The use of child soldiers have become a normal contribution to armies, especially in countries such as Africa. Although, countries such as Afghanistan, India, and Libya have been using child soldiers since 2011. According to “Children in Conflict: Child Soldiers,” there has been 36 countries involved since 1998. Something needs to be done about this issue due to the fact that thousands of

Recently, two million children have died over the past ten years due to becoming a child soldier. A huge deplorable development that has extended recently is the increase of child soldiers. Children are constantly being used as soldiers for various reasons. In some countries, there are more child soldiers than they are adults because children are more compliant. Children have been exploited as soldiers because they are being recruited to do a violent action, it is difficult for them to, later on, assimilate back to their lives, and child soldiers are regularly used in developing countries.

It is easy to see that child soldiers have been involved all around the world for centuries. Singer states “by the twenty-first century child soldiers had served in significant numbers on ever continent of the globe but Antarctica.” From 1998 to 2001 the countries that were active combatants were Mexico, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia, Algeria, Chad, Republic of Congo, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Eritrea, Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, East Timor, Philippians, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and lastly the Russian Federation. Noticeably a lot of these listed countries are African. Singer writes, “Africa is often considered to be at the epicenter

Children all across world are being exploited as child soldiers. Everyday kids younger the age of 10 are putting their lives on the line mostly by force. ¨Over the last ten years, two million children have been killed in conflict. Over one million have been orphaned, over six million have been seriously injured or permanently disabled and over ten million have been left with serious psychological trauma.¨(Children In Conflict). A child soldier is a child with armed forces; they’re trained to fight, cook, be porters, messengers, informant spies, etc. Countries all across the world have been using children to fight, places like the United Kingdom, Africa, and Asia lean on children to do their dirty work regardless of what laws are put into place for recruitment age.

These are the words of a 15-year-old girl in Uganda. Like her, there are an estimated 300,000 children under the age of eighteen who are serving as child soldiers in about thirty-six conflict zones (Shaikh). Life on the front lines often brings children face to face with the horrors of war. Too many children have personally experienced or witnessed physical violence, including executions, death squad killings, disappearances, torture, arrest, sexual abuse, bombings, forced displacement, destruction of home, and massacres. Over the past ten years,

Over the last ten years, at least over two million children are forcibly serving in the military, with them only being 10 years old or younger. Another conflict is that child soldiers are being isolated in many parts of africa, and are being used by armed groups as an ongoing conflicts like south asia, asia, and the middle east. Some governments have also recruited children under the age of 18 into their armed forces. One of their biggest challenges is to have freedom in their own hands without having to break the law.

One injustice facing the world today is the use of child soldiers. According to child-soldiers.org, a child soldier is “any person below eighteen years of age who is, or who has been, recruited or used by an armed force or armed group in any capacity…” Child soldiers do not only include the combatants. There are also child soldiers in noncombatant positions. The most dreadful injustice is having child soldiers, because of the amount of children involved, the recruitment they face, their war experiences, and post battle feelings or events.

These young soldiers seem to not be committed into committing war crimes, but one of their commitments is without a doubt, survival. However, in order for them to accomplish this, they unfortunately have to commit these terrible atrocities to not get killed. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of these children have little to no option whether or not they want to be serving, they are forcibly recruited. Jeffrey Gettle, author of article entitled Armed and Underage argues this idea well with his quote, “purchased, kidnapped, or terrorized” are some of the ways these girls and boys become child soldiers (2009). This quote demonstrates the types of way they are involuntarily placed in the army and when they are in the field, many types abusement become present like when they oppose given orders.

Child soldiers may often be over-looked when discussing issues of social injustice. The average person may not know that this still occurs, but in fact, it does in places such as Sierra Leone and Uganda. The psychological, economic, and social impacts on these innocent children are staggering. These children are robbed of a normal childhood, and in most cases, a normal life altogether. Although there are many campaigns against child slavery and soldiers, not all of these children are saved from this abuse. There are an estimated 300,000 child soldiers around the world, and an estimated 6,000 in the Central African Republic alone.

Child soldiers have become very common in places of constant war or combat. With the need for more soldiers as others die off, the juvenile population in places such as West Africa and the Middle East is plentiful and available. Military recruiters in these regions specifically look into children because of their “immaturity and basic curiosity which makes them susceptible” and easily influenced (Somasundaram 1269). Commonly, child soldiers don’t have a choice if they want to be recruited or not because they are usually trapped (by socioeconomics or other factors) and forced to participate. In war times, the country of recruitment is usually in chaos to begin, and child removal from families is effortless for recruiters. Once brought into the training camps where propaganda is well presented, children immediately feel scared, a result of the detachment from their families. Recruiters often feed detrimental information to the children, which typically includes certainty of family deaths and subsequent threats of the death of loved ones which “create a sense of fear, frustration, hopelessness, and general discontent” (Somasundaram 1269). The overload of emotions and inexperience causes children to immediately look to re-fulfill the authority figure in their lives (which was once their family) in order to regain a sense of comfort; similarly to the

Child soldiers. Most can not fathom the idea of children in war, less the fact that those children are fighting. It is a terrible thought to have to think about, especially when America now has the power to help and has been reluctant to use it. None the less, though, children from ages 10 and up are being recruited for war. Under international law, the participation of children under 18 in armed conflict is generally prohibited, and the recruitment and use of children under 15 is a war crime. Yet worldwide, hundreds of thousands of children are recruited into government armed forces, paramilitaries, civil militia and a variety of other armed groups. Often they are abducted at school, on the streets or at home.

Thousands of children are serving as soldiers in armed conflicts around the world. These boys and girls under the age of 18 serve in things such as government forces and armed opposition groups. While serving, they can do a number of things such as fight on the front lines, participate in suicide missions, and act as spies, messengers, or lookouts, take direct part in hostilities or they can be used for political advantage [either] as human shields and/or in propaganda and the girls are forced into sexual slavery. Many tend to believe that child soldiers are mostly boys. In fact, 30% of armed organizations that use children have girls.

In today’s day and age, children from all over the world are real soldiers in conflicts instead of playing toy soldiers. These children are being denied their childhood and instead are given a violent and gruesome role to play in brutal conflicts. These children are fighting wars that they had no responsibility in creating. Children are fighting in wars created by their elders. Children are replacing their toys with guns, like AK-47’s and instead of having a chance to attend

More than one million children were taken, and twenty-five thousand children (some as young as six) were forced to become part of the armed groups. The recruitment of children has taken the lives of more than two million children, and more than six million children were permanently disabled, caused one million children to be orphaned, left more than ten million children with serious psychological trauma, Currently, over three hundred thousand children, are serving as child soldiers in fifty countries in every region of the world. Most of them between the ages of eleven to fifteen.

Child warfare is a big problem today in the world. This is a big problem because children are getting taken away from their families and just getting pulled into the war and have to kill or they get beaten or killed if they put the kids in the front line to get killed before the high ranks. In the world there are approximately 300,000 child soldiers around the world. About 40% of the child soldiers are in their countries rank in the military. 40% of them are girls. This mainly happens in Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan. This happens because the military does not want their high ranked soldiers to die, so they put the child soldiers in the front line to die before the high ranked soldiers die. Also if the children don’t kill in the battle they get beaten with batons and even get killed with guns, knives, or sticks. Then they get hung on a pole to show the people it’s a sign of glory to the people that kill them. The African officials are making the kids go through