Child Soldiers: A Single-Issue Campaign

Although the term “war affected” has gained currency in scholarship and policy and practice in recent years, the focus of war studies in relation to children continues to be on child soldiers.

and are amenable to being resolved through relatively straightforward legal instru­ments. Diverse responses on the part of individuals to a range of circumstances tend to become congealed into a specific object of policy concern that can be framed, targeted, and evaluated. This is evident in the shifting foci of international child protection policy that has moved through a focus on street children, to child sexual exploitation, and child soldiers. In each case, a set of disparate behaviors with complex motivations and circumstances are gathered together as a specific object of concern that can be targeted (Wells 2015).

There is much to commend single-issue campaigns. Precisely because they resolve complex issues into a simple target of reform that can be codified in law and then monitored, they do impact to some degree on improving some children’s lives. However, they also inevitably tend to obscure or gloss over the complexity of children’s lives. In particular, in the case of war-affected children they have obscured the wider impacts of war on children and young people. In this, as in other single-issue campaigns, a specific target allows the whole structure that surrounds the core objective or target to remain unchanged. In this case, the objective of eliminating child soldiering allows war as a political structure to continue as a legitimate response to political conflict. Clearly, to challenge the continuing use of war to resolve political conflict will itself require political mobilization at different scales.

The campaign for an end to child soldiering was successful in its efforts to secure an optional protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The attention it brought to the issue of child soldiers probably contributed to the decision at the end of the Sierra Leone civil war to treat young rebel fighters as victims rather than perpetrators of war (Shepler 2005). It may also have contributed to shifting public opinion against the Tamil Tigers in the separatist civil war in Sri Lanka, although this shift did not necessarily support a just outcome to the war. It probably led to a change in practice in the UK towards the recruitment of under-18s in the armed forces who are now not deployed until they are 18, although recruitment of under-18s to the British Armed Forces continues if there is parental consent (Armed Forces Act 2006, s328, see also Wells 2008, 2014b). Other factors also shaped recent policy in the UK on under-18 recruitment, including a report on the deaths of four soldiers at the Deepcut army barracks in Surrey between 1995 and 2002 (Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, 2008). Nonetheless, children in armed forces (both government and rebel forces) worldwide never exceeded 300,000, whereas children displaced by war continue to be around 30 million, children subjected to sexual violence has been estimated by UNICEF as 150 million girls and 75 million boys with children in conflict zones being especially vulnerable, civilian children disabled by war four to five million, and civilian children killed in war around two million in the decade before the publication of Graca Machel’s report (1996). Unlike child soldiering, which has a clear and specific target, these kinds of effects of war can only be addressed by ending violent intrastate and interstate political conflict. Clearly, such an aim is utopian but it is nonetheless important to bring attention to the specific impacts of war on children and youth rather than only focusing on those that are amenable to specific and targeted interventions.

The representation of the child soldier in the campaigns against child soldiering and the popular discourse which surrounds it (e.g., circulated by films like Blood Diamonds, 2006 or Beasts of No Nation, 2015) is of a very young African (no specific country named) boy who is abducted, drugged, and brutalized into perpetuating violence. The racism of these signs is far from subtle. What is signified by these representations is the idea that “Africa” (an imagined space of inexplicable chaos and inevitable evil rather than any specific nation) is the uncivilized space that generates the problem of child soldiering (Hron 2016; Martins 2011; Schultheis 2008). Child soldiering is imagined as an atavistic practice, outside of modernity and detached from the civilized rules of engagement that characterize European wars. The focus on a specific objective allows the violence of global powers and its impacts on children and youth to be ignored or glossed over. This violence includes the whole machinery of colonial rule, of contemporary USA torture of prisoners of war, recruitment of under-18s to the armed forces in UK and USA, the “accidental” bombing of civilians by US forces in Afghanistan, the collapse of medical services in Iraq following the illegal international invasion of Iraq, and other issues.

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