Conclusion
In war zones and in ICCs, the truth is, in a corporeal sense, tantalizing and seemingly portable. But it is also inevitably compromised by the nature of war, where reporting and being reported can bring immediate physical risk or opportunity to either party.
It could be argued that independent testimonies in any sense are few. The risk of remobilization or retribution is real and child soldiers undergoing demobilization are referred to by number to reduce these possibilities (Stark et al. 2009, p. 525). For former combatants in war, a “safe harbor” may still represent an extension of these politics. Just as peace treaties between states may make little reference to state parties’ use of child soldiers, underage participants may also choose silence or partial truths. The concern here is of the consequences for children. Children may be “finishing off” adults’ sentences - and inadvertently completing humanitarian stories with both parties holding little regard for the truth. Of course this represents a grim reality in itself, but in such a critical and yet underresourced issue area these junctures and their pliable narrations are unlikely to be challenged.James draws attention to how “voices of children” characterize the humanitarian scene, even though children themselves remain in very weak partnerships with the adults who hear them (2007, p. 1). One might ask if “the story of the child soldier” is also a convenient modern day fairy tale for “online adults.” The key character is isolated from family and society and fighting to ward off death. We implicitly learn that the child has survived to tell the tale and in some small way overcome and outgrown the experience and indeed the agency that we are most unsettled by. We have some closure in each exposure, regardless of the efficacy of their treatment. What our efforts also reveal is commitment to tell or narrate (our) fears and stories: to cope - or warn - but not necessarily solve.
Clearly, all those working on issues around child soldiers have moral and professional responsibilities. Guided questions or a single focus should be
prevented, and the selection of extracts from interviews with ex-child soldiers should be done with care. To guard against fabrications, triangulation of data should take place, and interview material should be compared across a different range of child combatants (rank, age, gender, mode of conscription, etc.) and ideally with the experience of noncombatant but war-affected youth. Further contextualization should take place by means of a historical, cultural, and socioeconomic analysis of the country and the conflict to better understand the meaning young people themselves and the local communities give to underage participation in violence. Finally, we know that understandings of de facto childhood can differ considerably from de jure childhood, varying across different cultures. The most common threshold of childhood, prior to which children are treated differently to adults may in fact be closer to 12 years, or even earlier, before puberty or developed labor capacity. To think about children politically is to be engaging with many disciplines and multiple realities - which all anchor down the child we may seek to protect or frame the childhood that is useful to deploy. In terms of violence against young people, we return to the observation that the issue area of “war” and also “children in war” is an important one but that it conceptually drives a wedge between children and other relevant stages and contexts.
In a few well-profiled cases, the creation of first-person narratives has been an exit strategy for children who know that an emotive and yet rationalized testimony may lead them out of conflict. As Utas argues, this potential for “upwards mobility” through victimcy must be considered in research methodology. Despite this, methodology is “neglected” and often involves quantitative approaches and short-term field work (2004, p. 209). He notes that “generally research on young soldiers (as well as their wives or girlfriends) worldwide is carried out by ‘strangers’ seeking to collect stories of private and deeply traumatic character during one or maybe two interactions” (Utas 2005, p. 409). Thus the importance of building rapport with the interviewees - however time-consuming this may be - cannot be overestimated. We cannot afford for the real value of academic, policy, and advocacy research on child soldiers to be undermined by the convenient equivalent of speed dating and “drive- by” ethnography.