Nearly every day, a world-weary battle-hardened child stares out at us from a newspaper or magazine.

Every time we turn on the television or radio, we are confronted with another story of children bearing arms. In all of the rebellions, insurgencies, and civil conflicts that now involve millions of people across the globe, there is one common and undisputable fact: children and youth are always on or near the field of battle.

The prevailing view is that child soldiers are the victims of adult abuse and criminality. They exist as the most transgressive form of noncombatant: children who have been forcefully and unlawfully transformed into combat­ants in violation of their essential qualities. Like the concepts of child laborer, child bride, or child prostitute, the child soldier is seen to be a deviant product of adult abuse, and the presupposition is that these children are dependent, exploited, and powerless. Even where a child may have commit­ted terrible war crimes, the child's culpability is attributed to adult misuse and exploitation.

Our current understanding about child soldiers has been primarily shaped by an emerging international humanitarian discourse about children. Found primarily in the reports of nongovernmental organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, and numerous others, this discourse has had a profound effect upon public consciousness. But this discourse evidences little or no awareness that current humanitarian views about childhood derive from a particular constellation of ideas and practices that began to emerge in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages.

During the Middle Ages, children were deemed to be the natural com­panions of adults.¹ But it was also a time when a new set of new ideas about childhood developed that stressed belief in the innocence of childhood, the practice of segregating children from adults, and the isolation and prolonga­tion of childhood as a special protected state.

The emergence of formal and institutionalized schooling during the indus­trial revolution served to strengthen the idea of the innocence and weakness of children and to increasingly segregate young people from adults. Adolescence, it has been quipped, was invented with the steam engine.² During the industrial revolution, schooling slowly replaced apprenticeship as the prime mode of education. Traditionally, military training was tied to the appren­ticeship system and was the most resistant to formal schooling of all the professions. In the seventeenth century, a boy destined for a career in the military—the so-called noble profession—would have perhaps two or three years of separate education and at the age of 11, 12, or 13 would find himself as a commissioned officer in the army or navy, freely mixing with adults in the military camps.³ Historically, soldiering appears to be one of many professions that by necessity ignored the growing separation of chil­dren from adults—where else, after all, were the next generation of recruits to come from?

But even schooling itself and its associated ideas of childhood were not necessarily incompatible with military ideals. As schooling began to domi­nate educational processes, there was a simultaneous union of military and school cultures, as schools, which had once been primarily ecclesiastical institutions, became militarized. So, as formal education began to separate child life from adult life and create a special culture of childhood, that cul­ture itself was shaped by a military ethos. Military discipline was deemed to have a particular kind of moral virtue. To the extent that military life was understood to be virtuous and ennobling, there was little conflict between the idea of the child and the life of the soldier.⁴ By the end of the eighteenth century, the formal relationship between children and military life was frequently organized through a variety of institutional mechanisms that combined military training, apprenticeship, and pedagogy in varying combinations according to class and status.

Humanitarian discourse has had an equally profound effect upon con­temporary literary conventions and has reversed the images of children under arms that pervaded much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. The transformation is startling: the heroic child fighters of yesteryear, such as Gavroche in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables or the boy spy, Kim, in Kipling's eponymous novel, have been replaced by Agu, the battered victim of a nameless war in Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation. This is not to suggest that there were no dissenting views in the past. As early as 1861, Herman Melville raised his skeptical voice against the chorus of hosannas surrounding young boys marching off to the civil war. In his poem The March into Virginia Ending in the First Manassas, he writes, “All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys, the champions and enthusiasts of the state.”⁶ But Melville was in the minority, and it took more than 100 years before his lone voice became part of the cacophony of humanitarian discourse.

How did the heroic child soldier of an earlier era come to be replaced by the abused and exploited child who is both killer and victim? What alterations in literary conventions and moral attitudes were required in order to transform the child soldier into its modern literary construction? Much of this stems from the intense focus on African conflicts. While children have been recruited as child soldiers in wars all over the world— Columbia, Kurdistan, Laos, Mexico, New Guinea, Pakistan, Palestine, Peru, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and New Guinea come immediately to mind— the contemporary literary gaze remains firmly fixed on Africa. Exactly why this is the case is unclear. Certainly some contemporary examples of the use of child soldiers in Africa, such as the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone and the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, have provided chilling examples of the abuse of children.

Our understanding of war has also been affected by a more than half a century of peace (with obvious exceptions) in the West. Accordingly and luck­ily, we have lost a visceral understanding of war. Instead, our experience of war is mediated by cultural and geographical distance, professional volunteer armies, civil society, and human rights organizations, all of which, in myriad ways, serve to ascribe war to an essentialized “other.” As distant observers, we remain the ultimate noncombatants with little knowledge of the kind of warfare at home that often thrusts children into combat. From the safety of the West, we may have reached a point where we can barely comprehend the agility and resourcefulness of the children Anna Freud encountered during the years of the Nazi air blitz in London.⁸