New Report on Children and Armed Conflict — The Use of Child Soldiers
CLC’s Sydney Greenberger
July 23, 2024
By Sydney Greenberger, CLC
A 16-year-old is forced to join an armed group on his walk to school. Girls are kidnapped into being “wives” for soldiers. Children are visited by recruiters at schools and pressured to join the war effort. Otherwise, they are regarded as unpatriotic.
On June 3, 2024, the UN Children and Armed Conflict (CAAC) released its annual report. This disturbing report details the terrible treatment of children who are forced into either fighting themselves in wars or being forced to support their governments in various ways when they are at war.
On June 26, the UN Security Council held its annual open debate on children and armed conflict in New York. There, the council discussed the CAAC and heard the personal testimony of a former child soldier from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He explained that some children were forced to join armed groups, and others were abducted to hold their families to ransom. The head of the UN Security Council needs to protect children affected by conflict, helping them gain access to education and healthcare, and protecting them from living in environments where their rights are violated.
February 2002 marked the release of the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child which aims to eliminate the recruitment and use of children in war. The Optional Protocol requires that governments ensure children under the age of 18 are not forcibly recruited to the armed forces and requires them to prevent children from taking a direct part in the hostilities of war. The protocol has been ratified by 173 countries, including the United States.
Some governments in violation of the treaty were forced to demobilize their child soldiers, prosecute officers who recruited children, and change their deployment practices. Although the treaty has been in effect for over two decades, child soldier recruitment and engagement in conflict continues to occur in many places around the world.
The 2008 Child Soldiers Prevention Act (CSPA) allows the U.S. government to restrict arms sales and military assistance to countries whose security forces or government-supported armed groups recruited or used child soldiers in the previous year. Since the U.S. is the top arms exporter in the world, the CSPA creates an incentive for countries to put an end to the recruitment and use of child soldiers if they want American assistance.
Between 2005 and 2022, more than 105,000 children were verified as recruited by armed groups in their communities, with some being as young as 8 years old. The actual number is believed to be much higher. Yearly, thousands of children are used as soldiers, cooks, and spies, among other roles, in armed conflict around the globe.
There are a variety of reasons why children might become part of an armed group. Limited educational or employment opportunities and poverty can increase the pool of available children and motivate them to volunteer for armed groups. Children might be abducted, threatened, coerced, or manipulated by a member of the group. Children may believe they must associate with an armed group to survive. Children who come from impoverished families may join armed groups to generate income. Regardless of why a child becomes a member of an armed group, the recruitment and use of children by armed forces is a violation of child rights and international humanitarian law.
