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The issue of child soldiers
Child soldiers being mistreated
The issue of child soldiers
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Child Soldiers have commited horrible crimes under the fear of death from their own groups. Child soldiers and their prosecution is a big debate going on right now. Should they be prosecuted you tell me? In my opinion child soldiers should not be prosecuted as criminals will not stop if they arrested and the children didn’t have control over their actions.
Child soldiers shouldn’t be prosecuted People like the UN are only going to politely tell them to stop what they're doing. No force is being used to make them stop. . All of the actions are practically like whispering to tell them please don’t do this sir this is wrong and illegal. “Prosecutions only happen after the war has ended so those who recruit child soldiers will not take this
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When their villages got overrun these were their options going or be killed by other rebel groups. One example of this is in A Long Way Gone when Ishmael and his brother have the choice of joining the army or being killed immediately by the rebels. (A long way gone.) That was only one example of how their actions were not at their own free choice. Their immediate instinct is to going so that they remain safe and alive where their chances of life are much higher then fleeing the rebels. The child soldiers once they were brought into their group. Are given drugs such as; marijuana, cocaine, and brown brown (a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder). Drugs allow people to not be themselves and to not think clearly allowing their actions to be violent and dangerous. “Like the other soldiers, Ishmael relies on drugs to power him through his duties.” Just like the quote shows these drugs were the reason all of his actions could be done. Including rape torture, and killing of innocent civilians. The drugs gave them an alternate personality. That alternate personality was a killer that was ready to do any action that their captain told them to do. If these soldiers weren’t on drugs then the chances of them doing these actions would much slimmer. In conclusion drugs and difficult choices led to them to do the actions that they
Drugs – the two separate groups who were led by AH and Joel (JT) were under the influence of drugs and alcohol. The people especially in AH’s group were affected by the drinking of alcohol and consumption of the drug Methamphetamine which had an effect on the armed group’s behavioural performance as being more lethal and destructive, carrying baseball bats and metal poles heading towards JT’s
Ishmael was a normal 12 year old boy in a small village in Sierra Leone when his life took a dramatic turn and he was forced into a war. War has very serious side effects for all involved and definitely affected the way Ishmael views the world today. He endured and saw stuff that most people will never see in a lifetime let alone as a young child. Ishmael was shaped between the forced use of drugs, the long road to recovery and the loss of innocence of his
As Ishmael’s life as a boy soldier slowly came to an end, these changes were the hardest to accept. He was given all knew clothes, lots of help, and was practically given his life back. A normal person would be happy to accept that, but Ishmael wasn’t exactly a normal person. His life was dedicated to being a boy soldier, and through that he develops a very violent mindset. When he is taken away from this atmosphere, he resorts to violence and has extreme drug withdrawal. ALong with that, he had severe migraines and wanted to be fighting for his country. Many other soldiers looked up to him for his dedication and contribution. Even though all they wanted to do was help him, he just wanted to fight.
Beah writes,“Over and over in our training he would say that same sentence: Visualize the enemy, the rebels who killed your parents, your family, and those who are responsible for everything that has happened to you” (Beah 112). This manipulation is what pushed Beah to commit murder and become violent in nature. On the topic of manipulation of child soldiers, Enrique Restoy of the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers says, “‘But children are easily manipulated, and this is why we want to prohibit any kind of involvement of children in armed conflicts. As Beah is writing of all the drugs he’s routinely taking, he includes, “But after several doses of these drugs, all I felt was numbness to everything and so much energy that I couldn’t sleep for weeks” (121).
...ys, they are seized by soldiers and taken to a village engrossed by the military fighting back at the rebels. The fellow children soldiers became Ishmael’s only family at the time, and each of them were supplemented with a white pill, “The corporal said it will boost your energy” says a young soldier. (116) Little did Ishmael and the others know that the tablet was an illicit drug given to them to fight their fatigue and anxiety for a short term to better them in combat with the rebels. Beah unknowingly alters into a blood-craving animal, who kills with numbness and no emotion. “I was not afraid of these lifeless bodies. I despised them and kicked them to flip them.” (119) Ishmael now relies and is addicted to drugs to get through his day-to-day life, including smoking marijuana, and constantly snorting “brown brown” (121) which is a mixture of gunpowder and cocaine.
Due to the fact, [“Marijuana and brown brown”] (page 121) are the main drugs given to the soldiers every day, and the reason of the drugs, makes the soldiers work harder and eventually become addicted. Drugs took a very substantial toll on the soldiers, and later on, rose the decision making of the children, and the ability to trust one another. As a result, the drugs caused Ishmael to “have no pity for anyone”(page 126), which means to not care or feel sorry for anyone. New perceptions are intact when the drugs kicked in, ultimately, going back to the drugs will have an effect on not caring for anyone. Ishmael was rewarded for the amount of time spent and hard work with the nickname “Green Snake”(page 144) because of “his inconspicuous positions, and ability to take out a whole village from shrub”(page 144). With the new nickname, the Lieutenant awarded, Ishmael felt happy with the way the army was treating the recruitments, and himself. All in all, the self esteem felt by the soldiers may not always be true, on the other hand, the drugs have skewed the mindsets of the children, consequently making the self esteem false.
The first reason these kids shouldn’t be prosecuted or punished in any way is because it wasn’t their choice to be a soldier to begin with. According to Child Soldiers, Prosecution, most kids were forced to fight and had no choice of weather to enlist or not. There are about 200,000 child soldiers worldwide state's Armed and Underage, (Gettleman) and these kids are doing things their adolescent brains
Sometimes they had no choice but to join the military to keep themselves alive. Ishmael’s life was finally changed by some good UNICEF people. He finally learned to forgive and gained back his humanity. There are few types of brainwashing method used in the military to keep the child soldiers energetic and injecting hate in them. While people believe that military people are the authorities, the Sierra Leone military used drugs, movies, and speech to keep the soldiers
Children at such a young age don't have the mental ability to think long term about their actions, especially when they are being forced or drugged. Some may argue that if child criminals get punished for their actions, then child soldiers should too, but that is just not the case. The difference being, child criminals choose to commit their crimes, child soldiers are forced to commit crimes. As an example, in the article Child Soldiers it states, “More often than not, children have no say in whether they enlist or not and once recruited the children have become brainwashed through the use of drugs and alcohol” (Child Soldiers).
Before it can be decided whether or not to forgive child soldiers, the question, “What is a child soldier?” must be asked. A child soldier, is a person under the age of 18 who is being used, and most often being forced, to fight other people. Some may ask, “How can you force a child to fight if they do not want to?” A better question to ask would be, “Who wants to?” you may think that no child would want to fight, but in their shoes it might be a different story. They have probably lost everything; their homes, food, water, and their safety, so when they see the opportunity to have these things again- they are going to take it. Which is my first reason child soldiers should be forgiven and given amnesty on certain levels. Also, after
When children are kidnapped and torn away from their families to fight for something they know little about, violence can be justifed. In the book A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of A Boy Soldier, Ishmeal was forced to,”become the very thing he feared,” and he also tells us that the military,”brainwashed [them]..” and that the boy soldiers had become,”...addicted to cocaine, marijuana, and “brown-brown.” The abuse that Ishmeal and his fellow boy soldiers endured should not happen to anyone. Fighting back against a terroristic regime should be the standard because no child should have to endure that type of
“I would like to give you a message, please do your best to tell the world what is happening to us, the children. So that other children do not have to pass through this violence.”
The boys enjoyed mimicking what they saw in movies such as Rambo with the energy gained from white pills administered by Lieutenant Jabati. Hyping up the boys with action movies and muting their right minds with advocated substance abuse made the boys malleable and much easier to influence. Movies also inspired a different perception of all the fighting and slaughtering going on in real life which redirected the boy soldiers from the truth of the matter. The drugs and violence Beah was exposed to mixed with his already diminished hope for his life to ever go back to the way it was left Beah to disregard his future beyond day-to-day survival mode. Every day was just making it to the next; Beah’s standards of life were erased so there was nothing worth denying himself marijuana, or brown-brown to distract himself from his circumstances. What started as a tactic to make the boys easier to manipulate and enhance battle skills resulted to be the only way Beah and the other boys could get through the day. Being sober was overwhelmingly depressing, but as their dependencies grew so did risk. Not taking drugs would make every one of them sick because their bodies would go through withdrawal. Going cold turkey caused illness and irritability. Once Beah and everyone else arrived to Benin Home there was nothing to cure their fix available. “[Beah and the boys] broke into the Mini-hospital and stole some pain relievers—white tablets and off white… [They] emptied the capsules, ground the tablets, and mixed them together”(139).Being exposed to drugs spiraled into another hardship in Beah’s life. Drugs Beah intended to numb himself with only further restrained him from discovering any hope or enlightenment about the war crisis and his future. Later being forced into sobriety like he had been into using in the first place,
There are several reasons why the soldiers use drugs to escape the reality of war; but one purpose is to imagine going back to normal life and leaving the atrocities they’ve witness behind them. O’Brien writes that at night they would “give themselves over to lightness” and imagine flying “that big silver freedom bird over the mountains and oceans, over America, over the farms and great sleeping cities and cemeteries and highways and the golden arches of McDonald’s, it was flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the vast, silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing- Gone!.” (pg. 110) In his description, it’s plausible that something as ordinary as McDonald’s and wanting to be free from their anguish is representative of the yearning for home. As we imagine their circumstances, their wish to be back home was part of the mental burden they carried and one of their only sources of relief came in the form of getting
When someone kills another person’s family they will get recrimination on that person, with this comes great consequence which can result in long-term suffering or even death. Overall violence and the war have impacted Ishmael’s life and have served a permanent spot with Ishmael, and he may never return to the sweet innocent boy he once was. There is no life to be found in violence. Every act of violence brings us closer to