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How does war affect children
The Effects of Deployment on Young Children
The Effects of Deployment on Young Children
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“Children, you call them? They can pull a trigger just as well as veterans …” (Colonel Marcus Cullen, War Hammer 40,000). People should question the world in which they live when a child is forced to become a soldier. Especially when the children are under the age of 18, they should not be required to fight. Many children who are demanded to fight are taken from their families. These young adolescents are mistreated; malnurtured, abused and the girls are usually used for sexual purposes.
Everyday a child, from the regions in Africa, is recruited or abducted from their family to fight in an army. Children who are drafted to fight usually do not have parents and are older (The Situation). Some volunteer for income, food, or because they are pressured into combat (The Situation). Those who are taken from their homes or families happen to be in a war zone, misplaced or are poor (The Situation). The children who are homeless, and know the generals are out for them end up hiding and running for their lives throughout the night. Families and children hide from the captors underneath schools, churches and cellars (Steel). Parents are forced to tell where their children are hidden, if not they are tortured and even killed (Steel). After being abducted the children are then enforced to march to camp, anyone who attempts to escape is killed (Steel). As soon as these children are captured they are immediately trained to fight.
To transform these children into killers, there are many tactics used. Training was an extremely difficult time for most children because they had to learn to not be emotionally attached after slaughtering men and women. Many times a child was required to kill members of their village or even family (Steel). These ...
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...ing, nothing is ever the same. Sometimes families wont accept their children back because they are afraid they might be murdered (Parry). These children are scarred forever with what they went though. Girls and boys suffer through traumatic stress, nightmares, depression, flashbacks and aggressiveness, most have to be treated psychologically and yet they still will not return to normal because the memories are impacted in their brain forever (Steel).
Works Cited
Aldhous, Peter. "Brutalized Child Soldiers can Return to Normality." Student Research Center. 10 May 2008: pg. 6-7. 2-p. Print. http://web.ebscohost.com
Parenthetical Notation: Peter Aldhous, Student Research Center
Parenthetical Notation: “Steel”
Steel, Michelle, and . "Child Soldiers." Vision Insights and New Horizons. Child Soldiers Global Report, n.d. Web. 17 Nov 2013. .
Capturing children and turning them into child soldiers is an increasing epidemic in Sierra Leone. Ishmael Beah, author of the memoir A Long Way Gone, speaks of his time as a child soldier. Beah was born in Sierra Leone and at only thirteen years old he was captured by the national army and turned into a “vicious soldier.” (Beah, Bio Ref Bank) During the time of Beah’s childhood, a civil war had erupted between a rebel group known as the Revolutionary United Front and the corrupt Sierra Leone government. It was during this time when the recruitment of child soldiers began in the war. Ishmael Beah recalls that when he was only twelve years old his parents and two brothers were killed by the rebel group and he fled his village. While he and his friends were on a journey for a period of months, Beah was captured by the Sierra Leonean Army. The army brainwashed him, as well as other children, with “various drugs that included amphetamines, marijuana, and brown brown.” (Beah, Bio Ref Bank) The child soldiers were taught to fight viciously and the effects of the drugs forced them to carry out kill orders. Beah was released from the army after three years of fighting and dozens of murders. Ishmael Beah’s memoir of his time as a child soldier expresses the deep struggle between his survival and any gleam of hope for the future.
...be seen as an entity that promotes vile results. However, it is imperative to understand that globalization is multilayered and difficult to fully understand. In the case of child soldiers, globalization has played a pertinent role in unifying international organizations in hopes of finding a solution to this “phenomenon”. On the other hand, although certain international organizations such as United Nations have had a prominent role in advocating against child soldiery, for the following reasons, its attempts are insufficient: it lacks the ability to enforce sanctions established within the international community and it does not do enough to recognize the political, social and economic inequalities that are prevalent in most of these fragile states. Therefore, child soldiery, cannot be eradicated until these issues are dealt with on a collective global scale.
As Garbarino recognizes, the effects of war and such violence is something that sticks with a child and remains constant in their everyday lives. The experiences that children face involving war in their communities and countries are traumatic and long lasting. It not only alters their childhood perspectives, but it also changes their reactions to violence over time. Sadly, children are beginning to play more of a major role in wars in both the...
It is hardly surprising that boys like Toby who dreamed of battle were unprepared for the reality of war, since the real problems of their parents’ generation were eclipsed by “nostalgic adulation” of myth-like heroes. In the words of Tobias Wolff, “I went into the army…. It seemed to me when I got there that this was where I had been going all along, and where I might still redeem myself. All I needed was a war. Careful what you pray for.” There may be times when war is necessary, but if we send soldiers into harm’s way, then ideally our youth should be under no illusions about what that means and that the repercussions are felt long after the fighting stops.
One of the major problems in the Middle East is child related. To be specific, child soldiers. It is estimated that there are over 38,000 kids who are forced into being child soldiers (Storr). Because child soldiers can’t prevent their horrific fate, they deserve to be granted amnesty by the United Nations. One main reason why they should be given amnesty is because they are forced and drugged into becoming killers.
War has always been something to be dreaded by people since nothing good comes from it. War affects people of all ages, cultures, races and religion. It brings change, destruction and death and these affect people to great extents. “Every day as a result of war and conflict thousands of civilians are killed, and more than half of these victims are children” (Graca & Salgado, 81). War is hard on each and every affected person, but the most affected are the children.
Child soldier is a worldwide issue, but it became most critical in the Africa. Child soldiers are any children under the age of 18 who are recruited by some rebel groups and used as fighters, cooks, messengers, human shields and suicide bombers, some of them even under the aged 10 when they are forced to serve. Physically vulnerable and easily intimidated, children typically make obedient soldiers. Most of them are abducted or recruited by force, and often compelled to follow orders under threat of death. As society breaks down during conflict, leaving children no access to school, driving them from their homes, or separating them from family members, many children feel that rebel groups become their best chance for survival. Others seek escape from poverty or join military forces to avenge family members who have been killed by the war. Sometimes they even forced to commit atrocities against their own family (britjob p 4 ). The horrible and tragic fate of many unfortunate children is set on path of war murders and suffering, more nations should help to prevent these tragedies and to help stop the suffering of these poor, unfortunate an innocent children.
“Compelled to become instruments of war, to kill and be killed, child soldiers are forced to give violent expression to the hatreds of adults” (“Child Soldiers” 1). This quotation by Olara Otunnu explains that children are forced into becoming weapons of war. Children under 18 years old are being recruited into the army because of poverty issues, multiple economic problems, and the qualities of children, however, many organizations are trying to implement ways to stop the human rights violation.
These are the words of a 15-year-old girl in Uganda. Like her, there are an estimated 300,000 children under the age of eighteen who are serving as child soldiers in about thirty-six conflict zones (Shaikh). Life on the front lines often brings children face to face with the horrors of war. Too many children have personally experienced or witnessed physical violence, including executions, death squad killings, disappearances, torture, arrest, sexual abuse, bombings, forced displacement, destruction of home, and massacres. Over the past ten years, more than two million children have been killed, five million disabled, twelve million left homeless, one million orphaned or separated from their parents, and ten million psychologically traumatized (Unicef, “Children in War”). They have been robbed of their childhood and forced to become part of unwanted conflicts. In African countries, such as Chad, this problem is increasingly becoming a global issue that needs to be solved immediately. However, there are other countries, such as Sierra Leone, where the problem has been effectively resolved. Although the use of child soldiers will never completely diminish, it has been proven in Sierra Leone that Unicef's disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration program will lessen the amount of child soldiers in Chad and prevent their use in the future.
Many children are given the choice to die or to kill others. They should be prosecuted to an extent, otherwise they should be given amnesty. Some think children should be given amnesty, others think they should be prosecuted. There are many people who think rehabilitation is a good first step. Some, think they should be sent to jail for their crimes.
Wells, Karen C.. "Children and youth at war." Childhood in a global perspective. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009. 152. Print.
In many countries, especially in Africa, there are child soldiers. Some do volunteer, but most are forced into the military. These child soldiers kill lots of civilians, and commit oodles of war crimes. The population that carries out these abhorrent and petrifying acts should be given amnesty. This is because most of the soldiers had no choice. They were forced into it. Some say that these soldiers should not be given amnesty of any kind. This is because they did kill lots of people. However, they don’t realize that these children are brainwashed, and are given loads of drugs. These children need amnesty.
Like human trafficking, child soldiers are a big problem. Both deal with situations of kids being abducted, and kids being tricked into situations. Also, both kinds of victims, without proper care could later turn around and do the same thing to future children. Though child soldiers are not directly responsible for what they have done previously, they will be responsible for something they do in the future because of their past experiences. Child soldiers should be prosecuted because the the child knows what they are doing, they can be rehabilitated through prosecution, and if we don't prosecute more they will be kidnapped and used for bad purposes.
The debate of whether or not child soldiers should be given
It's difficult to forget the intense crimes these children committed, but you must remember that it is often not their choice. Specifically, in Ishmael Beah’s interview, a former child soldier from Sierra Leone, on The Hour by the CBC, he claimed that, “…there is always ways of killing people in front of you to desensitize you, you are given more drugs after that,” (2007). Rather than children just deciding to commit war crimes, their commanders drug them and use tactics to make them lose human emotion, so the children aren’t freely making decisions, but are being manipulated and controlled to do so. Many child soldiers can relate to Ishmael Beah because they didn't just openly decide to commit war crimes, they were forced. Beah also said that the manipulation didn't stop after he was rescued.