Children at War.

• Author: Perrin, Benjamin E.A.
• Position: Book Review

Child Soldiers: Legal and Military Challenges in Confronting a Global Phenomenon

P.W. Singer, Children at War. New York: Pantheon, 2005. Pp. 288 [Hardcover $35 CAN].

Over the last decade, the existence of child soldiers has been brought to light through a barrage of graphic international news agency articles and human rights reports. Usually, these materials only identify sporadic and often sensationalized cases. What has been less forthcoming is a deeper understanding of what P.W. Singer calls the "child-soldier doctrine": a calculated and pervasive strategy by armed groups to use children as combatants. Children at War is an admirable effort at making this daunting topic accessible to a wider public policy audience, and it provides an interesting non-legal primer on this topic for practitioners of international humanitarian law. (1) However, the book's insufficient treatment of important legal aspects of the child soldier issue is disappointing given that effective criminal prosecutions are a necessary element to confronting this challenge. In addition, stepped-up prosecutorial activity at the international level has taken place since Singer completed this text, and it also warrants attention.

While conducting interviews with personnel of private military companies from around the world for his earlier publication entitled Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, (2) Singer was surprised to learn that many of them had faced children in combat. This prompted him to look deeper into the matter, resulting in Children at War. (3) This book explains the advent of child soldiers in modern anned conflict and begins with a discussion of the historical context of children in war. Singer explains that historically well-known instances of the use of child soldiers, from ancient times to the US civil war and the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth), are exceptions to the millennia-old prohibition on children as combatants. (4)

More recently, however, approximately three-quarters of the armed conflicts around the world have involved armed children, some as young as six years old. (5) One of the most notable is Sierra Leone, where up to 80 per cent of all fighters in the Revolutionary United Front ("RUF") are alleged to have been between seven and fourteen years old. (6) Rebel militias, paramilitaries, terrorist cells and even some state armies have opted to arm children in conflicts in Columbia, Lebanon, Liberia, Kashmir, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, and elsewhere. Singer provides a catalogue of many of the major armed groups in various regions of the world that have resorted to child soldiers to achieve their ends: up to 60 per cent of non-state armed groups are said to use child soldiers, and up to fifty states have recruited child soldiers in violation of international and domestic law. (7) The existence of girl soldiers and their sexual abuse as "soldiers' wives", including the atrocities that take place after their inevitable pregnancy, is a particularly troubling problem canvassed in this book. (8)

Three main causal factors are provided for the proliferation of child soldiers. First, social disruptions and failed development in impoverished countries has created a vulnerable "pool" of children who are easy targets for abduction or "voluntary" recruitment. Second, technological gains have made lethal weapons smaller, more accurate and easier to use than ever before. For example, children as young as ten years old use the widely available AK-47, which weighs 10.5 pounds, has just nine moving parts, and requires only half an hour of basic training to tire with reasonable accuracy. This weapon is also cheap and plentiful. In child soldier hotspots like Uganda, a chicken can reportedly be exchanged for an AK-47 on the black market. (9) Finally, non-state actors in modern conflicts view children as a low-cost and efficient strategy to rapidly expand and project force. (10)

Each stage of the recruitment, abuse, training, indoctrination and tactical use of child soldiers on the battlefield is explored in this book, with examples from recent conflicts. Policy-makers and human rights workers should be especially attuned to nuances in the way that children are taken in to armed forces. Singer describes how children in refugee camps are often targeted for recruitment. (11) The use of propaganda in conditioning children to accept a role in armed conflict is documented in places like Sri Lanka. In the territory controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, school-aged children reportedly sing songs glorifying war and play on playgrounds equipped with...