“… killing had become as easy as drinking water. My mind had not only snapped during the first killing, it had also stopped making remorseful records, or so it seemed….”
-- Ishmael Beah, from his book A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Child soldiers in the Congo.

Some 300,000 children under 18 are being exploited in more than 30 armed conflicts worldwide, according to estimates from UNICEF.

Most of these child soldiers witnessed terrible atrocities; many took part in inflicting them. When the conflicts are over, can these children heal and re-enter normal society?

Yes, say experts with firsthand experience.

John Williamson has studied the outcomes of child soldiers who survived fighting during the 12 years of war in Sierra Leone. In a study he completed in 2006, he found that “most children who have been demobilized appear to be doing as well as other children in their community.”

Williamson works with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as the senior technical adviser for its Displaced Children and Orphans Fund (DCOF). He looked at the outcomes of 4,674 child soldiers demobilized between May 2001 and January 2002.

Thanks to the Lomé Peace Accord, which provided guidelines for the child solders’ disarmament, demobilization and reintegration into normal society, children were assisted with family reunification. Child soldiers also were given a choice between access to education or skills training. The largest donations to support these programs came from USAID/DCOF.

COMMUNITY SENSITIZATION

Because many communities feared and hated the child soldiers who would be returning, careful sensitization work was needed. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) worked with community leaders, stressing forgiveness for, and acceptance of, children who had been forced into their roles as soldiers.

Traditional cleansing and healing ceremonies along with religious support also seemed to increase community acceptance of, and trust in, the children, Williamson found. In addition, these ceremonies helped the children themselves feel more acceptable to normal society.

“Ensuring opportunities for children to return to school or receive skills training was a major factor in successful reintegration,” Williamson wrote in his study. “This not only helped children to establish a new identity, it also increased their acceptance by family, community members and peers.”

Appearing to be like “everyone else” is important to former child soldiers, Williamson told America.gov.

“NGOs and UNICEF are strongly of the view that it becomes counterproductive at a point to focus on children because they were formerly child soldiers. The whole point of integration is that young people resume a place in the community comparable to others of their age,” Williamson said.

“I think there is a consensus among the practitioners that once the former child soldiers have the same kind of opportunities that other young people in the community have, you don’t want to have programs that are just focusing on them,” he told America.gov.

THE BIG PICTURE

Lloyd Feinberg, who manages DCOF, said that focusing aid programs on former child soldiers can have unintended consequences.

USAID, he told America.gov, has tried very hard to focus programs on all children affected by conflict.

“Sometimes when you focus on the former child soldiers,” he said, “it can either stigmatize those children, or it glorifies them -- everybody else is saying, gee, maybe we should have become child soldiers because look at all the money that is going to help them and we’re not getting anything.”

Feinberg said it is important to stay focused on the larger context of a society that suffers conflict and forces children to be soldiers.

“It really goes back to the whole economic development issue,” he said. “There are no quick fixes. You can’t just take a kid, give him six weeks or six months of training and put him into a job because in most cases there is no market that can support jobs.

“I think that everybody recognizes the largest population of potential candidates for armed groups is kids who don’t have opportunities for jobs. We are looking at ways that we can identify vulnerable communities and really take a longer term approach toward identifying how we do support economic development strategies, policies and programs in ways that really do increase the earning capacity of the families as opposed to just increasing the gross national product,” Feinberg said.

For example, USAID funds STRIVE programs (Success Through Incentive Vision Effort) that focus on strategies to increase the economic capacity and status of vulnerable families as well as their children. USAID is studying ways to refine those projects, Feinberg said, by looking at some of the larger, longer-standing programs of economic development and seeing how they have benefited children who had been affected by conflict.

Jane A. Morse / Staff Writer

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