Peter Warren Singer, senior fellow and director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution.

Washington -- The use of children as soldiers is not only child abuse but also a threat to national and global security, says Peter Warren Singer, senior fellow and director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based policy research organization.

“You have to start to look at this issue as not merely one of human rights but also one that is critical to global and national security,” Singer told America.gov recently.

“It isn’t that human rights are not important,” Singer explained, “it’s that you’ve got to see them within a larger context.”

Nations need to have a “hard interest” in stopping the use of child soldiers, he said, because doing so provides the mechanisms to shrink the pool of failed states and areas terrorists can exploit.

Singer condemns the tendency of policymakers to lump children’s issues into a separate and independent category. “This issue of child soldiers is not just about children,” Singer said. It is “an inherent part of this broader breakdown of global security that we’re seeing.”

Singer is the author of Children at War, winner of the 2006 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. The book takes a comprehensive look at the plight of some 300,000 child soldiers fighting in conflicts around the world.

Child soldiers often are used in conflicts because they are cheap, readily available, malleable and expendable. According to Singer, the use of child soldiers makes conflicts easier to start, harder to end and peace agreements more difficult to maintain.

Often abducted, child soldiers are most often the poorest of the poor, with no one to protect or guide them and no immediate prospects for schooling or employment.

CHILD SOLDIERS VERSUS GANGS

When most Westerners think of soldiers and war fighting, they think of adults in organized, professional militaries. But that is not the case in much of the world, he said.

“Look at most conflicts and look at the ‘actors’ on the ground: They are not tightly organized, bureaucratic, professional [armies] in our sense of the term,” Singer said. “If you look at the actors on the ground and the way they really operate, in many ways they look and act more like gangs than battalions or regiments,” he said, adding that child combatants often are fighting for local or regional interests, rather than “big picture” politics.

Singer said there are parallels between child soldiers in some parts of the world and gangs seen in the United States. In both cases, he said, the youth are recruited from poor areas that lack good governance.

“You’re also [recruiting] from youth who are looking for some kind of meaning,” he said. “It’s the idea of whoever has the gun in their hand is more powerful in that community, has protection.”

An even more tragic parallel between gangs and child soldiers is the damage on the community. “It doesn’t just harm the people within the gang, it causes a broader breakdown,” Singer said.

The tools to prevent both gangs and child soldiers are similar as well, says Singer. In both cases, he said, there must be a plan to rehabilitate and re-integrate youth into society and to prevent further recruitments.

“A big parallel in both gangs and child soldier groups is that it is not just about getting ‘foot soldiers.’” The real key is getting the organizers,” Singer said.

FOCUS ON THE ORGANIZERS

On the battlefield, targeting the leaders of child soldiers is especially important, Singer said. Professional militaries are loath to kill children, he acknowledged, “but a bullet from a 14-year-old is just as lethal as a bullet from a 40-year-old.”

In battle, Singer said, the goal is to disrupt and scatter child soldier units, not to slaughter the children. To this end, a variety of tactics are available, he said. The primary goal, he said, “to eliminate the adult leader in control.” With that accomplished, the units of child soldiers “will often dissolve,” Singer said.

In addition to addressing the causes that create pools of potential child soldiers, such as poverty and social dislocation, steps must be taken to creating more negatives than benefits for those who would exploit children, Singer said. That means targeting the warlords and other groups that recruit children as combatants.

He urged the international community to pressure not just the warlords but their financial sponsors and trading partners as well.

This is slowly starting to happen, Singer said. Some leaders of child soldiers have been arrested and charged with war crimes and child abuse. “But more needs to be done,” he said, and the current political will is insufficient to the task.