Romeo Dallaire, is the author of The Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children, and he states,
“It may seem unimaginable to you that child soldiers exist and yet the reality for many rebel gang leaders, and even state governments, is that there is no more complete end-to-end weapon system in the inventory of war machines than the child soldier… Man has created the ultimate cheap, expendable, yet sophisticated human weapon at the expense of humanity’s own future: its children.”
There are many conflicts around the world but Romeo decided to focus his attention on child soldiers and how the process happens. Child soldiers approached Romeo Dallaire during the year of 1994 when the genocide was taking place in Rwanda. This book demonstrates that children are soldiers when they shoot, but when they get hurt or killed they are children again. He has made many efforts to end child soldiers, and within this book he provides the overview of child soldiers. He believes that no child should have to live that type of lifestyle because they are children and they have every right to be a kid. In this novel, They Fight like Soldiers, They Die like Children, and he focuses on the idea of the rebels and then drifts off into the beginning stages of the process of child soldiers. Another novel called, Children at War by P.W.Singer, has several stories that child soldiers have written, for example a boy that is age fourteen wrote,
“ I joined the Army when I was fourteen because, one, I was persuaded that the only way to get my parents back or to stop that from happening was to be apart of the Army and kill those people who were responsible for killing my parents. But, you see, the thing that is very disturbing about this thing is that once I joine...
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...t they are easy to access; they are low cost, and easy to manipulate. When children are on the battlefield fighting for their lives, they become more violent and tend to do more killing than usual, raping girls, and torturing others. The armies, militia, and rebel groups recruit the children and separate the community to resist the conscription. The child is being forced to commit murder and turn against their family and friends because this proves that the child is recognized and implicated in the violence they have created. Child soldiers are known to be criminals, traitors, or even terrorists, so they would be held in military prisons. When either girl or boys are captured they go through abusive interrogation procedure, torture, isolations, rape, and death threats. These are the consequences of children being on the battlefield and shortly after being captured.
...when you enlist young men, straight out of school and place them in battle, you force them to grow up too quickly and the results are "...a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by war."
As defined by Timothy Webster, author of Babes with Arms: International Law and Child Soldiers, a child soldier is “any person under the age of eighteen who is or has been associated with any kind of regular or irregular armed group, including those who serve as porters, spies, cooks, messengers and including girls recruited for sexual purposes (Webster, 2007, pp.230). As this definition reveals, a child soldier is more than simply a child with a gun. It is estimated that there are approximately 300,000 children under the age of 18, being used as soldiers in 33 conflicts currently, and this figure continues to rise (Webster, 2007, pp.227). Similarly, in 1999 it was estimated that more than 120,000 children, under the age of 18, were used as soldiers to fight ...
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...
What is war really like all together? What makes war so horrifying? The horror of war is throughout All Quiet on the Western Front. For example Albert says the war has ruined them as young people and Paul agrees. “Albert expresses it: "The war has ruined us for everything." He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.” (Remarque, Chapter 5). The way the war has affected each soldier has changed them forever. The boys who were once school boys will never be the same.
Wells, Karen C.. "Children and youth at war." Childhood in a global perspective. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009. 152. Print.
There are thousands of soldiers that are under the age of 18 around the world. Many kidnapped and are forced into war. They are forced to do brutal things like kill their friends and family. They are also brainwashed by being drugged so they can kill in the war.
War always seems to have no end. A war between countries can cross the world, whether it is considered a world war or not. No one can be saved from the reaches of a violent war, not even those locked in a safe haven. War looms over all who recognize it. For some, knowing the war will be their future provides a reason for living, but for others the war represents the snatching of their lives without their consent. Every reaction to war in A Separate Peace is different, as in life. In the novel, about boys coming of age during World War II, John Knowles uses character development, negative diction, and setting to argue that war forever changes the way we see the world and forces us to mature rapidly.
Most would agree that murdering somebody before even being old enough to purchase a firearm is ridiculous, but the protagonists in both A Long Way Gone and All Quiet on the Western Front had to just that without even blinking an eye. Unfortunately, child soldiers have existed for many generations, and there is not much being done to stop it from happening. War has existed for centuries, but the use of children has proven to cause serious mental and physical illnesses that they will not recover from for the rest of their often shortened lives. Paul Baumer from All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, and Ishmael Beah from his memoir A Long Way Gone are forced to grow up and act much older and much more mature than they actually are as a
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.
...it may help us arrive at an understanding of the war situation through the eyes of what were those of an innocent child. It is almost unique in the sense that this was perhaps the first time that a child soldier has been able to directly give literary voice to one of the most distressing phenomena of the late 20th century: the rise of the child-killer. While the book does give a glimpse of the war situation, the story should be taken with a grain of salt.
Miller, Sarah Rose. “Child Soldiers.” Humanist 1 July 2002: 1-4. eLibrary. Web. 14 Feb. 2011.
After Beah became a speaker for the United Nations, he spoke that he “joined the army to avenge the deaths of (his) family.” (p. 199) Beah soon realized that the revenge he was seeking against the rebels that he believed killed his family would never come to an end. He was in a war within himself and it wasn’t going to end until he came to accept that he was done fighting. The atrocities that Ishmael Beah and the hundreds of thousands of child soldiers around the world have witnessed are memories that will be instilled in their minds forever.
When war is thought of, usually a picture comes to mind of man vs man, nut in reality, there is women, and even children. Children fighting, killing, dieing. The natural thought of a child may be happiness, games, and toys. What about guns, grenades, and explosions? That is right, guns. Children with guns, killing other human beings is quite disturbing once really thought of. Children from other countries killing other without regret. Child soldiers should be held accountable for their actions. These children committed serious crimes, they had a choice to do what they did, and these children lack emotion.
This story brings back some harsh truths about warfare, and explains why so many naïve young men joined up, only to suffer deaths well before their time.
Africa houses the largest population of child soldiers based on the prevalence of armed conflict in the continent. Some of the regions where child soldiers have become the norm rather than the exception include Chad, Somalia, Sudan, and the Central African Republic. Based on the statistics developed by the United Nations in the year 2013, eight government armies had made the commitment to stop the process of child recruitment for the use of warfare (Tiefenbrun 420). Although statistics are high in the African continent, other regions of the world such as Bahrain, Afghanistan and the greater Asia and oceanic areas abduct and force children into submission through acts of cruelty. These are violence and forced killings, while at other instances, some children join willingly in a bid to fight poverty, causes of revenge, and sometimes in defense of their neighborhoods and villages (Macmulin 460) . Child recruitment is an unacceptable practice and must relevant parties and actors must work together to stop it at any cost.