Child soldiers.

There are armed conflicts going on all over the world, and not only adults but children are suffering and dying. And it's not only those children who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when enemy soldiers come through or when a bomb is dropped on civilian establishments. Children are marching, fighting, killing, and dying--seventeen year olds, thirteen year olds, and youths as young as seven, who may not even understand what they are fighting for. It's sad that today, in the twenty-first century, children are still being used in such a way. It is disgraceful that people all over the world stand by and watch as children die for them. This can and must end.

According to the U.S. Campaign to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, the number of children under the age of eighteen who are at this time involved in armed conflicts throughout the world is over 300,000, and hundreds of thousands more could be sent to fight at any moment. An estimated two million youths have been killed in combat in the past decade alone, and three times as many have been seriously wounded or disfigured.

Some children join the army voluntarily, many of them from poverty-stricken homes with lives of hardship. For some, the army may provide a better life than they are accustomed to. They can get regular meals and wages or escape from an abusive home environment. But children in the army are frequently abused and harassed there, and the promise of minimal food and money often isn't worth the cost: lifelong trauma, physical disabilities, or death.

Children also join armed forces for other reasons, the most common being that it is practically a custom within their culture. They may feel passionately about a particular cause and see this as an opportunity to support it, or they may be insecure and feel the need to have control of a weapon. Being in the military may help raise a youth's confidence, if not mistreated or called into battle. Sometimes it isn't the child's choice at all. Occasionally parents volunteer their children for recruitment into the armed forces, and youths have also been abducted, press-ganged, or otherwise forcibly conscripted into the military.

Child soldiers are actually preferred by some army commanders because they are easier to manage and manipulate than adults. They aren't as likely to question orders. So, in the case of children, the commanding officer is clearly the power behind the guns, whereas adult soldiers are more likely to disobey orders, thereby detracting from the authority of the commander. Children are also more likely to carry out suicide missions than are adults.

The downside to child soldiers on a military level is that they are generally weaker than adults, both physically and mentally. They are more likely to be unable to sustain long marches or strenuous missions or carry heavy loads (which, despite their unsuitability, is often what they are forced to do). Children aren't as desensitized to violence; being less callous, they may be unable to continue when exposed to the horrors of battle. Stressful assignments or situations undermine a child's fortitude, and abuse from fellow soldiers and commanders, which often occurs, can severely traumatize a child or teen.

Child soldiers--mainly girls but occasionally boys too--are often sexually exploited. Whether this is done to distract adult soldiers from the horrors of war, to merely have some fun, or both, this sort of treatment can haunt children their whole lives. One girl from Honduras, who had served in the army, later said:

   At the age of thirteen, I joined the student movement. I had a dream to
   contribute to make things change, so that children would not be hungry....
   Later I joined the armed struggle. I had all the inexperience and the fears
   of a little girl. I found out that girls were obliged to have sexual
   relations "to alleviate the sadness of the combatants." And who alleviated
   our sadness after going with someone we hardly knew? At my young age I
   experienced abortion. It was not my decision. There is a great pain in my
   being when I recall all these things.... In spite of my commitment, they
   abused me; they trampled my human dignity. And above all they did not
   understand that I was a child and that I had rights.

Not all child soldiers are mistreated, harassed, or manipulated; some are protected and cared for. But no matter how much a child in the army is sheltered, all the pain and horror of war cannot be hidden. When a war is going on, commanders will send children into battle eventually. It is inevitable that they will witness--or worse, experience--atrocities that most other children can only have nightmares about.

Some people might maintain that the end is worth the means. If the cause that children are fighting for is a good one, perhaps it will save lives in the long run. It is possible that having a few hundred more soldiers on one side in a certain battle could be the difference between winning and losing a war--but it is improbable. It is much more likely that hundreds of youths will die in a battle that makes no ultimate difference whatsoever. Furthermore, it can work both ways: children can also support an unjust cause. Whichever the case, allowing so many children to die is a means that can never be justified by such an extremely dubious end. For even the noblest end, the means of child soldiery is both immoral and unconscionable.

Do adults have the right to tell youths that they cannot stand up for their views--that they must let adults handle the conflict for them? There are other ways to support a view than to wield a weapon and kill those you oppose; fighting is not necessarily the best solution. In an ideal world, there would be no war, no violence. And although this isn't and never will be an ideal world, people can strive toward this vision by finding nonviolent ways to support their beliefs. Perhaps recognizing that the use of child soldiers can never be justified will be a first step toward the recognition that no one should be a soldier. Still, in a world in which wars are seen as legitimate, can adults rightly forbid children to join in them? Perhaps the most important reason for doing so is that children can have no real idea of what they are consenting to. When they join up, few children are aware of what being in an army actually entails. By the time reality sets in, desertion is the only means of escape.

Child soldiers who survive often have a difficult time assimilating to society. They may be physically disabled or emotionally scarred and, having spent years of their lives training and fighting, may be unused to interacting within a social community. Studies show that a large number of former child soldiers become victims of prostitution. Youths frequently return home to discover their families are no longer alive or have dissolved. And even if the family is still alive and together, children are often unable to bridge the gap caused by years of separation and different lifestyles.

One of the current situations involving the use of child soldiers is the West Asian crisis. Afghan military units have been using children as soldiers for twenty years, raising and educating them in extremely militaristic schools and environments and utilizing them in the civil wars. Large numbers of children were recruited by the Taliban from a particular type of religious school in Pakistan called a madrasa. Madrasas are mainly for poor students who can afford little better, and many Afghan refugees attend them. The al-Qaeda were long rumored to have been recruiting children and training them for military combat; therefore many of the youths injured and killed during U.S. military activities against al-Qaeda and Taliban forces were likely in the service of Osama bin Laden's troops.

There are a number of national and international efforts to stop the use of child soldiers. The U.S. Campaign to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers upholds an international ban on recruitment of youths under eighteen years of age for armed services. Its aims are:

* U.S. ratification of the new child soldiers protocol

* elimination of U.S. military aid that facilitates the use of child soldiers by other governments or armed political groups

* increased U.S. governmental and nongovernmental support for programs to prevent child recruitment and to provide for the demobilization, rehabilitation, and social reintegration of child soldiers

* raising the U.S. enlistment age to eighteen.

Anti-child soldier organizations in other countries have similar goals, adjusted to the circumstances of their own nations.

We, the people of the world, adults and children alike--those who are soldiers as well as those who aren't--must support these organizations. We must acknowledge that children the world over are fighting, bleeding, suffering, and dying for us. Whether it is or isn't their choice, they don't deserve to be forfeiting their lives which have only just been embarked upon. Many children who aren't soldiers have to face death too--due to accidents, disease, or some other natural cause. But soldiering isn't natural. It's the result of people standing by while youths risk everything. These children are the future of humanity and, by endangering them, we endanger our own future.

Sarah Rose Miller is now a sixteen-year-old student of Watershed High School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This essay earned honorable mention in the thirteen-to-seventeen-year-old age category of the 2001 Humanist Essay Contest for Young Women and Men of North America.