Children are easy targets to become child soldiers because they can easily be manipulated. Also, because of their circumstances such as having limited food or water supplies and limited education, many kids see becoming a child soldier as a way to survive.
In Uganda, Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony has created his army primarily through the violent abduction and forced enlistment of children. Child soldiers are forced to commit horrific acts because it is what they have been trained to do; it can be said that the children are being “brainwashed” to kill. As Anna Stickley, a British occupational therapist who has worked with child soldiers, described, “Some children were forced to kill, ambush villages, abduct other children and [even] kill their own families.”
"I did not kill anyone for the first four days of my captivity and then, on the fifth day, they said I had to prove I wasn't scared, they took me back to my village and ordered me to kill my father. At first, I said no, I can't kill my father, but then they said they'd kill us all and started beating me with a panga [machete]. I took the panga and cut him up. I then saw them do it to my mother. The first night, I was haunted by visions of my father as I tried to sleep. I could only cry silent tears as the rebels could not know that I regretted what I had done. They do it so that you can't go back home." Child soldier quoted by independent journalist Euan Delholm for Amnesty International.
Once under Kony’s authority these children are forced to commit violent tortures and it is almost impossible to escape. If a child soldier does manage to escape, the process of reentering a normal life is very hard. The United Nations and many countries have begun to send aid for ex-child soldiers in order to rehabilitate them and help them adapt to the society that they abandoned when they became child soldiers.
The circumstances and the atrocities that child soldiers are forced to endure go against everything that the “Rights of a Child” stands for. (Look at the Right of a Child tab to find out more!) At an age when children are supposed to be enjoying life and getting an education, child soldiers are denied that privilege. Instead they suffer from brutal hardships that no one --whether a child or even an adult-- should face.
As he marched for days through the bush without food or water, armed with an AK-47 to loot and to kill, Bosco Ojok dared not dream of going home. Just 14 when he was abducted near his northern Ugandan house by the Lord's Resistance Army, he never said a word to anyone about escaping from the rebels' world-renowned campaign of terror, which included cutting off the lips, ears and noses of civilians as they fought the government. If anyone heard, the frightened teen knew, it would mean his swift execution... continue reading this story by Time Magazine's Laura Blue and Jonathan Woodward...
