World Vision supports United Nations campaign to end recruitment of child soldiers by 2016

The United Nations campaign, Children Not Soldiers is galvanising support to end and prevent national security forces using children as soldiers by the year 2016. 

Thousands of girls and boys have been recruited to work in state militias or armed groups in countries across the world.

While many participate on the front lines as combatants, many others are hired as porters of equipment or supplies, as cooks, spies or informants to the combat effort.

Four out of every ten children recruited are girls, often as sex slaves. 

The children’s charity World Vision says that, while many obstacles still exist, the goal of eradicating the recruitment of children to combat can be reached with increased political will and international co-operation.

Erica Hall, World Vision UK’s Senior Child Rights Advisor, said: “Governments must ensure their military practices explicitly prohibit the recruitment and use of children.

“But that’s only half of the effort needed. They must also do everything they can to ensure children are safe and cared for within their own communities, so that joining the military or an armed group is not seen as a better option to their current situation,” Erica adds. 

The use of child in combat has a devastating toll on children, families, their communities and society at large, often for generations. The practice not only exposes children to unimaginable hardships, but leaves them physically and emotionally scarred and in need of support and rehabilitation long after a conflict ends, or when they leave the conflict.

World Vision believes that any solution must focus on the reasons children take part in war and combat. While cases of abduction and forced recruitment to a state militia or other kind of armed group persist, the practice of targeting vulnerable children that results in their voluntary recruitment is still far too commonplace. Acute poverty, ethnic disputes, family pressure, the promise of money, food and shelter and protection all make children more susceptible to recruitment.

Those displaced by conflict and separated from their families are particularly vulnerable to being recruitment, and those children are often unaware of the dangers that go hand in hand with involvement in combat, including the potential for their physical or sexual abuse.

The complex reasons why children end up as soldiers must be addressed by governments in order to stop the practice.

World Vision continues to work with other partners to help rehabilitate child soldiers and reintegrate them back into their communities and their families. This includes helping children through periods of demobilisation, as well as providing support to overcome the trauma they have experienced, down to learning the local practices and beliefs of their home community that they may have missed out on or simply forgot from years away fighting.

To learn about the United Nations campaign Children Not Soldiers, go to http://childrenandarmedconflict.un.org/children-not-soldiers/