Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism

Abstract

236 Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 17 No. 3 (2007) ISSN: 1546-2250 Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism David, Rosen M. (2005). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press; 199 pages. $22.95. ISBN 0813535689. To date, most of the writing about child soldiers comes from the discipline of psychology or from the perspective of human rights. The psychology writing tends to assume that children involved in war will be traumatized and the rights literature tends to see soldiering as one of the worst abuses of children. Without downplaying the indisputable horrors of some individuals’ experiences, David Rosen, a professor of anthropology and law at Fairleigh Dickinson University, asks us to understand child soldiering from a political perspective. He brings clear thinking to the field by daring to question the assumptions of the human rights regime. In so doing, he comes down firmly on the side of a growing number of scholars of childhood who insist on foregrounding children’s agency rather than always seeing them as hapless victims. Of course, there is a delicate line here. One does not want to run the risk of downplaying the violence many children experience, but a corrective is necessary to child protection discourses that almost completely remove any sense of agency in childhood. How do we return to a focus on agency? Rosen makes clear that Ethnography—particularly the methods of participant observation— has unsettled conventional concepts of childhood and remains the best way to study children. Observing and listening to the voice of the child in natural settings, where children are not disempowered by the regimes of formal interviewing, testing, and measurement, provide the clearest portraits of the competence of children (133). There are a lot of assumptions circulating in the world about what causes child soldiering, and very little hard evidence to back up 237 those assumptions. One of the most often repeated is the notion that the worldwide traffic in small arms is responsible for the rise in child soldiers. The argument is that smaller guns mean that smaller people can now wield them. To me the most useful achievement of this book is the effective skewering of the small arms argument. The author also does an excellent job of situating humanitarian discourse on child soldiers within debates about “new wars” and about the vulnerability of children. The core of the book is made up of three chapters on different historical and geographical examples of conflict and different models of youth participation in political violence. He looks at young Jewish partisans from World War II, the child soldiers of the recent civil war in Sierra Leone, and young Palestinians of the Intifada. The use of examples from the past is useful because the arguments become easier to follow when somewhat removed in time from the presently regnant child rights regime. He calls all of the young people in his case studies “child soldiers,” in order to demonstrate that using today’s lenses retrospectively forces us to look at the past differently, but also obliges us to acknowledge the constructed nature of the lenses. As a specialist on child soldiers of Sierra Leone, I noticed a few small factual errors in that section, though I would leave it to someone with a more nuanced understanding of the Middle East to judge the politics and accuracy of the chapter on Palestine. The author is hardly the first to point out that child soldiering is not a new phenomenon, but he makes the point clearly and forcefully. The introduction includes examples of children’s involvement in war from Western and non-Western societies, including the well-documented participation of children in the U.S. Civil War. He mentions the strangeness of the “straight 18 position,” noting that, “for the rest of the world… it is by no means clear that all persons under age eighteen are or even should be deemed children” (3). He directs our attention to the ahistorical basis of humanitarian discourse, noting, “Humanitarian advocacy shows little or no awareness that current humanitarian views about childhood itself are historically contingent and derive from a particular 238 constellation of ideas and practices that began to emerge in...