Engaging the Voices of Girls in the Aftermath of Sierra Leone's Conflict: Experiences and Perspectives in a Culture of Violence

Abstract

Introduction: Sierra Leone's Civil War and Gendered Representations of Child SoldiersIn March 1991, the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone (RUF/SL), led by former Sierra Leone Army corporal Foday Sankoh, and backed by Liberian warlord Charles Taylor, invaded Sierra Leone from Liberia. Although initially claiming to be political movement espousing liberation, democracy and a new Sierra Leone of freedom, justice and equal opportunity for all (RUF/SL 1995), the RUF in reality was loosely consolidated organization of largely disaffected young people that wreaked murderous havoc on the country. With its message of political revolution failing to attract popular support, the RUF embarked on savage 10-year civil war that had devastating consequences for civilians, particularly children.In many ways the RUF's campaign of cruelty and destruction was rooted in long history of structural violence. With its legacy of colonialism and slave re-settlement, Sierra Leone had been integrated into the world system in such way that its traditional social institutions were largely shattered and its economy was controlled by small group of international enterprises and kleptocratic governing elite (Clapham 2003; Richards 1998; Zack-Williams 1999). In this context of misrule and weakened social systems, the welfare of children1 was severely undermined. Children, who make up nearly half of Sierra Leone's population, had limited access to good quality education, and suffered from the effects of high unemployment and maldistribution of resources. By the end of the 1980s, disillusion and anger among young people were widespread. With civic life increasingly overtaken by avarice and violence, children were highly vulnerable to forces of aggression and war-lordism, and to perceptions of violent aggression as legitimate means to attain power and prestige (Abdullah et al. 1997; Krech and Maclure 2003). Following the outbreak of hostilities, children were rapidly engulfed by the conflict. Thousands of young people under 18 years of age became actively engaged as participants in Sierra Leone's armed struggle. As documented elsewhere, many of the children appear to have derived sense of personal empowerment and familylike solidarity from their attachment to militarized groups (Peters and Richards 1998). For many others, however, acquiescence to the norms of violence and terror, either as aggressors or as unwilling victims, was the only recourse for survival.As the war progressed and became more horrific, children engaged in the conflict were depicted by the world's media as being lost in vortex of iniquity and madness. The image of carrying out acts of horrible brutality became widely seen as the quintessence of youthful violence and irrationality (Skinner 1999). Moreover, once implicated in armed conflict, they were generally assumed to be permanently damaged:Even if [children] survive the rigors of combat, it's often too late to salvage their lives. Unrelenting warfare transforms them into preadolescent sociopaths, fluent in the language of violence but ignorant of the rudiments of living in civil society. (Newsweek 1995)By portraying as largely perverse and uncivilized, the bulk of international news reporting, and indeed much of academic and policy-oriented discourse, has tended to pathologize children who have been caught up in armed conflict and to discount the complex realities of the experiences and perspectives of the children themselves. In addition, this image has almost always been reified as masculine phenomenon, one that is persistently reinforced by familiar photographs of pre-pubescent boys armed with AK-47s. Because the majority of reports and international initiatives continue to regard the notion of child soldiers as either male or gender neutral, the effects of armed conflict on young girls, and the gender implications of children in combat, are rarely considered (McKay and Mazurana 2004). …