Girls behind the (front) lines

Abstract

Behind the rhetoric of soldiers fighting soldiers that fuels military propaganda and popular accounts of war around the world, children are maimed, tortured, starved, forced to fight, and killed in numbers that rival adult civilian casualties, and outnumber those of soldiers who die. These youthful casualties—some one and a half million in recognized armed conflicts in the last decade alone—are largely invisible: most of the military texts, the political science analyses, and the media accounts of war ignore the tactical targeting of children. In over a decade of studying war, I have seen children victims of war lying maimed in hospitals or dead in bombed out villages, and living or dying of starvation in refugee camps and on the streets after their families and homes have been attacked. I have seen children sold into forced labor and sexual servitude by international networks of profiteers who exploit the tragedies of war and the powerlessness of children. This constitutes a multi‐billion dollar transnational “industry.” Despite seeing all this, I have witnessed only a very small percentage of all the children directly affected by war. When I try to find out what has happened to other children in war, what (very) little data exists concerns mainly boys. This prompts me to ask: Where are the girls?