Response to Review of Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism—Getting Child Soldiers Right

Abstract

239 Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 17 No. 3 (2007) ISSN: 1546-2250 Response to Review of Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism—Getting Child Soldiers Right David M. Rosen Fairleigh Dickinson University Madison, New Jersey Citation: Rosen, David M.. (2007). "Response to Review of Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism— Getting Child Soldiers Right." Children, Youth and Environments 17 (3). Read this Book Review The main thrust of my book Armies of the Young is to place the issue of child soldiers in historical and comparative context and in doing so to restore to children’s lives a sense of agency that has been stripped away by contemporary humanitarian accounts of children at war. I appreciate the remarks made by the reviewer. Western attitudes toward child soldiers have undergone a seismic shift. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries the child soldier-hero was widely celebrated in Western literature, ranging from the street urchin Gavroche in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables,to the boy spy Kim in Kipling’s eponymous novel, to Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremain. In the real world, young Sioux boys fought against Custer at Little Big Horn, Jewish children served in Zionist and socialist resistance groups that fought the Nazis in the Warsawghetto and in the Sovietbacked partisan armies of Eastern Europe, and boys and girls fought in the Mau Mau rebellion against the British in Kenya. Yet over the last few decades, our image of the child as soldier has radically changed. Johnny Tremain has been replaced by Agu, the battered victim of a nameless war in Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation and the term “child soldier” now denotes the suffering of children at the hand of adults. No one can deny that there are many instances in which children and child soldiers are abused, but the long history of child soldiers in the West should serve as a clue that the situation is not simple. 240 Instead, contemporary Western cultural notions of childhood, which celebrate the innocence and vulnerability of the child, dominate all contemporary discussions of child soldiers and recognize no other reality. As a result, humanitarian narratives tend to be breathtakingly superficial and thin. Accounts from such diverse places as Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone show a striking portability of discourse that mirrors the portability of the entire human rights project, which in itself stems from the transnational movement of human rights personnel—advocates, writers, researchers, investigators, attorneys, prosecutors, judges, clerks— from one global “hot spot” to the next. These accounts of human rights violations, ideologically and methodologically stripped of their context, are unlikely to ever to yield a satisfying account of human experiences in situations of conflict. Treaties such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child, as well as humanitarian and human rights groups have created a new international legal definition of childhood as beginning at birth and ending at age 18. Many assume that this definition merely recognizes, secures, and protects children’s rights. In reality the children’s rights movement is a social movement that seeks to replace the multiple understandings of childhood that exist around the globe with a single universal definition. Yet, Western ideas never quite square with the actual experience of childhood in the rest of the world. So despite the many treaties, conferences and accords dealing with the child soldier problem, they have had absolutely no impact upon the number of children under arms. It is only when we understand that the ban on child soldiers is really part of a broader effort to impose Western ideas on more varied social systems that we begin to see why the child soldier problem is so difficult to resolve. International law tends to demonize and criminalize difference. A better way would be a system of international law that also incorporates local understandings of childhood and does not automatically override and restrict local solutions to difficult problems. David Rosen received his Ph.D. in anthropology from theUniversity of Illinois and his law degree fromPaceUniversitySchool of Law. He is currently 241 atFairleighDickinsonUniversity in Madison, New Jersey. His is the author of Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in...