Reintegration of child soldiers
The consequences of child soldiering
Training and employment more important than psychosocial rehabilitation for former child soldiers in Uganda
Authors:
C. Blattman
Publisher:
Households in Conflict Network , 2006
What are the long-term effects of child soldiering? This study of northern Uganda finds that only a small percentage of ex-child soldiers experience ongoing psychological trauma. Instead, it suggests that the primary disadvantage these young people face compared with their peers are impediments to employment – especially physical disabilities, and deficits in education and training resulting from interrupted schooling.
The study is based on interviews conducted in northern Uganda with more than 1000 households and 741 young people, including 462 of whom had been abducted to serve as child soldiers in the civil war. The analysis presents qualitative and quantitative findings on the long-term psychological, economic and political effects of child soldiering. It identifies that:
- abductees lose nearly a year of schooling on average, with younger abductees less likely than others to return to schooling
- former abductees are more than twice as likely to have suffered a serious injuries
- the combined effects of lower education and injury on young people’s human reduce by nearly half the likelihood that a youth is later engaged in skilled work, and reduce by a third the average wage earned
- the greatest concern of many youth and their families is the interruption of education and employment.
However, the survey also found that exposure to conflict seems to increase political participation: abductees are more likely to vote and twice as likely to be community leaders. This trend was stronger among young people who were subject to especially violent experiences.
Finally, the study found that the average psychological impacts for combatants are moderate, with serious distress concentrated in the minority that personally experienced extreme violence - roughly a sixth of abductees. The average impacts of abduction on later aggression and social exclusion are meanwhile weak or nonexistent.
These findings, the author suggests, implies that the majority of ex-child soldiers may benefit more from an expansion of existing programs for adult literacy, skills education, agricultural improvement, and enterprise development, than from access to psychosocial therapies that are the focus of many rehabilitation and reconstruction programmes.
