Adolescents volunteering for armed forces or armed groups

This paper presents the main findings of research involving in-depth interviews with children from nine countries who stated that they had volunteered for combat, and discusses the implications of those findings for demobilisation and reintegration programmes.

It observes that, while many child soldiers are coerced into joining the army or armed forces, when asked, many children state that they volunteered to fight. Therefore, the paper argues, if preventive strategies and demobilisation and reintegration programmes are to succeed, they must take this fact into account and identify and address the reasons why children volunteer; if these issues are not addressed, there is a strong likelihood that the young soldiers will not want to leave the forces, or will rejoin them.

It identifies five major common factors which often lead to children deciding to join armed forces - war, poverty, education, employment and family:

• war itself creates the conditions of poverty, lack of education, and lack of family support which lead to children joining the conflict; it can also have the effect of normalising violence
• it is rare for children who are not living in poverty to become child soldiers. It can be considered a form of child labour, and consequently to seek to eliminate child soldiering without providing alternatives will lead to a rise in other forms of child labour
• a lack of education (including vocational training), or not being in school, increases the chances of young people joining armed forces. Poor children are less likely to be in school
• a lack of employment opportunities can lead to many young people joining the armed forces as a means of supporting themselves and possibly also their family
• family circumstances can be very important. Children without family support are particularly vulnerable to both forced and voluntary recruitment to secure their own survival and support. Less recognised is the fact that frequently children - both girls and boys - join to escape abusive or exploitative domestic situation. In other instances, families encourage their children to join up.

The paper recommends that, since these factors are cumulative, as well as mutually reinforcing, any programme to prevent child recruitment and promote demobilisation and reintegration that tackles all or several of them is likely to be significantly more effective than if they are addressed in isolation.

The paper also stresses that:

• there is a need to reduce domestic violence or abuse of children, which also requires addressing the wider problem of the status of girls and women in society
• it is often incorrectly assumed that girls do not fight, and therefore few girls are demobilised and reintegrated on a par with boys
• many boys who volunteered were pressured to do so to conform to expected male roles; therefore action to address the gender stereotyping of boys that encourages or pressures them into taking up arms would therefore also have a major impact on child soldiering.