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Child Soldiers: Victims or Perpetrators of Crime?

By Nicolás Brando

On 21 February, 2022

In Children , Gender , General , War

The existence of children enlisted in armed groups poses difficult questions to moral and political philosophers regarding our assumptions about what childhood is, or the relationship between victimhood and criminality, or autonomy, dependence and vulnerability. This post aims to briefly introduce how discourses on child soldiers can be morally problematic. The post is based on a forthcoming chapter (co-authored by Alexandra Echeverry) on child soldiers in Colombia.

In the movie Monos , a group of teenage guerrilla soldiers guard a kidnapped prisoner, and tend their cow. Through this simple plot, the film portrays the inner tensions, the plurality of roles, and the complex relationships between children in their condition as children, and their status as soldiers. 

The recruitment and use of children in armed conflict is a practice prevalent in all continents. Around 20 percent of UN member states allow minors (of 16 or 17) to enlist to their armed forces, including the United Kingdom, Canada, France and the United States. Child soldiers are considered to be involved in at least three quarters of current armed conflicts around the world, and armed groups in Africa, Asia and South America use children in hostilities (in the Central African Republic alone, more 14.000 children have been recruited in the last 8 years alone. They play a variety of roles, from combatants, wives, and bomb planters, to nurses, cooks or spies. Determining the exact number of child soldiers is difficult due to lack of accessibility to the regions where they are most prevalent, but it is estimated that the are currently more than a 100.000 active child soldiers, with about 40 percent being girls. The database of the Child Soldiers World Index will be active in mid-2022.

The notion of a ‘child soldier’ challenges some of our deepest held conceptual intuitions. We tend to imagine ‘childhood’ as a protected space, one that reflects the dependence, vulnerability, naivety, and innocence of a child. However, the idea of a ‘soldier’ forces us to reimagine the child in a radically opposing manner: as self-reliant, resilient, aggressive and violent. How can an innocent, vulnerable and dependent being be, at the same time, violent, aggressive and resilient?

This seeming oxymoron affects our moral judgment. When deliberating over how to deal with child soldiers, we feel that we must choose between treating them as children, or treating them as soldiers. It’s a binary opposition: either they are victims of war or they are perpetrators of war. This tension opens difficult questions from a perspective of justice. Most child soldiers are enlisted in armed groups which can commit terrible atrocities against the civil population. ISIS in the Middle East , Boko Haram in North West Africa , guerrilla and paramilitary groups in Colombia (and many National Armies as well) are some examples of armed forces that have terrorised, murdered, kidnapped, raped and pillaged their own populations. What does justice require for child soldiers and children engaged with armed groups in cases such as these? Ought they be considered as perpetrators of crime, even if they may have been coerced to play an active role in hostilities? Or should they be understood strictly as victims of war, despite of the active role they may have played in conflict?

In this post, I aim to briefly present the binary discourses of child soldiers (as victims and as criminals), and to explore the reasons why this strict opposition between victimhood and criminality fails to grasp the complexity of child soldiering, neglecting the lived experiences and sundry realities of these children, and how these should influence our moral evaluation of the subject.

Children as Victims

Grounded on international law, and supported by most social activism on subject , the standard discourse and politics that deal with children engaged in armed conflict considers that child soldiers are children first: they are vulnerable, easily manipulated, exploitable, and innocent. Their enlistment in armed groups cannot be considered an autonomous choice; and if they are not autonomous, they cannot be held responsible for their actions. In other words: child soldiers ought to be considered as victims rather than perpetrators of crime during armed conflict.

Because of being children, child soldiers are necessarily faultless of any action committed during armed conflict as they are, by definition, incapable of understanding the consequences of their actions, and too immature to consent to the acts that they commit. Moreover, the circumstances under which they enrol into armed groups (usually tied to poverty, destitution, and threat of death to them or family members) implies that they are under vulnerable conditions in which they are not capable of dissenting from the behaviour expected by their superiors.

Moral agency is considered as entirely absent or “systematically subverted” in their circumstances ( as Jeff McMahan states ). Thus, regardless of the actions they may have carried out while enlisted as soldiers, and regardless of the voluntariness of their decision to take part in armed conflict, they are defined as unable to make a truly voluntary decision, nor to understand the risks and moral complications of their actions.

But, why is this narrative so predominant? In part, creating a blanket discourse of all children as victims is a necessary consequence of the binary opposition of adulthood and childhood. Clear and distinguishable categories are used as “legal fictions” to make more manageable the operationalisation of resources and policy . Coordinating international action, marshalling resources, and facilitating children’s reintegration to their communities requires a clear and straight narrative that admonishes them from blame or liability . International support for the reintegration of children formerly engaged in armed conflict depend on the image of the child soldier as ‘victim’ in order to accrue compassion and help. Moreover, local communities may be reticent of the return of demobilised child soldiers to their towns; victimhood attempts to convince the local population that these children are not at fault. It aims, not only at the community perceive them as ‘victims’, but for the demobilised child soldiers to believe it and sell it also.

Children as Perpetrators of Crime

In stark opposition to the ‘victim’ narrative, it is not surprising to find journalistic accounts, government declarations, and local responses that stand in radical denial of the claim of child soldiers’ victimhood; they are often portrayed as irredeemable, as rotten, as incorrigible, and, in short, as nothing but criminals .

The criminal narrative stems from various sources. First, child soldiers are regularly forced by their superiors to commit acts of atrocity within their ranks or on their local communities in order to prove their allegiance and their commitment to the group. This means that in many instances, the image that these children leave in their local towns are of violence and cruelty . Many former child soldiers themselves grapple with the ambiguity of their guilt and responsibility. Arn Chorn-Pond former child soldier enlisted in the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia reflects: “I continue to think that inside of me I am a perpetrator and a victim. And that inside of me I’ve never thought I’m a good person. I always think I’m a bad kid and I’m a bad person.”

Moreover, despite that official governmental discourses on child soldiers emphasise the victim narrative, this discourse tends to shift when needed, in order to justify military actions by the government forces on armed groups. For example, in two separate bombings of guerrilla and dissident bases in 2021 in Colombia (March and September), five minors were killed. Diego Molano, current Colombian Minister of Defence, in both instances has justified the act by putting the blame on the groups that have recruited children, and by appealing to the justifiability of the act due to the high profile of the other targets killed in the attack ( El Espectador 2021 ). Molano went as far as to claim that children enrolled in armed groups have been transformed into “war machines” , which made them legitimate government targets ( Turkewitz and Villamil 2021 ).

Portrayal of child soldiers as villainous criminals can work as a strategy to justify certain government actions, but it also reflects the relationship and fear that many local communities have regarding the return of former child soldiers . Many child soldiers have to pass through gruesome initiation processes in which, in many cases, they ought to prove their allegiance to the armed group by burning their bridges with their communities. This means that their return may not be as simple, as local communities may be reticent of accepting their return.

The Problem with Binaries

Strict narratives of child soldiers, be them as victims or as perpetrators serve particular political purposes. As to victimhood, this discourse aims to improve community support, funding and backing for organisations that support the reintegration processes of former child soldiers ( Salamanca Sarmiento 2019: see chapter 4). On the other hand, criminal narratives serve a fundamental political purpose: governments use them to justify violent action against armed groups. A first issue, thus, with this strict construction of narratives is the strategic selectivity inherent in their use .

Image copyright of Uğur Gallenkuş. Click image for access to his photo feed.

While victimhood serves a valuable strategic purpose (gathering support and funding for the reintegration of former child soldiers into society), its focus on highlighting the vulnerability, trauma, and need for protection tends to work against an acknowledgement of children’s agency, and the potentially active role they should play in their reintegration into their communities, and in dealing with their own actions and past (see Derluyn et al. 2015 ). In an interview with Salamanca Sarmiento ( see 2019: 106 ), a demobilised Colombian child soldier, after watching a documentary on the impact of armed conflict on a civilian population, mentioned his feeling of guilt and responsibility over the actions he had done while in conflict, and that he wanted to make amends and deal with his responsibility. Experts in charge of his reintegration process denied him from acting on his responsibility by claiming that “ He is a child, he needs to study, that’s his only responsibility .” By being labelled exclusively as victim of conflict he was barred from actively engaging with his responsibility and his feeling of guilt.

Strict constructions can lead to “ narrative tensions ” for the former child soldiers themselves, and for the social workers and other people working with them. The simplification of the diverse realities and lived experiences of individual child soldiers into binary categories restricts children’s capability to engage with their lives, their past and their futures as active agents. It demands from them to accommodate to and internalise their status.

Former child soldiers reintegration process requires accounting for their subjective experience, and their age, gender, disability, ethnicity and etc . The reasons why children and adolescents take part in armed conflict, their experiences while in conflict, their relationship with their local communities and their past all differ to such a high extent, that attempting to box them into neat categories does not benefit them.

This phenomenon, as applied to child soldiers, reflects the wider problem on how children and childhood are categorised and homogenised more generally. The fact that we determine how children ought to be treated based on strict age categories traps actual children’s lived experiences into idealised, and sometimes corrosive categories.

In the case of child soldiers, assuming the absolute victimhood of minors fails to perceive them as active agents who, in many cases, have enrolled voluntarily and willingly into armed conflict. In his memoire , Santiago L., a demobilised child soldier enlisted in the FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forced of Colombia) when he was 12 years-old, portrays a picture of the engagement of children in armed conflict very different from the pure victimhood discourse. Despite some family issues and an unstable home environment, before enlisting with the FARC-EP, Santiago had sufficient opportunities in life. He had access to an education, he had guardians who took care of him, fed him, gave him work. He had trouble, however, staying in one place and keeping a routine, so he moved from aunt, to uncle, to brother, to friend, till he ended up going to a FARC-EP meeting in town, and requested to enlist in the guerrilla army. He was not forced to do so, he was not even asked to enlist; Santiago went to the woods out of his own accord, and, despite the hesitance of the officers to recruit someone that young, he insisted that he wanted to be a soldier .

As Mark Drumbl argues, reflecting on the ICC trail against former child soldier and one of the leader’s of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda, Dominic Ongwen, “There is great diversity in how children enter conflict and, once in conflict, what they do. Recognizing this diversity is essential to the success of individual reintegration.” Ogwen was abducted by the LRA when he was around 12 years-old, later to become a leader of the group, committing the same crime of abducting and recruiting child soldiers as he suffered in his preteens. Is he simply a criminal? Or should he count as a victim of the system that created him?

Blurring Categories

The discourses that conceptualise child soldiers in a particular way have a strong impact on how society perceives them, on how policy-makers and politicians deal with them, how they are treated by the legal and judicial systems, and, very importantly, how former child combatants perceive themselves, their past and their role in their reintegration process. Strict distinctions between victims and perpetrators, between vulnerable and autonomous individuals, and between guilty and innocent parties clash with the reality that children live in armed conflict. While appealing to the vulnerability, innocence and victimhood of children ensures they are provided with safeguards and special protections; these discourses omit an important part of what these children and youths have lived through, and how they deal with their own life and choices. They incapacitate these individuals in an important way; they restrict an individual’s capacity to affront their actions, and it limits their understanding of themselves as active and autonomous agents capable of making choices, making mistakes, and working to amend the errors in their past.

This feeling of being silenced is very prominent in reflections of former child soldiers. Take the case of Jazmín, a 16 year-old girl demobilised from an armed group in Colombia :

“Everyone judges me without knowing my past […] When I talk and unburden myself, people judge me. I cry for my childhood. When I want to share what I live they don’t listen because they say I’m strong. I want someone to listen. I don’t want pity, I don’t want compassion, I don’t want to be that person who’s alive but dead; I don’t want these pills that make me keep quiet.” (translated by the author).

This silencing and incapacitating of child soldiers is particularly concerning as it relates to girls. Gendered assumptions abound regarding the roles and attitudes of girl child soldiers . Research by Nabuco Martuschelli and Bandarra (2020) with girl soldiers in Colombia portray the obstacles (the triple silencing) that affect demobilised girl soldiers due to them being stereotyped and homogenised to traditional gender expectations in the media, by public authorities and in their communities. Asking the girl soldiers, and various other groups in civil society (students, teachers and police officers) about the reasons why children enlist in armed groups, showed that while almost half of the girl soldiers (46 percent) considered their enrolment as a voluntary choice made because it suited their interests, goals and desires, around 70 percent of the individuals from civil society assumed them as necessarily being involved as victims (i.e. due to coercion, poverty or domestic violence) ( Carmona Parra et al. 2012). See a concise and clear reflection by Rose Khan on the impact of gendered stereotypes and norms on how girl soldiers are presumed and treated .

Image copyright of Wissam Nassar for The New York Times.

On the other hand, discourses of full autonomy, of guilt, and of child soldiers as fully conscious and voluntary perpetrators of crime omit to consider the conditions under which many of these children and youth came into armed conflict . They neglect (sometimes on purpose) the social and economic conditions which force many children to take part in armed conflict, and they are blind to the plural roles that children may play in armed groups, and the most often exploitative, oppressive, and harmful conditions with which they have to coexist while in conflict. As Bandy Brian, another demobilised child soldier in Colombia reflects:

All my life I’ve been criticised for my past but no one understands that I had only one bifurcation in my path. I had to choose, and I chose the path I chose because I thought it was the best for me at the moment. But I was mistaken, and that’s when my horrible past (that I wish to forget) began . 15-year-old former child combatant, Bandy Brayan (translated by the author)

Even if testimonies from demobilised child soldiers point towards a more autonomous and self-assertive understanding of their relationship and enrolment with armed groups, the fact that many of these choices tend to be made under duress, and in a context of poverty, need and violence, must make us take any absolute statement with a pinch of salt.

Closing Remarks

This post’s objective was very humble. Namely, to provide a first point of reflection on the issues surrounding child soldiers, and how assumptions about who a child is can reflect and effect strongly how they are treated and recognised as moral subjects. The case of child soldiers opens up important questions about our assumptions of what characterises children, how our assumptions about childhood affect their treatment, or the difficult relationship between autonomy, dependence, victimhood and criminality evolve in particular scenarios.

NOTE: I’ve consciously only provided links to sources which are accessible to everyone: either open-access papers, or public sources. I’ve thus omitted all sources which are only accessible to the academic community (such as paywalled academic publishers). This is done in order to ensure that everyone can follow the debate.

This research was funded by the British Academy through the Newton International Fellowship funds.

Nicolás works on questions related to discrimination of and justice for vulnerable groups. He is particularly interested in issues related to the status of children in theories of justice. He is a Derby Fellow at the School of Law and Social Justice (University of Liverpool). He is currently working on a monograph entitled “A Political Theory of Childhood.”

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Child Soldiers: Recruitment and Abuse of Children in Armed Conflicts

The main aim of this Master's thesis is to analyse how children are recruited and abused as soldiers in armed conflicts, and how international humanitarian law protects their rights. The thesis is divided in two main parts, theoretical and empirical. In theoretical part are introduced the most important documents of international humanitarian law and international human rights law, including international governmental and non-governmental organizations which promote these rights. In empirical part, the author focuses on case studies, namely the case of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and the case of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The author was not interested in finding similarities in these two cases, but conversely, to point out on the uniqueness of each case. To precise, the thesis is analysing reasons for the recruitment and abuse of children by the LRA and ISIS, and the legal responsibility of both groups. The author of this thesis chose as a methodology a...

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Child soldiers: Victims or perpetrators?

An essay by manfred nowak.

About the author:

Manfred Nowak is a lawyer and Professor of International Human Rights. From 2004 to 2010, he served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture. In this essay he writes about his experiences, the path taken by child soldiers and the question of guilt.

In October 2019, I presented a study to the United Nations General Assembly as an independent expert and lead author, focusing on the ethical and legal permissibility of depriving children of their freedom. While adults can be taken into police custody, investigated, put on trial or even imprisoned for life for their crimes, the Convention on the Rights of the Child is more restrictive. Article 37(b) designates the detention of children as a measure of last resort. It should only be applied when a child (up to the age of 18) is deemed to be so dangerous that milder measures are insufficient to protect other people or the child themselves from harm.

The reason for this is that children and adolescents are in a stage of development and consciousness where they should not or can only be held to limited account for their actions. Moreover, depriving children of liberty constitutes a form of structural violence that usually leads not to the ‘improvement’ of the child's behaviour but to its deterioration, thus triggering a spiral of violence.

The study, titled ‘United Nations Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty’, found, based on empirical studies and the evaluation of a large number of statistical data, that, conservatively estimated, more than 7 million children worldwide are behind bars. The vast majority of them are children placed in so-called ‘institutions’, ranging from orphanages to facilities for ‘difficult-to-manage’ children, due to challenging family circumstances, disabilities or their non-conforming and antisocial behaviour. The second-largest group includes children who have already been deemed criminally responsible (in most states from the age of 14) and are in police custody, under investigation or serving a sentence. Many children or minors who have fled or emigrated from their countries of origin, either with their families or alone, are currently being held in closed refugee camps or detention centres. The Global Study calls for a radical rethinking of the system for all these children, namely towards deinstitutionalisation, diversion and a ban on migrant detention. In many states, these recommendations have led to significantly fewer children behind bars.

Two chapters of the study deal with children in armed conflicts and those detained for reasons of national security, mainly due to their affiliation with terrorist or extremist organisations.

Children and adolescents are often lured under the influence of extremist or terrorist organisations such as the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq through social media or hate preachers and then forced to commit particularly brutal crimes. In many African countries, like Sierra Leone, Uganda, Somalia and Nigeria, children are abducted by armed groups and forced to become child soldiers, engaging in extremely violent acts on the front lines, including torture, rape and mutilation.

In my previous role as the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, I interviewed young people in prisons who had been abducted from school and abused as child soldiers by armed groups like the Maoists in Nepal and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. After attempting to escape, they had been tortured and cruelly punished by means of mutilation and eventually rearrested and subjected to torture and punishment by government forces due to their affiliation with these armed groups – a horrific cycle from which escape seemed nearly impossible.

Are these children victims or perpetrators?

This question is explored in the film ‘ Theatre of Violence ’, which deals with the well-known case of child soldier Dominic Ongwen. He was abducted at the age of nine by the particularly brutal Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Northern Uganda, forced to commit cruel crimes as a child and later rising to become one of the leading commanders in the LRA. In 2021, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for particularly brutal war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Ongwen admitted to committing these crimes. However, in his appeal, he argued that his terrible experiences as a child soldier and the brutal LRA regime had left him with no choice but to commit these serious crimes. He claimed that his compulsion and resulting mental illness should be considered grounds for exonerating his crimes, even crimes he had committed as an adult. The appeals chamber rejected this argument and upheld the 25-year sentence for the former child soldier, who was then 40 years old.

Theatre of Violence

Theatre of Violence – Official Trailer UK

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In the Global Study, we demand that child soldiers and children involved in terrorist or extremist organisations be treated primarily as victims and not as perpetrators. This means that they should generally not be arrested, prosecuted or punished, but rather reintegrated into society through rehabilitation and deradicalisation measures, ideally reuniting them with their families. The ICC’s Rome Statute also stipulates that children under the age of 18 should not be held accountable for their actions before the ICC.

But what about former child soldiers who commit serious crimes as adults?

Criminal law is based on the Roman legal principle Nulla poena sine culpa – no punishment without guilt . This principle means that individuals can only be held accountable for their criminal acts if they have acted with culpability – intentionally or negligently. Children are absolutely incapable of culpability until they reach the age of criminal responsibility, usually at 14 years, because they lack the maturity to understand the wrongfulness of their actions. Adolescents up to the age of 18 are only partially culpable. However, adults who suffer from a severe mental disorder or profound impairment of consciousness, or who commit a crime while in a state of full intoxication, can be exempted from punishment due to lack of culpability.

Even though child soldiers are usually deeply traumatised for life due to their terrible childhood experiences, they eventually reach an age where, like other adults, they become criminally responsible for crimes committed as adults and can therefore be held accountable under criminal law. Exceptions apply only if they can truly demonstrate that their terrible experiences as child soldiers have led to a severe mental disorder that excludes them from being held responsible. Such a decision can only be made by a criminal court like the ICC on a case-by-case basis, taking into account all circumstances and considering psychiatric assessments. Even when there are no grounds for exoneration, the traumatic experiences they had as child soldiers should be taken into account as mitigating factors in sentencing, as highlighted by a judge at the International Court of Justice in a dissenting opinion.

The ethical dilemma remains – for the victims of these crimes, for the perpetrators who are also victims, for the judges who must decide on such difficult issues and for society. It would be much better if the international legal prohibition against recruiting child soldiers was finally enforced in practice. Unfortunately, the reality is different: often, it is (former) child soldiers like Dominic Ongwen who recruit new child soldiers.  

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“This is my story”: Children's war memoirs and challenging protectionist discourses

• Go to the author page Helen Berents

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Abstract Protectionist frames of children as passive, uncomprehending victims characterize the international architecture of responding to children in war. However, stories such as those in children's war memoirs draw attention to the agency and capacity of children to negotiate and navigate distinct traumas and experiences in war. Children experience particular vulnerabilities and risks in conflict zones and their potential as contributors to the solutions to war must also be taken seriously. Children's authoritative voices in memoir writing reveal the limitations of protectionist-dominated approaches and offer a rationale for taking the participatory elements of international humanitarian mechanisms and responses to conflict more seriously. Such a move may help address the comprehensive silencing of children's voices in the institutional architecture concerned with children in war.

Introduction

“Who is Malala?” [the man] demanded. … My friends say he fired three shots, one after another. … By the time we got to the hospital my long hair and Moniba's lap were full of blood. Who is Malala? I am Malala and this is my story. 1

So concludes the prologue to I Am Malala, the memoir of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl who campaigned for education in the Swat Valley and was shot by the Taliban at age 15 in October 2012. Yousafzai frames the book as a story of a specific experience of conflict and its consequences. Sudanese former child soldier Emmanuel Jal prefaces his book, War Child, by noting that “this one is not meant to be a history of a country to be read by scholars. It is the story of one boy, his memories, and what he witnessed.” 2 Seventeen-year-old Syrian refugee Nujeen Mustafa says:

I hate the word refugee more than any word in the English language. … The year 2015 was when I became a fact, a statistic, a number. Much as I like facts, we are not numbers, we are human beings and we all have stories. This is mine. 3

The genre of children's war memoir is growing in popularity in literary publishing. Narratives of children's experiences of war, such as a memoir, open space to overcome the distance and abstraction of numbers. Thus, this article argues that such stories offer a counter-narrative to dominant framings of children in war as passive victims. Children's war memoirs show children who, even when violence and conflict overwhelm their lives, find ways of navigating, resisting, surviving amidst conflict. Such memoirs reflect how ideas of children and childhood are constructed, reveal “cultural spaces available to host and circulate these narratives” 4 and are fundamentally located in a space of “struggle for recognition of individuals and groups” 5 . Thus, they can reveal complex aspects of children's experiences of war that offer a rich resource for better understanding children's lives in war and possibilities for better addressing violence and supporting peace.

Protracted conflict, increasingly urbanized warfare 6 and unprecedented forced displacement around the world 7 present a particularly challenging environment for children and for efforts to protect and empower them. The United Nations (UN) Secretary-General's 2018 Annual Report on Children in Armed Conflict noted that “children continue to be disproportionately affected by armed conflict in many country situations”, with a significant increase in violence through 2017 compared to the previous year. 8 Shifting patterns of conflict since 2016 have seen children increasingly caught up in violence, including recruitment by armed groups in countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, the Syrian Arab Republic, Yemen and South Sudan. 9 Ongoing violence in the Syrian Arab Republic, Iraq, Myanmar and other countries has resulted in the death, maiming, starvation and serious illness of large numbers of children. 10 The use of children by terrorist groups such as Boko Haram and the Islamic State, including as suicide bombers, 11 presents new challenges in responding to the multiple and complex forms of violence and risk that children face.

The difficult and complex environments of conflicts have a profound effect on those who live within these spaces. Children actively resist war and go on living amongst its daily consequences. Despite this, their agency is largely absent when speaking about children and war. Their overwhelming, and pressing, requirements for safety, shelter, food and health care, as well as the longer-term needs of education and employment, dominate discussions of children's experiences of conflict, and position them as passive. Such totalizing narratives of victimhood obscure and homogenize the complexity of the lived experience of children in war. Legal and humanitarian mechanisms for assisting children in war, including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the Geneva Conventions and the Children and Armed Conflict Agenda, are characterized by a protectionist discourse which limits capacity for understanding multiplicity of experience. Saying this is not to dismiss the significant role these documents and practices have in productively supporting children in conflict, but rather to ask what other experiences of war children have, and what other forms of support they require. To fully understand the implications of children's experiences of conflict, we must consider the persistent everyday lives of those within conflict zones not reducible to either “victim” or “combatant”. As children's agency is often erased in formal discussions of preventing or resolving conflict, accounts of their experiences of everyday life can offer a way of recognizing their capacity and legitimating their voice and experience, particularly when produced for mass literary markets. Taking lived experience as meaningful helps in understanding how children experience conflict and suggests ways for working with them for change. It is difficult for these stories to be heard beyond zones of conflict which are distant from the realities of many people's lives globally, particularly in the global North.

This article considers the particular example of child-owned and -authored narratives of war in order to discuss the limits of protectionist framings and illustrate its argument for taking children's experiences seriously. Narratives produced by children offer a different way of thinking about children in conflict. The article takes children's war memoirs as an example of the value and complexity of children's own narratives. As a form of popular literature, they offer a way of accessing the detail of children's daily experiences of conflict. Thus, this article suggests that children's war memoirs offer a site where the complexities of children's experiences of conflict are visible and accessible to a broad popular audience. Taking such accounts seriously can offer a productive way of thinking about children's agency in war that can inform discussions about institutional architecture and humanitarian interventions.

This article illustrates its argument by considering a range of popular children's war memoirs. This includes stories of former child soldiers such as Sierra Leonean Ishmael Beah's 2007 A Long Way Gone 12 and Emmanuel Jal's 2009 account of his time in the Christian Sudanese Liberation Army, War Child, 13 as well as the 2015 I Am Evelyn Amony, 14 which recounts Evelyn Amony's time with the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and as the wife of LRA leader Joseph Kony. It also includes stories of those who have lived through and escaped from war such as Syrian refugee Nujeen Mustafa's 2016 Nujeen, telling the story of her journey to Europe in a wheelchair to escape Syria's civil war, and 8-year-old Syrian Bana Alabed's 2017 Dear World, 15 which began as live tweets from Aleppo during the 2016 siege. Finally, it includes, from 2013, I Am Malala 16 by Malala Yousafzai, telling of a young woman's activism against extremism. This is a non-exhaustive collection of children's war memoirs, chosen to illustrate a breadth of experience and selected due to popular reception to these stories.

In discussing children's war memoirs as a source of knowledge about conflict that centres the capacity and agency of the child and may offer one avenue for considering how such agency can be better accounted for in formal responses to children in conflict, there is an important consideration of the ethics of “using” these texts, analyzing them, bringing them in to broader debate. 17

Kate Douglas, writing in her scholarly discipline of literary studies, offers an incisive consideration of the ethics of considering trauma texts authored by young people, calling for the need to “find appropriate methods for reading these texts within diverse disciplinary and scholarly contexts”. 18 She draws attention to how the narratives of these texts may be taken up in ways that are potentially damaging and reflects on the intersectional imbalances of power and voice in their production. More crucially, she asks scholars to reflect on their engagement with accounts of trauma. While this article cannot delve into the content of these memoirs as much as desired due to space limitations (and as it is not a literary studies analysis but one grounded in international relations), I am profoundly conscious of not reproducing the worst forms of superficial analysis or unethical engagement with the texts considered here.

Children's capacity is often excluded in dominant narratives of their experiences of war; this article suggests that children's war memoirs can work to complicate such simple narratives. This article first unpacks the dominant narrative of passivity and totalizing victimhood that characterizes much framing of children's experiences of war; it argues that such a framing limits our capacity to fully understand children's experiences and narrows possible responses and support for children affected by conflict. This limited conception of childhood is evident in the protectionist framing of the UN's Children and Armed Conflict agenda, as well as much of non-governmental organizations’ (NGO) advocacy. Instead, this article argues that recognizing children as having agency and working to respond to violence and navigate conflict allows children's stories to be seen as a legitimate source of knowledge about conflict. Building on this, the article secondly outlines an argument for recognizing the importance of everyday accounts in constructing fuller and more responsive understandings of conflict.

Having demonstrated that the agency of children should be considered more critically, the article turns to consider the role of children's war memoirs as a powerful, culturally recognized space for children's voices in accounts of war. It argues that memoir can be seen as one site where children's agency in war is evident. Such books offer stories of agency, resiliency and meaning-making by children affected by war, demonstrating the diverse ways children are affected by and navigate armed conflict. Children's authoritative voice in memoir writing reveals the limitations of protectionist-dominated approaches and offers a rationale for taking the participatory elements of international human rights mechanisms and responses to conflict more seriously. Through these explorations, this article argues for taking children's own stories of conflict into account in order to help move towards addressing the systematic and comprehensive silencing of children's voices in the institutional architecture concerned with children in war.

Children's vulnerability

Definitions of childhood are contested, but there is a broad consensus that childhood is the period from birth to 18 years of age. At the most basic definitional level, the CRC defines a child as “every human being below the age of eighteen unless, under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier”. 19 While in some legal and cultural systems, different competencies are recognized before (and sometimes after) the age of 18 – such as voting, purchase and consumption of alcohol or tobacco, age of consent for sexual activities, and legal accountability – at some point every society recognizes a person as transitioning from childhood to a “competent adult”. The notion of the child that dominates in popular discourse and underpins international conventions such as the CRC is presented as universal but is in fact the product of Western philosophical, psychological and sociological thought: an incomplete, irrational “becoming” 20 who is the passive recipient of socialization and a site of investment for the future. 21 Thus, childhood can be understood as the condition experienced by all children, 22 and their passivity and incompleteness justifies the protectionism of the family, concerned institutions, the State and the international community. 23 Removing children from the public sphere and legislating an “appropriate place” for children reinforces their incomplete status and legitimizes their marginal condition and silencing. They are often seen as “presocial”, which precludes them from being able to articulate political or social positions. 24 Brocklehurst argues that there is a “conceptual separation” of the child and the political, a “containment” of the concept of the child as specifically not political. 25 This also allows the child to be deployed as a motivation for political action (for example, as an emotive symbol) when necessary.

In being located in the passive, private sphere against the public, political world, the child is prevented from participating or speaking. Moreover, the dominant discourse delegitimizes any attempt by children to speak for themselves. It places “the child” in front of the multiplicity of experiences and institutionalizes the dominant conception of childhood. The concept of “children” as seen by adults may not reveal the lived experience of young people themselves, a “phenomenon of duality and misrepresentation which is unique to this cohort, since they cannot represent themselves”. 26 Cordero Arce points out that children are considered dependent, incompetent and irrational, not because they actually are any of these things, but because adults acknowledge children only as lacking competency and rationality; furthermore, he notes that “the child” embodies a whole set of ideas that reinforce this formalized adult “knowing”. 27

These cultural norms of childhood, even when not in conflict zones, limit children's agency and prevent them from being seen as competent contributors to communities and societies. 28 In conflict, children are often characterized inherently as victims. They are not seen as having agency, and thus

most approaches to building peace marginalize issues surrounding children: they are little discussed in peace-building policies, seldom asked to participate in peace-building projects, and peace-building strategies are rarely informed by knowledge regarding either their wartime experiences or their post-conflict needs. 29

Children in conflict zones, therefore, may be perceived by aid and development agencies and collective public understandings as “the ultimate victim”. 30 Childhood has been “decontextualized” and is characterized by “dependence and vulnerability”. 31

As a result, children in conflict environments are portrayed as being consistently, and universally, negatively affected. With their childhoods “lost” or “stolen”, children in these environments are seen as either dangerous delinquents to be reformed or innocent victims to be protected. Adults label former child combatants as “out-of-place” and dangerous because they have transgressed what is seen as appropriate behaviour and appropriate place for a child or young person. Additionally, the presence of large youth populations is constructed as a thing to fear. 32 Alternatively, children are constructed as passive victims, seen as the unwilling and uncomprehending tool of vicious regimes 33 or the unwitting sufferer of tragic circumstance. Thus, collectively, young people are frequently portrayed as dangerous; individually they are seen as in need of care and protection.

Yet, a compelling and every-growing body of detailed research evidence demonstrates that children are not merely or solely victims or delinquents. In 1990, James and Prout identified the key features of the “emergent paradigm” of research and researchers committed to recognizing children in their own right. 34 They argue that while children are still in a process of development, their experiences are not invalidated because of this. They note that childhood can be understood as a social construction, contingent on geographic and historical location; comparative analysis demonstrates a multiplicity of childhoods that run counter to the notion of a universal construction. Those researchers adopting and contributing to this view see children as active in the construction of their own social lives. Young people thus acquire a form of full social position, different in each society, whereby they occupy “subordinate positions within the social structure as ‘dependent beings’ rather than ‘dependent becomings’”. 35

In conflict contexts, children act to negotiate the difficulties they encounter. This includes joining but also escaping from armed groups, supporting their families financially and taking on head-of-household roles, and persisting to pursue their education when possible. They also have their own opinions on the state of national or local politics, mourn and grieve for loss, and navigate insecure and violent contexts. 36 In Colombia, children affected by the conflict, living as internally displaced people in informal communities, position themselves as active in daily efforts to mitigate violence and construct strong community. 37 Finnstrom's work in Uganda demonstrates that child rebels do not position themselves as passive but rather negotiate, as actors with agency, their own circumstances. 38 Similar examples are evident in other environments. 39 In conflict zones, children may continue to pursue everyday activities such as schooling, play or family life. 40 Even in the foundational document for the UN's Children and Armed Conflict agenda, Graça Machel's 1996 report, there is evidence of children undertaking a wide array of activities and supporting their communities. 41 These kinds of activities may, as Kate Lee-Koo argues, evidence “experience, skill, strength, cunning, political consciousness, capacity for judgement and the ability to act, all of which … qualify as a form of agency and all of which have the capacity to shape a child's immediate environment”. 42

It is crucial, in recognizing the agency of children, to acknowledge that the ability to exercise agency is intimately connected to power. States or institutions have the capacity to act in a strategic manner – planning, using resources, establishing control. However, those individuals or groups who are marginalized and lack power can still respond to the context of their daily lives. De Certeau refers to this as “tactical agency”; 43 often invisible, it involves individuals and communities navigating and negotiating structures of power and oppression. Recognizing that children have agency is to recognize that children can enact that agency in ways which are broadly seen as negative, such as joining armed groups and participating in armed conflict, or positive, such as participating in peacebuilding or seeking out education or employment opportunities post-conflict. If we take the definition of “child soldier” from the 1997 Cape Town Principles, we can see that the range of activities in which children are compelled to engage within conflict are multiple and complex:

“Child soldier” in this document is any person under 18 years of age who is part of any kind of regular or irregular armed force or armed group in any capacity, including but not limited to cooks, porters, messengers and anyone accompanying such groups, other than family members. The definition includes girls recruited for sexual purposes and for forced marriage. It does not, therefore, only refer to a child who is carrying or has carried arms. 44

Children recruited to armed groups also find ways of avoiding their responsibilities or subverting orders, to avoid killing or hurting other children for example. Thus, even within a subset of children affected by conflict – child soldiers – it is evident that children exhibit tactical agency in a range of ways.

It is instructive here to bring in Marshall Beier's distinction between “agency” and “subjecthood”: the former refers to the “capacity to act”, while the latter implies “mastery of one's own agency or the idea that actions are the products of one's (at least relatively) autonomous choices”. 45 Child soldiers, for instance, “might have some measure of acknowledged agency”, but “recognition of autonomous subjecthood runs counter to hegemonic understandings of childhood”. 46 To reduce children in war to simply victims limits our capacity to fully understand their experience. As Beier argues,

the denial of subjecthood leaves little room for serious engagement with the possibility that some young people might choose participation in armed conflict as an autonomously reasoned survival strategy. Moreover, directing our gaze instead toward the presumed “real” subjects – those adults in the name of whose projects child soldiers fight – also leaves us potentially inattentive to the material conditions that could motivate a young person to see such a choice as an opportunity for improved circumstances. 47

Such attentiveness to the agency of children moves towards recognizing their subjecthood, as per Beier's insight, and permits an understanding of children's experiences of conflict as being constituted of victimization, but also acts of resistance and resiliency. It offers an understanding of “children” that takes lived experience seriously and recognizes the inadequacies of universalizing notions of childhood.

To understand children as being worthy of study allows engagement with children in order to understand how they construct and determine their own lives, the lives of those around them, and their societies. In conflict-affected environments, where children act in ways beyond the “appropriate” forms of childhood, flexible and responsive approaches to children allow them to be recognized alongside other marginalized and structurally powerless groups. If children are active contributors and participants in conflict environments, approaches to their protection and support need to account for their lived complexity. To do this, their stories must be taken seriously.

Limitations of protectionist-focused architecture

At a broad, overarching level, children's rights are articulated in the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The CRC establishes a set of universal rights to which all children are entitled, and which all signatory nations are obligated to assure. The CRC is the most ratified document in UN history (only the United States has not yet ratified it), and it both enumerates the rights that children should be guaranteed and outlines space for children's participation in matters affecting them, “in accordance with the age and maturity of the child”. 48

International humanitarian law makes special provision for the protection of children in conflict. Article 77 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions explicitly outlines the principle of special protection:

Children shall be the object of special respect and shall be protected against any form of indecent assault. The parties to the conflict shall provide them with the care and aid they require, whether because of their age or for any other reason. 49

Other elements of the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols address the evacuation of children, their right to medical care, and other protections against hostilities.

The UN Security Council's Children and Armed Conflict (CAAC) agenda, comprised of twelve resolutions, provides a comprehensive architecture for the protection and support of children in conflict. In 1999, the initial resolution of this agenda, Security Council Resolution 1261, identified six grave violations of children in conflict as follows: killing and maiming of children, recruitment or use of children as soldiers, sexual violence against children, abduction of children, attacks against schools or hospitals, and denial of humanitarian access for children. 50 These grave violations have formed the infrastructure of subsequent compulsory monitoring and reporting to the UN of children in situations of armed conflict. In 2018 the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2427 on “Children and Armed Conflict”, which emphasized the need for “child mainstreaming” in security sector reform, meaning “to mainstream child protection”. 51 Such language is typical of UN documents on the engagement of securing children's rights in conflict. These are well-established mechanisms, and represent widespread support for the protection of children in conflict; such efforts are significant and laudable.

However, there are valuable and important critiques of child protection systems that do not adequately centre the child in considerations of responding to children's experiences of war. 52 Children are particularly vulnerable in conflict environments, their rights are often violated with impunity, and their perspective on war is often dismissed as “childish”. Yet protection, while the most pressing of concerns for children facing violence and insecurity, is often over-emphasized at a general level without accounting for the complexities of children's lived experiences of conflict.

For example, Jo Boyden argues that UNICEF's discourse on the “world's children” presupposes a monolithic notion of childhood which applies everywhere, a notion that many international organizations adopt and promote. 53 Another pervasive rhetorical device is the idea that childhood can be “lost” or “stolen” from young people. Such a conception performs two functions. The first is that children are seen to either have or not have a “childhood” and that childhood is seen as a set of conditions, but more than this, any absence of these conditions results in the wholesale loss of childhood. The second function is that in claiming a child has “lost” their childhood, that child becomes the perfect (passive) victim of that loss, and responsibility falls upon concerned adults to redeem them and restore the conditions of childhood.

While the Convention on the Rights of the Child was ratified more quickly and more widely than any other UN Convention, its creation was not uncontested, and critiques of the so-called “children's rights regime”, including and beyond the formal documents of the UN, are enduring. 54 Particularly in conflict contexts, “participation” of children in decisions that affect them, which is one of the “guiding principles” of the CRC, often gets subsumed under the urgency of the protection mandates of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Security Council's CAAC agenda. In this, opportunity is missed for engaging children's own experiences in order to better respond to children's needs in conflict.

The CAAC agenda, argues Lee-Koo, is “animated by a protection ethic” 55 that constitutes an “overbearing focus” which “blindsides the Council to the breadth of experiences and multiple subjectivities of children in armed conflict”. 56 This protectionism isn't limited to the CAAC agenda but can be seen more broadly in the Security Council's approach to civilian populations. 57 Lee-Koo notes that the Security Council's approach can be seen to stem from three imperatives: “international legal obligation to uphold children's right to be free of violence, moral obligations to protect children from violence, and – importantly – instrumentalist claims that children's protection is a tool in the maintenance of peace and security”. 58 Similar arguments can be made of the international humanitarian framework – that it is heavily protectionist-driven and universalizing of children's needs in conflict.

Crucial to this discussion is Cecilia Jacob's argument that child security and child protection need to be distinguished. The “politics that determine children's insecurity as a site of intervention is as important, if not more so, than the political influence or agency exerted by children”. 59 Yet, evidence of children's agency may motivate changes to the political and legal structures that respond to their insecurity. This article is not arguing that the existing international architecture for responding to children in war is not important or valuable; rather, it draws on a well-established literature which recognizes children's agency, to argue that the inclusion of children's direct experiences of war within international architecture and mechanisms can strengthen and complement existing efforts to address children's needs in conflict.

The children's war memoir as genre and generative

Hearing children's accounts of war, accounting for their everyday experiences, and including their insights on surviving unimaginable violence and horror, if done meaningfully, could contribute to strengthening efforts for their protection and engagement. Although not uncontested or unproblematic, children's war memoirs offer evidence of one way of understanding children as having agency and subjecthood that could productively inform debates about international mechanisms for responding to their needs in conflict.

While many memoirs of childhood that appeared through the 1990s in particular put the family in the global North under scrutiny, 60 memoirs of children's experiences of war that grew in popularity in the early 2000s place the broader context under scrutiny as much as the family. Revolving around a single experience of conflict, children's war memoirs provide space to unpack and explore the nuance and complexity of life in a war zone, the choices that children make, and the geopolitical context in which these decisions occur. Children's memoirs of war are not new; Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl, for instance, presents an account of World War II from the perspective of a Jewish girl in hiding. These accounts have cultural currency and enduring relevance to understanding and accounting for young people's experiences of war. This article uses the term “children's war memoirs” as a shorthand for what is a much more complex genre of writing. These children's books are not solely about their experiences of war; rather, they are memoirs of children's lived experiences which include experiences of war. This distinction is important to make, as it acknowledges that young people writing about their lived experience produce accounts greater than reductive stories of “war”.

Gillian Whitlock argues that autobiographies function as “soft weapons” which can “personalize and humanize categories of people whose experiences are frequently unseen and unheard”. 61 Kate Douglas, who has undertaken detailed, sensitive and important work on youth memoirs that deal with trauma and war, refers to children's war memoirs as “trauma texts” and argues that these texts

are affective; they may have a consciousness-raising, social-justice agenda, carrying testimony that might otherwise not be heard or comprehended. Many trauma texts deal with global issues. These texts can shift the margins of global citizenship and social suffering; they address and implicate and call for response. 62

The overlap of these books’ content with debates about human rights and humanitarian responses in the audiences that consume these cultural texts means that such accounts are well positioned to demonstrate the capacity of children to tell narratives of their own experience of conflict. Maureen Moynagh argues that child soldier narratives in particular complicate victim/perpetrator binaries and provide “a ‘textual battleground’ for particular representations of childhood innocence across cultural and political contexts”. 63 These narratives position children as both victims but also as having agency – or even subjecthood (to invoke Beier). They also present a complex moment that requires critical engagement with how memories of children in war operate as “tools of cultural memory” that contribute to or challenge the way social and cultural life is understood and remembered. 64 The stories being told are often accounts of places and experiences that are very different to those familiar to the audience, as these stories, often of war and violence in the global South, are consumed and marketed to audiences in the global North. 65

There are profound power inequalities and layers of co-constitution within the stories. This does not invalidate children's war memoirs, but it draws attention to them as a complex site of contestation over understandings of war and children's agency. Writing about children's memoirs broadly, Douglas notes:

Children's lives are traditionally constructed as valuable only for what they can tell us about adult lives, or about adult preoccupations with childhood. The subject of the autobiography must be deemed “worthy” to the critics of the time – or else it risks being labelled trivial or inconsequential. 66

The memoirs of children's experiences of war that are published and widely distributed often tell stories of exceptional childhood, traumatic events and experiences that are overcome, presenting accounts that foreground resilience. 67

While children's war memoirs might “play a reparative role after trauma, mediating between the trauma and the witness” 68 in crucial and important ways, Mackey also notes that “the complexities of self-representation do not always line up easily with the cultural work that these narratives are expected to do”. 69 Children's war memoirs are complicated because of their entanglement in cultural discourse and political practice; yet it is precisely this entanglement that positions them as important literary texts, and important sites of children's authoritative voices on their understandings of conflict that highlight the imperative to consider their agency more carefully when discussing their experiences of war.

Children's stories of war

There is a large popular literary appetite for children's war memoirs. Malala Yousafzai's I Am Malala has sold over 2 million copies, and the version for young readers has sold over 750,000 copies. 70 Nujeen Mustafa's book has been translated into nine languages since its publication in 2017. A year after its release, Ishmael Beah's book had sold over 600,000 copies. 71 The commercial success of some of these books is assisted by their being discussed by various celebrities: US late-night TV host John Oliver heard of Mustafa's love for the daytime soap opera Days of Our Lives that had she had watched to teach herself English and introduced his audience to her story by staging a made-up ending scene from the show. 72 Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling heard of Bana Alabed's love of the books while she was still in Syria and sent her a message of support and e-books of the series. 73 The hunger for stories of war told by children is testimony to the potentially important role such books play in making visible and accessible accounts and understandings of children's experiences of war. These children are, in many ways, exceptional; and yet, while there are exceptional circumstances that enabled the writing of their books, their stories reveal the importance of considering their stories not as exceptional but as illustrative of everyday experiences of war. All these narratives reveal complex and distinct experiences: direct experiences of violence, the challenges of being a child in these contexts, the importance of community and children's contributions to that community, the challenges in getting those beyond the situation to pay attention and understand, and aspirations for the future. There is a note of caution, however, as there is a danger in these books reproducing simplistic stereotypes as well as simplistic solutions for deeply complex problems.

The children's war memoirs explored here all begin in a similar fashion. Most begin with a prologue or first chapter describing a key moment in the child's experience of war, such as Malala Yousafzai being shot in the head, Ishmael Beah and Emmanuel Jal's experience of being taken by armed groups to become child soldiers, or Nujeen Mustafa's recounting of the sea-crossing from Turkey to Greece. All return to their childhood and a description of life either before war or before war became all-engulfing. These early chapters of children's war memoirs tell stories of everyday life and “typical” childhood behaviour. Bana Alabed tells the reader: “[M]y baba always took me swimming at Alrabea Pool, which was my favourite thing to do. Going to the swings was my second favourite thing to do.” 74 Yousafzai describes Swat Valley as “the most beautiful place in the world” and tells of her early years, interwoven with history and myths that her father told her growing up. 75

The memoirs also tell of the incremental, inexorable arrival of conflict to these children's lives and communities. Jal notes that “there was peace in Sudan for the first three years of my life, but I cannot remember it. All I knew was a war that grew as I did.” 76 Jal describes the arrival of refugees to his village, where his Mamma still woke early for church to “make us porridge made of sorghum grain before putting on our ‘Sunday best’”. 77 Experiences of school are also foregrounded, reminding the reader of the crucial importance of education and highlighting the tragedy of war's impact on children's ability to safely access schooling. Evelyn Amory tells the reader that her “happiest memory” is when she received “the second-highest grade in my class in Primary Four …. When my dad heard the news, he slaughtered a goat and gave me the liver.” 78

Extended attention to education also features in Yousafzai's story, as it is her advocacy for girls’ education that resulted in the attempt on her life. Douglas argues that the texts produced by Yousafzai, including her memoir, make “visible moments of resistance” 79 and allow her to “authorize herself”, 80 including explicitly presenting her position as an advocate for girls’ education. In Mustafa's story, her brother says that she “only need[s] to hear something once to remember it exactly”, and yet her disability prevents her from attending school, something the onset of the civil war makes even more unbearable for her. This deep desire to learn and to have an education is an ongoing thread in Mustafa's story. Education is not only a lived marker of normalcy of childhood, but reflects the importance placed on education by many children in conflict zones. Education provision often suffers in war, and yet opportunities for education can provide spaces for children to escape the violence in their lives and to plan and work towards future goals. 81

These similarities in children's war memoirs reflect a broader convention of autobiographical writing. It is common to return to the beginning in telling a story, but in these stories, this also provides an important frame of “normalcy” for these children's lives. These are children who, like children everywhere, have both modest and grand visions for their future, have families who love them, and have aspirations to learn and grow. Each of these stories frames a “normal” childhood that is removed from the child, perpetuating the dominant discourse of childhoods that are “lost”. The children in the first chapters of these books are profoundly human and relatable, but they also introduce key themes of relevance to considering how children experience conflict and the major challenges they face: from education as discussed above, to health care and disruption of services, war impacts children's everyday experiences.

Children's memoirs of war also offer an argument for recognition of their capacity for resilience and navigation of violence and risk. Many of these children are profoundly affected by the events they have endured. Evelyn Amory finds it difficult to narrate certain experiences of her time with the LRA and the abuse she suffered. Beah speaks of the experience of being inducted and indoctrinated into the group. They made the children burn their clothes and possessions: “I ran towards the fire but the cassettes [with his favourite rap music] had already started to melt. Tears formed in my eyes, and my lips shook as I turned away.” 82 Beah also describes how he was made to kill others, and to take drugs that made him “fierce” 83 and without fear of death. These experiences are reflected upon later in the book when he is involved in a disarmament, demobilization and reintegration programme and transitions out of life as a child soldier. Bana Alabed shares her terror and fear as Aleppo was bombed around her while she was trapped with her family:

I didn't know what it was when the first big bomb came. It was just a regular day …. It was the loudest noise I had ever heard in my life, a noise so big you could feel it in your body, not just hear it. The sound and the surprise made my body feel like jelly. 84

These stories, as Beah says, put “a human face” on an “issue that is bigger than everyone and me”. 85 They remind the reader that the statistics are comprised of individual children with unique stories; that every one of the approximately 300,000 child soldiers has a story like Beah or Jal or Amony; that of the tens of thousands of refugees arriving in Europe since 2014, each child carries with them memories of war like Mustafa or Alabed; that while Yousafzai was airlifted to the UK to recover, thousands of girls still risk violence simply by attending school every day. Yet, just as adults do, children in conflict zones find ways of navigating and resisting violence and making sense of the chaos around them to seek out safety. 86 Children's war memoirs, in this framing, offer a way of recovering children's agency, recognizing that while they undoubtedly need protection and support, they also have well-developed understandings of conflict and solutions for peace.

Traumatic texts and the value of children's voices

The stories in these children's war memoirs present a window into the minds and experiences of children and the diversity of their experiences of wars. Children's war memoirs can be read as a way of recognizing children's authoritative voice, presenting children as knowledgeable about the situation around them and able to position their single story within the surrounding context. Recalling Douglas's observation of children's war memoirs as “trauma texts”, these narratives that recount experiences of violence (both as victims and as perpetrators) and experiences of fear are narratives of negotiating significant trauma. Similarly, while they are literary texts, this also means they function as cultural and political texts. 87 Demands for “forensic truth” 88 undermine the crucially important value in recounting a narrative truth about a lived experience of trauma. A sustained campaign as to the “truth” of Beah's A Long Way Gone by The Australian newspaper claimed that Beah's account was fundamentally suspect and thus, by implication, had little merit. 89 This deeply problematic critique misses the valid and valuable contribution that Beah has made to a genre of life writing which helps us to better understand the experience of child soldiers and children's navigation of traumatic memory. 90 Alabed, who started documenting the Syrian conflict via her Twitter account, with the help of her mother, was dismissed as “propaganda” by Assad, and has experienced organized attacks against the legitimacy of the Twitter account, as well as accusations that she is not a real person. 91 Even Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai has been accused of telling her own story at the expense of those still back in Pakistan. 92 Literary arguments aside, these critiques of the child authors of these books draw upon deeply held stereotypes about children as innocent and uncomprehending victims. The telling of stories in children's first-person voices 93 challenges perceptions of children in conflict as passive or ignorant of what is happening around them; accounting for trauma as a lived experience offers crucial insight into children's experiences of war.

The exceptional children of war memoirs

Children's war memoirs are particularly good examples of “resilient autobiographies” that are seen as “most appropriate” for publication and consumption. 94 Such “resilience” is demonstrated through the overcoming of a traumatic event. These children, who have experienced war, escaped or overcome suffering and violence, and found the resources to tell their story, can be seen as exceptional. Not all children affected by war have the capacity or opportunity to tell their story as these young people do; and not all children are given the opportunity to make new lives post-trauma and post-war. The stories that are told via memoirs are instances where children's agency is visible, and where more complex stories of children's lived experience of war are told.

Significantly, all these memoirs exist alongside paratexts and intertexts. 95 These young people, having overcome individual trauma and survived a collective experience of violence, move their narrative on beyond the reflection and retelling that memoir offers. For example, Yousafzai has gone on to study philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford while running the international girls’ education advocacy organization The Malala Fund. Beah is an ambassador for UNICEF, and Jal has a musical career and runs an NGO. In giving interviews, writing and speaking publicly, and continuing to live with public attention, the stories of children's experience of war told by these young people continue beyond the books they have authored. Their agency is evident in their daily advocacy for children in war.

There is a necessary caution in focusing on these stories. Often described as “exceptional”, these young people have overcome and escaped violence and war; they are held up as icons 96 to be aspired to. But this framing is imposed and carries particular expectations of performance of certain values and narratives. It also implicitly condemns those children who are not able to escape and succeed in the same way. By emphasizing exceptional agency, it reinforces the implied incapacity of other children and reinforces certain expectations of Western exceptionalism. This is the paradox at the heart of the presence of these young people in popular discourses about war: the contribution of their war memoirs to effecting meaningful change is predicated on highly unequal global power relations, on highly unequal power relations between child and adult, and on the sharing of experiences of trauma. In recognizing the capacity and agency of children, legitimizing their subjecthood as rights-bearing individuals in conflict, these memoirs offer more complex ways of understanding children's experiences of war.

Memoirs are one example of child-owned narratives that demonstrate the value and complexity of children's experiences. For instance, alongside formal published memoirs, children tell their stories through Twitter and blogs. There are other spaces in which the voices of children (or adults who were children at the time of the events in question) are heard, such as accounts of war in which children, as victims, tell their experience to a court record, or a record formed as part of a transitional justice mechanism. These accounts tend to be more formalized and restricted, and the child speaking is a vessel for the legitimacy of experiences of violence; their script is limited. Nevertheless, these multiple sites, in which children's voices are heard and their experiences recounted, present spaces where children's agency is evident. They offer insight into how protectionist-driven frameworks can be enhanced by discourses that more fully account for the complexity of children's experiences of war.

Stories like those told through children's war memoirs can help us to better understand children's experiences of conflict. In their best form, they can prompt action, support, and investment in solutions that account for children's agency when addressing their suffering in conflict. At a minimum, they expose readers to experiences beyond their daily lives, fostering awareness of the complexities of violence and insecurity, but also the resilience and hope of children living amidst war.

This article has taken children's war memoirs as one source in which children's agency is foregrounded and their diverse and complex experiences of conflict are recognized as legitimate. Narratives of children's lived experience of war have a large audience, with no signs of abating interest. They enter the popular discourse as books discussed in book clubs and in literary reviews, and they influence the ways in which people interact with human rights campaigning and discussion. In these spaces children's voices are granted authority and – although always implicated in uneven global circulations of power – offer a more nuanced understanding of the consequences of conflict for children in countries often quite distant to the lived experience of the readership of such books.

The institutional architecture that engages children in conflict is frequently characterized by a “protectionist ethic” that subsumes other concerns. While documents like the CRC offer a space for children's participation (established as a key guiding principle of the document), such participation is often overlooked in practice. The drive to protect children in conflict is crucially important and overwhelmingly urgent. This article seeks to draw attention – via accounts of conflict in children's war memoirs – to the spaces and ways in which children already participate and demonstrate the “due weight” that their views should be accorded. 97

While protectionist frames dominate the international architecture of responding to children in war, stories such as those in children's war memoirs draw stark attention to the agency and capacity of children in negotiating and navigating incredibly different traumas and experiences of war. While children experience particular vulnerabilities and risks in conflict zones, their potential as contributors to the solutions to war and conflict must be taken more seriously. These children's war memoirs demonstrate existing avenues for doing so and reveal children themselves as narrators and authors of that experience. This article has highlighted the contributions of a selection of these accounts to argue that taking them seriously offers ways of thinking about war that centre the child as actor rather than just a passive victim. Broadening the inclusion of children's voices in formal spaces of humanitarian and peace and security practice can offer novel ways of addressing conflict, and prompt new urgency to addressing the enduring challenges and violations experienced by children in war.

• 1 Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb, I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 203, p. 6.
• 2 Emmanuel Jal and Megan Lloyd Davies, War Child: A Child Soldier's Story, St Martins Griffin, New York, 009.
• 3 Nujeen Mustafa and Christina Lamb, Nujeen: One Girl's Incredible Journey from War-Torn Syria in a Wheelchair, William Collins, London, 2016, p. 12.
• 4 Kate Douglas, Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma, and Memory, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 2010.
• 5 Gillian Whitlock, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2010.
• 6 Vincent Bernard, “Editorial: War in Cities”, International Review of the Red Cross, Vol. 98, No. 901, 201.
• 7 Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 201, Geneva, 25 June 2018; Vincent Bernard, “Migration and Displacement: Humanity with its Back to the Wall”, International Review of the Red Cross, Vol. 99, No. 904, 201.
• 8 Annual Report of the Secretary-General on Children and Armed Conflict, UN Doc. A/72/65-S/201/465, 16 May 201, para. 5.
• 9 Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict, A Credible List: Recommendations for the 2018 Annual Report on Children and Armed Conflict and Listings, March 2018, available at: https://watchlist.org/wp-content/uploads/2258-watchlist-policy-note_web… (all internet references were accessed in August 2018).
• 10 Annual Report of the Secretary-General, above note 8.
• 11 John G. Horgan, Max Taylor, Mia Bloom and Charlie Winter, “From Cubs to Lions: A Six Stage Model of Child Socialization into the Islamic State”, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Vol. 40, No. 7, 2017.
• 12 Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2007.
• 13 E. Jal and M. Lloyd Davies, above note 2.
• 14 Evelyn Amony and Erin Baines, I Am Evelyn Amony: Reclaiming My Life from the Lord's Resistance Army, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2015.
• 15 Bana Alabed, Dear World: A Syrian Girl's Story of War and Plea for Peace, Simon & Schuster, London, 2017.
• 16 M. Yousafzai and C. Lamb, above note 1.
• 17 This article does not look at fictional stories of children in war such as the filmic depiction of child soldiers in Blood Diamond (2006) or Beasts of No Nation (2015). Nor does it explore stories told about children such as through NGO advocacy or journalism, as these are stories told without the participation of children, which is central to the discussion (see Jana Tabak and Leticia Carvalho, “Responsibility to Protect the Future: Children on the Move and the Politics of Becoming”, Global Responsibility to Protect, Vol. 10, No. 1–2, 2018). The article also does not look at visual depictions by children or “children's stories” told through images of children such as the image of Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi's death on a Turkish beach, although the visual is an important site in both fictional and non-fictional depictions of children in conflict (see Helen Berents, “Apprehending the ‘Telegenic Dead’: Considering Images of Dead Children in Global Politics”, International Political Sociology, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2019; Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno, “‘A Horrific Photo of a Drowned Syrian Child’: Humanitarian Photography and NGO Media Strategies in Historical Perspective”, International Review of the Red Cross, Vol. 97, No. 900, 2015). All these sites are important additional spaces where the stories and voices of children might be productively explored.
• 18 Kate Douglas, “Ethical Dialogues: Youth, Memoir, and Trauma”, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2015, p. 273.
• 19 Convention on the Rights of the Child, 20 November 89 (entered into force 2 September 90), Art. 1.
• 20 Jens Qvortrup, “Childhood Matters: An Introduction”, in Jens Qvortrup, Marjatta Bardy, Giovanni Sgritta and Helmut Wintersberger (eds), Childhood Matters: Social Theory, Practice and Politics, Avebury, Aldershot, 1994.
• 21 Allison James, Chris Jenks, and Alan Prout, Theorizing Childhood, Teachers College Press, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, 1998.
• 22 Tobias Hecht, At Home in the Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998.
• 23 Olga Nieuwenhuys, “Growing Up between Places of Work and Non-Places of Childhood: The Uneasy Relationship,” in Karen Fog Olwig and Eva Gulløv (eds), Children's Places: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, Routledge, London, 2003, p. 99.
• 24 D. Sears and N. Valentino, “Politics Matters: Political Events as Catalysts for Pre-Adolescent Socialisation”, American Political Science Review, Vol. 91, No. 1, 1997.
• 25 Helen Brocklehurst, Who's Afraid of Children? Children, Conflict and International Relations, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2006, p. 140.
• 26 Ibid., p. 21.
• 27 Matías Cordero Arce, “Towards an Emancipatory Discourse of Children's Rights”, International Journal of Children's Rights, Vol. 20, No. 3, 2012, p. 379.
• 28 Michael Wyness, Lisa Harrison and Ian Buchanan, “Childhood, Politics and Ambiguity: Towards an Agenda for Children's Political Inclusion”, Sociology, Vol. 38, No. 1, 2004; Alison James and Alan Prout (eds), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, Falmer Press, Basingstoke, 1990; Jo Boyden, “Children under Fire: Challenging Assumptions about Children's Resilience”, Children, Youth and Environments, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2003; Nick Lee, Childhood and Society: Growing Up in an Age of Uncertainty, Open University Press, Buckingham, 2001.
• 29 Alison M. S. Watson, “Can there Be a ‘Kindered’ Peace?”, Ethics and International Affairs, Vol. 22, No. 1, 2008.
• 30 Alison M. S. Watson, “Resilience is Its Own Resistance: The Place of Children in Post-Conflict Settlement”, Critical Studies on Security, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2015, p. 51.
• 31 J. Boyden, above note 28, p. 1.
• 32 Siobhán McEvoy-Levy, “Conclusion: Youth and Post-Accord Peace Building”, in Siobhán McEvoy-Levy (ed.), Troublemakers or Peacemakers? Youth and Post-Accord Peace Building, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN, 2006, p. 282.
• 33 Vanessa Pupavac, “Misanthropy without Borders: The International Children's Rights Regime”, Disasters, Vol. 25, No. 2, 2001.
• 34 A. James and A. Prout (eds), above note 28.
• 35 N. Lee, above note 28, p. 47.
• 36 See Alcinda Manuel Honwana, Child Soldiers in Africa, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA, 2006; Michael Wessells, “A Living Wage: The Importance of Livelihood in Reintegrating Former Child Soldiers,” in Neil Boothby, Alison Strang and Michael Wessells (eds), A World Turned Upside Down: Social Ecological Approaches to Children in War Zones, Kumarian Press, Bloomfield, CT, 2006; Carolyn Nordstrom, “The Jagged Edge of Peace: The Creation of Culture and War Orphans in Angola”, in S. McEvoy-Levy (ed.), above note 32; Jo Boyden and Joanna de Berry (eds), Children and Youth on the Front Line: Ethnography, Armed Conflict and Displacement, Berghahn Books, New York, 2004.
• 37 Helen Berents, Young People and Everyday Peace: Exclusion, Insecurity and Peacebuilding in Colombia, Routledge, New York, 2018; Helen Berents, “Children, Violence, and Social Exclusion: Negotiation of Everyday Insecurity in a Colombian Barrio”, Critical Studies on Security, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2015.
• 38 Sverker Finnström, “Wars of the Past and War in the Present: The Lord's Resistance Movement/Army in Uganda”, Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 76, No. 2, 2006.
• 39 A. M. Honwana, above note 36; C. Nordstrom, above note 36.
• 40 Kim Huynh, Bina d'Costa and Katrina Lee-Koo, Children and Global Conflict, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015.
• 41 Graca Machel, Impact of Armed Conflict on Children: Report of the Expert of the Secretary-General, Ms. Graça Machel, Submitted Pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 48/157, New York, 1996.
• 42 Katrina Lee-Koo, “‘The Intolerable Impact of Armed Conflict on Children’: The United Nations Security Council and the Protection of Children in Armed Conflict”, Global Responsibility to Protect, Vol. 10, No. 1–2, 2018, p. 62.
• 43 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1984, p. 14.
• 44 UNICEF, Cape Town Principles and Best Practices on the Prevention of Recruitment of Children into the Armed Forces and on Demobilization and Social Reintegration of Child Soldiers in Africa, Cape Town, 27–30 April 1997, available at: www.unicef.org/emerg/files/Cape_Town_Principles(1).pdf .
• 45 Marshall Beier, “Shifting the Burden: Childhoods, Resilience, Subjecthood”, Critical Studies on Security, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2015, p. 241.
• 46 Marshall Beier, “Ultimate Tests: Children, Rights, and the Politics of Protection”, Global Responsibility to Protect, Vol. 10, No. 1–2, 2018, p. 177.
• 47 M. Beier, above note 45, p. 242.
• 48 Article 12 of the CRC states: “States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.”
• 49 Protocol Additional (I) to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 19, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts, 1125 UNTS 3, 8 June 1977 (entered into force 7 December 1978), Art. 77.
• 50 UNSC Res. 1261, 25 August 1999.
• 51 UNSC Res. 2427, 1 July 2018, p. 3.
• 52 Cecilia Jacob, “‘Children and Armed Conflict’ and the Field of Security Studies”, Critical Studies on Security, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2015; K. Lee-Koo, above note 42.
• 53 Jo Boyden, “Childhood and the Policy Makers: A Comparative Perspective on the Globalization of Childhood”, in A. James and A. Prout (eds), above note 28, p. 183.
• 54 See, in particular, M. Cordero Arce, above note 27, who has a significant and radical critique; see also Obijiofor Aginam, “Erosion of Indigenous Values and the Poverty of International Legal Protection of Children in Wars and Conflicts: An African Perspective”, in Children and War: Impact, Protection, and Rehabilitation. University of Alberta, Los Angeles, CA, 2006; Ann Sheppard, “Child Soldiers: Is the Optional Protocol Evidence of an Emerging ‘Straight-18’ Consensus?”, International Journal of Children's Rights, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2000; Andrew Mawson, “Children, Impunity and Justice: Some Dilemmas from Northern Uganda”, in J. Boyden and J. de Berry (eds), above note 36.
• 55 K. Lee-Koo, above note 42, p. 57.
• 56 Ibid., p. 60.
• 57 Gina Heathcote, “Women and Children and Elephants as Justifications for the Use of Force”, Journal of the Use of Force and International Law, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2017.
• 58 K. Lee-Koo, above note 42, p. 59.
• 59 Cecilia Jacob, Child Security in Asia: The Impact of Armed Conflict in Cambodia and Myanmar, Routledge, London, 2016, p. 47 (emphasis in original).
• 60 Kylie Cardell and Kate Douglas, “Telling Tales: Autobiographies of Childhood and Youth”, Prose Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1, 2013.
• 61 G. Whitlock, above note 5.
• 62 K. Douglas, above note 18, p. 273.
• 63 Maureen Moynagh, “Human Rights, Child-Soldier Narratives, and the Problem of Form”, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 42, No. 4, 2011, p. 47.
• 64 K. Douglas, above note 4, p. 7.
• 65 G. Whitlock, above note 5. See also Helen Berents, “Hashtagging Girlhood: #IAmMalala, #BringBackOurGirls and Gendering Representations of Global Politics”, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 18, No. 1, 2015.
• 66 K. Douglas, above note 4, p. 160.
• 67 Ibid., p. 158.
• 68 Ibid., p. 151.
• 69 Allison Mackey, “Troubling Humanitarian Consumption: Reframing Relationality in African Child Soldier Narratives”, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 44, No. 4, 2013, p. 101.
• 70 Sarah J. Robbins, “Four Questions for Malala Yousafzai”, Publishers Weekly, 12 October 2017, available at: www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/articl… .
• 71 Gabriel Sherman, “The Fog of Memoir”, Slate, 6 March 2008, available at: www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2008/03/the_fog_of_memoir.html .
• 72 “Refugee Syrian Girl ‘So Happy’ at Days of Our Lives Tribute”, BBC News, 30 September 2015, available at: www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-34406034/refugee-syrian-girl-so-happy-…
• 73 “Syrian Girl Thanks JK Rowling for Sending Harry Potter Books”, BBC Newsbeat, 25 November 2016, available at: www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/38101262/syrian-girl-thanks-jk-rowling-f… .
• 74 B. Alabed, above note 15, p. 10.
• 75 M. Yousafzai and C. Lamb, above note 1, p. 1.
• 76 E. Jal and M. Lloyd Davies, above note 2, p. 6.
• 77 Ibid., p. 8.
• 78 E. Amory and E. Baines, above note 14, p. 3.
• 79 Kate Douglas, “Malala Yousafzai, Life Narrative and the Collaborative Archive”, Life Writing, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2017, p. 298.
• 80 Ibid., p. 308.
• 81 See, for example, Helen Berents, “‘It's About Finding a Way’: Children, Sites of Opportunity, and Building Everyday Peace in Colombia”, International Journal of Children's Rights, Vol. 22, No. 2, 2014.
• 82 I. Beah, above note 12, p. 110.
• 83 Ibid., p. 122.
• 84 B. Alabed, above note 15, pp. 21–22.
• 85 I. Beah, above note 12, p. 14, postscript.
• 86 H. Berents, Young People and Everyday Peace, above note 37; Helen Berents and Charlotte ten Have, “Navigating Violence: Fear and Everyday Life in Colombia and Mexico”, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2017.
• 87 K. Douglas, above note 18, p. 281.
• 88 Mark Sanders, Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2007, p. 17. Sanders’ use of the terms “forensic truth” and “narrative truth” is critically adapted from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report, and is discussed by Douglas in relation to Beah: see K. Douglas, above note 18.
• 89 G. Sherman, above note 71.
• 90 K. Douglas, above note 4; K. Douglas, above note 18.
• 91 Nick Waters, “Finding Bana – Proving the Existence of a 7-Year-Old Girl in Eastern Aleppo” Bellingcat, 14 December 2016, available at: www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2016/12/14/bana-alabed-verification-using-… .
• 92 Thomas Olesen, “Malala and the Politics of Global Iconicity”, British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 67, No. 2, 2016.
• 93 It is worth noting that these books do have a diversity of by-lines. Both Emmanuel Jal and Ishmael Beah are the sole authors of their memoirs. Nujeen Mustafa and Malala Yousafzai co-authored their books with journalist Christina Lamb. Bana Alabed is sole author, but the book acknowledges that she received help from her mother and editor in telling her story. Evelyn Amory's book is edited and introduced by associate professor Erin Baines, piecing together notes from conversations with Evelyn to produce the book, which Baines explains in the front matter (pp. xvii–xxiii). Kate Douglas argues that mediation of text – whether via translation or collaboration – is often assumed to create “inferior cultural texts”, but it is important to recognize the bias inherent in such accusations, which particularly affect “young writers and writers whose first language is not English” (K. Douglas, above note 4, p. 307). If, as this article argues, children's war memoirs can offer a site for conveying children's experience of war and a way to better account for children's agency when considering responses to their suffering in war, the implications of adult assistance in authorship must be acknowledge and considered, even as they do not invalidate the narrative themselves.
• 94 K. Douglas, above note 4, p. 158.
• 95 See Kate Douglas and Anne Poletti, Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2016, p. 96.
• 96 See H. Berents, above note 65.
• 97 CRC, Art. 12.

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Child Soldiers - Both Victims and Combatants: Is There Anything IHL Can Do?

58 Pages Posted: 15 Nov 2016

Dermot Groome

Pennsylvania State University, Dickinson Law

Date Written: November 14, 2016

The proliferation of child soldiers has raised a number of troubling questions for the laws of war. These children are the victims of international crimes committed by those who unlawfully enlist and deploy them. These children are also “combatants” under international law and like all combatants they lose the many protections afforded civilians. Apart from the physical and psychological harm caused to children by exposure to combat, child soldiers have also been the intentional victims of crimes perpetrated by members of the armed formation that incorporated them. Crimes specifically directed at them such as rape, sexual slavery and inhuman treatment. Some children have been summarily executed for indiscipline or attempting to escape. Yet, others have been used as disposable weapons in an emerging trend to use children as suicide bombers, sometimes remotely detonated by their adult handlers. This article examines the unique situation of child soldiers, and the several simultaneous yet inconsistent characterizations they embody. A child soldier can be at the same time: a lawful target of the enemy, an individual with the potential to commit international crimes, a victim of the international offense of child conscription and finally, often the intended victim of other acts constituting war crimes but for their unlawful conscription. This article examines the relevant laws and customs of war and questions whether International Humanitarian Law’s (IHL) rigid binary classification of actors as either combatants or civilians appropriately reflects the reality for children, the most vulnerable victims of contemporary conflicts. The article makes the argument that IHL must develop a third status in addition to the combatant/civilian distinction. A hybrid status for children unlawfully incorporated into an armed force or group. This hybrid status retains the child’s combatant status vis-à-vis belligerent forces as defined by well-established tests, yet treats them as civilians vis-à-vis members of the armed force that has unlawfully incorporated them. Perpetrators of crimes against child soldiers should not be able to strip children of the protections intended for them by committing the crime of unlawful conscription against them. The laws of war should be interpreted to deny them the ability to insulate themselves from criminal liability by virtue of their commission of another crime. There is no theoretical or conceptual barrier preventing an interpretation of IHL that affords children this hybrid status. This proposed hybrid status preserves the clarity necessary for the effective application of IHL and ensures that these children remain within the protections of international law.

Keywords: International Criminal Court, Child Soldiers, Rape, Sexual Slavery, International Humanitarian Law, Ntaganda, Democratic Republic of Congo

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Dermot Groome (Contact Author)

Pennsylvania state university, dickinson law ( email ).

150 S College St Carlisle, PA 17013 United States

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Child soldiering: moral responsibility and the self-defence question

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Victims and/or perpetrators? Towards an interdisciplinary dialogue on child soldiers

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Worldwide, thousands of children are acting in different roles in armed groups. Whereas human rights activism and humanitarian imperatives tend to emphasize the image of child soldiers as incapable victims of adults’ abusive compulsion, this image does not fully correspond with prevailing pedagogical and jurisprudential discourses, nor does it represent all child soldiers’ own perceptions of their role. Moreover, contemporary warfare is often marked by fuzzy distinctions between perpetrators and victims. This article deepens on the question how to conceptualize the victim-perpetrator imaginary about child soldiers, starting from three disciplines, children’s rights law, psychosocial approaches and transitional justice, and then proceeding into an interdisciplinary approach.

We argue that the victim–perpetrator dichotomy in relation to child soldiers needs to be revisited, and that this can only be done successfully through a truly interdisciplinary approach. Key to this interdisciplinary dialogue is the growing awareness within all three disciplines, but admittedly only marginally within children’s rights law, that only by moving beyond the binary distinction between victim- and perpetrator-hood, the complexity of childhood soldiering can be grasped. In transitional justice, the concept of role reversal has been instructive, and in psychosocial studies, emphasis has been put on the ‘agency’ of (former) child soldiers, whereby child soldiers sometimes account on how joining the armed force or group was (partially) out of their own free will. Hence, child soldiers’ perpetrator-hood is not only part of the way child soldiers are perceived in the communities they return to, but equally of the way they see themselves. These findings plea for more contextualized approaches, including a greater participation of child soldiers, the elaboration of accountability mechanisms beyond criminal responsibility, and an intimate connection between individual, social and societal healing by paying more attention to reconciliation.

This article deepens on the question how to conceptualize the victim-perpetrator imaginary about child soldiers through an interdisciplinary dialogue between children’s rights law, psychosocial approaches and transitional justice. With this interdisciplinary perspective, we intend to open up narrow disciplinary viewpoints, and contribute to more integrated approaches, beyond a binary distinction between victimhood and perpetrator-hood.

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It is estimated that about 250,000 children worldwide, both boys and girls, are involved in armed groups where they act in different roles, such as soldiers, spies, cooks, porters and sex slaves [ 1 – 5 ]. Acknowledging this diversity, the most comprehensive and internationally endorsed definition of child soldiers can be found in the 2007 Paris Principles, drawing on the 1997 Cape Town Principles [ 6 ], and refers to “any person below 18 years of age who is or who has been recruited or used by an armed force or armed group in any capacity, including but not limited to children, boys, and girls used as fighters, cooks, porters, messengers, spies or for sexual purposes. It does not only refer to a child who is taking or has taken a direct part in hostilities” ([ 7 ]:7). The recruitment of children into armed forces has been hitting the headlines in politics and the media for many years, despite the fact that this group constitutes only a small part of all children and adolescents who are affected, directly and indirectly, through armed conflict on a global scale [ 8 ]. One possible explanation is that the notion of ‘child soldiers’ often defies emotional and moral senses, due to the conflicting sub notions of childhood and warfare, whereby the ‘child’ is perceived as particularly vulnerable, as opposed to the ‘soldier’ who is regarded as inherently damaging [ 9 , 10 ].

The uneasiness about child soldiering can be traced back to at least two sources. First of all, in the course of history, images of childhood and attitudes towards children have significantly evolved: first, a kind of ‘indifference’ towards childhood as a separate life-period has given way to childhood as a social, educational and cultural moratorium entitled to safe development, special care and protection; and secondly, the latter notion has been challenged by views of childhood as a life-period of evolving competence and agency, requiring equal human rights that allow autonomy and social participation, as well as supplementary rights for children accommodating their vulnerability [ 11 – 15 ]. More generally, children have come to be viewed as rights-bearing subjects rather than objects, which engendered a range of children’s rights-based legal and policy developments that culminated in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child [ 11 , 15 – 17 ]. This paradigmatic shift fostered a growing awareness and problematization of child soldiering, conceptualizing it in terms of grave children’s rights violations and placing it prominently on the humanitarian and human rights agenda. These developments incited a range of international conventions enshrining the rights of children in armed conflict and outlining measures conducive to the protection of such rights [ 9 , 13 ]. Moreover, humanitarian imperatives tend to emphasize the image that child soldiers are incapable victims of adults’ abusive compulsion, stripped from legal agency and without any accountability, which does not fully correspond with prevailing pedagogical and jurisprudential discourse, nor represent the broad range of child soldiers’ own perceptions of their role [ 9 , 10 , 13 , 18 – 20 ].

A second source of the uneasiness about child soldiering is related to the nature of contemporary warfare, which is often marked by fuzzy distinctions between perpetrators and victims. Not only are children forcibly recruited as child soldiers and thus actively participate in the armed conflict, also the frequently ethnic nature of these conflicts, amongst others, can turn every civilian into a potential victim or a perpetrator ready to defend his/her group’s interests [ 21 ]. Such practices both increase the risk of psychological damage to all civilians [ 22 , 23 ], and pose particular challenges to the recovery, rehabilitation, reintegration and reconciliation processes of all affected youth, and (former) child soldiers in particular. This thin line between being a ‘victim’ and a ‘perpetrator’, which becomes utmost clear in the situation of child soldiers, has large implications for general processes of peacebuilding [ 24 ] and transitional justice [ 25 ], both in the short and the longer run.

As the complexity of these phenomena has dramatically increased in recent years, we argue that they can no longer be analysed from one single discipline or field of study, but require a truly interdisciplinary approach. Following Ost ([ 26 ]:543), by inter-disciplinarity we mean the attempt to embark upon a ‘dialogue’ among disciplines leading to the (partial) reorganisation of theoretical frames and operational hypotheses. Unlike multi-disciplinarity and trans-disciplinarity, the essence of inter-disciplinarity lies in organising the ‘translation’ of one scientific language into the structure and the terminology of the other(s). In this contribution, we look at the victim-perpetrator dynamic in relation to child soldiers from three different disciplines or fields of study, i.e. children’s rights law, transitional justice, and psychosocial approaches. Our central research question is how to conceptualize the victim-perpetrator imaginary about child soldiers starting from these three disciplines. With this interdisciplinary perspective, we aim at opening up narrow disciplinary viewpoints, and contributing to more integrated approaches on the reintegration of former child soldiers into their communities and societies. Apart from its theoretical value in analytical terms, we also argue that an interdisciplinary perspective is indispensable from an operational point of view, as adequate policies, programmes and projects that tackle this difficult issue can only be developed by bringing together insights from different disciplines.

The insights and proposals described in this contribution are based on two types of sources: first, an extensive literature review in each of the three fields of study mentioned; and, secondly, a series of sustainable contacts with policy makers and practitioners in the fields mentioned built up throughout the years, by means of workshops, meetings and conferences. Footnote 1

Our contribution is structured in two major steps. We start by reviewing the issue of child soldiers from three different disciplinary perspectives, children’s rights law, transitional justice and psychosocial approaches, and list the cross-cutting themes, similarities and divergences of all three perspectives (section 2). In a second step, we offer ideas to move forward in this field of study, through interdisciplinary dialogue and mutual learning, and draw out some implications for policy-making and practice (section 3).

By focussing our paper on (former) child soldiers in particular, we do not wish to discard the fact that armed conflict affects all children and adolescents, far beyond this special target group [ 8 ]. Nevertheless, the particular phenomenon of child soldering allows us to contemplate on ‘victimhood’ and ‘perpetrator-hood’, and its relation to rehabilitation, reintegration and reconciliation processes aiming at all children affected by armed conflicts, their families, communities and society. We recognize that this analysis could have benefited from the inclusion of additional perspectives, such as anthropology, political science, sociology and other disciplines, but their involvement goes beyond the scope of this contribution.

Disciplinary perspectives on child soldiers: victims and/or perpetrators?

In this section, we explain in a mono-disciplinary fashion how each of the three disciplines under review – children’s rights law, transitional justice and psychosocial approaches—deal with the question of ‘victimhood’ or ‘perpetrator-hood’ of child soldiers. At the end of the section, we spell out the challenges that each of these three approaches are confronted with.

• Children’s rights law

The situation of children affected by armed conflict, and in particular questions regarding children’s role as ‘victim’ and/or as ‘perpetrator’, produces many challenges for the field of children’s rights law, both legal and non-legal. A 2011 special issue of Human Rights & International Legal Discourse has fleshed out some salient legal issues, i.e. questions that arise within the disciplinary context ([ 27 ]; on technical legal questions, see [ 28 – 30 ]). Here, we seek to identify the challenges related to the concept of ‘victimhood’, by examining how child soldiers are generally portrayed, and how their rehabilitation, recovery and reintegration are considered.

Recruitment and use of child soldiers

Children’s rights law, and other legal sub-disciplines such as international criminal law, international humanitarian law and international labour law, all tend to focus on child soldiers as their primary concern, rather than on children affected by war in general. Most of the standard-setting and discussion has focused even more narrowly on the recruitment and participation of children in armed conflict, and on the age limit to be applied. Whereas Art. 38 CRC (in line with international humanitarian law and criminal law) applies 15 as the minimum age for recruitment and use in hostilities, the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (OPAC) applies the age of 18 (in line with international labour law), except for voluntary enlistment with state forces (with the debate being geared towards the adoption of a ‘straight 18’ approach, regardless of whether recruitment was forced or voluntary) [ 31 ]. The African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child [ 32 ] is the only human rights treaty that already applies a ‘straight 18’ approach (combined reading of arts. 2 and 22). The Security Council’s work on children and armed conflict was initially confined to child recruitment too. New triggers for listing situations and for monitoring and reporting were added in 2009 and 2011, including killing and maiming of children, rape and other sexual violence against children, recurrent attacks on schools and/or hospitals, and recurrent attacks against protection persons in relation to schools and/or hospitals ([ 33 ]:883-906).

Art. 39 CRC provides for “ measures to promote physical and psychological recovery and social reintegration of a child victim ” of, inter alia, armed conflicts. Art. 6 OPAC stipulates more narrowly that those children who were recruited or used in hostilities in violation of the Protocol (so not just any child victim) may benefit from “ assistance for their physical and psychological recovery and their social reintegration ”. The Paris Principles do not focus exclusively on child soldiers, but reintegration is nonetheless often mentioned in combination with release and protection, or in the context of formal disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration processes (DDR).

Victims or perpetrators

The attention paid to the recovery and reintegration of child soldiers reflects an acknowledgement of their victimhood. Child soldiers are mainly considered as victims. However, children’s rights approaches have always oscillated between protection (what Breen [ 34 ] has called ‘paternalism’) and autonomy. That tension is not a legal one, but goes back to the underlying notion of childhood. These two schools of thought or perspectives on childhood (protection versus autonomy) have also informed the CRC. On the one hand, there is the view that children need special protection and priority care. That was the almost exclusive theme of the 1924 and 1959 Declarations on children’s rights, which should be understood in light of the two World Wars [ 35 ]. This protectionist view has been referred to as the biomedical model of childhood: ‘children as passive victims who are psychologically scarred and vulnerable’ [ 36 ]. On the other hand, there are proponents of recognising children as autonomous individuals and ‘fully-fledged beneficiaries of human rights’ [ 36 ]. In non-legal terms, reference is made to ‘children’s agency, resilience and coping mechanisms’ [ 36 ]. Following Eide ([ 37 ]:3), it may be argued that in the CRC, a balance has been struck between these two schools:

“The CRC sees the child as an initially highly vulnerable person in need of protection, nurturing and care who under parental guidance gradually prepares for an independent life in a social setting of rights and duties when reaching eighteen.”

The Committee on the Rights of the Child has echoed this position ([ 38 ]:§44):

“The evolving capacities of the child (art. 5) must be taken into consideration when the child's best interests and right to be heard are at stake. The Committee has already established that the more the child knows, has experienced and understands, the more the parent, legal guardian or other persons legally responsible for him or her have to transform direction and guidance into reminders and advice, and later to an exchange on an equal footing. [footnote omitted] Similarly, as the child matures, his or her views shall have increasing weight in the assessment of his or her best interests.”

That balance does not solve all questions, though, for it is unclear to what extent the recognition of the child soldier’s autonomy would also imply by necessity its responsibility—including the criminal responsibility. Children may be seen as perpetrators of crimes when they have reached a certain age of criminal responsibility. What that minimum age of criminal responsibility (MACR) is, remains highly uncertain under international children’s rights law. Article 40 CRC obliges states to establish a MACR, but does not specify at which age. The CRC Committee has submitted that twelve is the absolute minimum ([ 39 ]:§32). The MACR is set in domestic law, and may therefore greatly vary. At the level of international criminal prosecution before the International Criminal Court, prosecution below the age of eighteen has been completely excluded though (Art. 26 Rome Statute).

The general tendency seems to be to emphasize child soldiers’ lack of maturity and hence their vulnerability, and not to hold them criminally responsible therefore [ 40 , 41 ]. To the extent that it is accepted that they should be held accountable for their actions, criminal accountability is refuted [ 40 , 42 , 43 ], and/or procedural safeguards are considered necessary [ 39 ]. The latter requirement seems to refer to a juvenile justice approach, which is characterized by additional safeguards as well as the establishment of a minimum age of criminal responsibility [ 44 – 46 ]. As the CRC Committee has put it ([ 39 ]:§31):

“Children at or above the MACR at the time of the commission of an offence (…) but younger than 18 years (…) can be formally charged and subject to penal law procedures. But these procedures, including the final outcome, must be in full compliance with the principles and provisions of CRC as elaborated in the present general comment.”

A minority position has argued, in an attempt to ‘reimagine child soldiers in international law’, that child soldiers have ‘circumscribed actorship’ ([ 47 ]:98):

“I propose approaching the individual child soldier through a model of circumscribed action. A circumscribed actor has the ability to act, the ability not to act, and the ability to do other than what he or she actually had done. The effective range of these abilities, however, is delimited, bounded, and confined. Circumscribed actors exercise some discretion in navigating and mediating the constraints around them. They dispose of an enclosed space which is theirs and in which they exercise a margin of volition. The acreage of this space varies according to an ever fluctuating admixture of disposition and situation. Although encircled, circumscribed actors are not flattened. Affected by conflict, they also affect others. Threatened and harmed, they may, in turn, threaten and harm others.”

In sum, in children’s rights law, child soldiers are predominantly considered to be victims, rather than perpetrators. This is problematic for at least two reasons. Conceptually, it overemphasizes the paradigm of vulnerability and the need for protection, at the expense of acknowledgement of agency. Above, in practice, the portrayal of child soldiers as victims often turns out to be counterproductive in reintegrating them into their communities, and in coming to terms themselves with what they have done [ 17 – 25 , 47 , 48 ]. Let us now move to a second disciplinary perspective, transitional justice.

• Transitional justice

When societies are moving away from authoritarianism to democratic forms of government or emerge from violent conflict to situations of relative peace, debates about the serious violations of human rights and the international crimes committed in the past arise relatively fast. The new elites have an interest not to deny such calls, but to deal with them in a constructive manner to avoid further conflict [ 49 ]. ‘Transitional justice’ refers to “the study of the choices made and the quality of justice rendered when states are replacing authoritarian regimes by democratic state institutions” ([ 50 ]:431), or in a later policy document by the United Nations to “the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation” ([ 51 ]:4). These processes and mechanisms are commonly regarded to consist of four major components: criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, victim reparation policies, and various types of institutional reforms [ 52 ]. Some of the key issues that new regimes are facing in their pursuit of justice relate to truth-seeking, accountability of offenders, victim reparation and exploring reconciliation between former enemies [ 49 , 53 ]. It should be noted that the literature and policy-making on transitional justice have emerged from the many political transitions in the world in the 1980s and 1990s, and hence have centred on violations of civil and political rights and the corresponding international crimes (killings, disappearances, torture,…). Far less attention has been paid to the violations of economic, social and cultural rights, and the problems of discrimination, marginalisation and distributive justice resulting therefrom, which often created the root causes leading to violence, civil war and international conflicts. In recent years, interest has grown in transitional justice about the interplay between the first and the second generation of human rights, which could constitute the basis for a more integrated human rights approach, also for children [ 54 ].

Children as victims of armed conflict

In the growing literature on transitional justice, children are predominantly conceived of as victims of armed conflict. It should however be stressed that the field of transitional justice, both in theory and in practice, has paid extremely limited attention to children as independent persons distinct from their parents, their guardians or other adults. Only in recent years, some publications with a more explicit focus on children within the context of transitional justice have been drafted [ 8 , 29 , 56 – 58 ].

Transitional justice literature offers three important distinctions to denote the many faces of victimhood [ 59 ], within the broader concept of mass victimization. The latter, in the words of Fattah ([ 60 ]:412) refers to: “victimization directed at, or affecting, not only individuals but also whole groups. In some cases the groups are very diffuse, the members have nothing or not much in common, and the group is not targeted as a specific entity. More often, however, the acts of victimization are directed against a special population”. The first distinction is between individual victims and collective victims, the latter being the result of violent actions directed at a specific population (e.g., ethnic, ideological or religious groups) and society at large. A second distinction is between direct victims, who have suffered direct effects such as killing, abuse and detention, and indirect victims. The latter category can be defined narrowly to include only the direct victims’ family members, who experience hardship and pain as a result of the crimes committed, or more widely to encompass persons who have been traumatised as a result of having witnessed these crimes being committed, such as neighbours, friends and bystanders. The third distinction is based on the time dimension, and relates to first- and second-generation victims. According to Huyse [ 59 ], violent conflicts can produce a new generation of young people who are traumatised in various ways, and this may be a source of new conflict in the future. It is clear that children who are affected by armed conflict can be victims of many sorts, i.e. they can be victims of both the first and the second generation, they can be direct and indirect victims alike, and they can be part of individual and collective victimhood. All three distinctions are not only relevant to understanding the relationship between the harm done and the person(s) affected, but they also constitute important criteria for identifying who can participate in transitional justice mechanisms that are set up to deal with the past and construct a new future.

Although mechanisms of transitional justice developed over the last twenty years have paid some attention to children as victims of human rights violations and international crimes, they still have hardly focused on the roles children could play within such mechanisms. Examples of truth commissions that have paid attention to child victims, where children have testified about their experiences and have been able to express their expectations for the future can be counted on the fingers of one hand [ 58 ]: by way of example, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission held some special children’s hearings to allow their experiences to be known to the country [ 61 ]; the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission established a protocol with child protection agencies in the country to allow children to participate in the proceedings as witnesses; and in Liberia, a memorandum of understanding between the truth commission and the National Child Protection Network listed various strategies for the protection of children who participated in the commission’s hearings, like documenting their experiences and acknowledging their roles in the future development of the country [ 56 ]. Even lesser attention is paid to children in courts and tribunals for criminal prosecutions or civil proceedings: prosecutions of crimes committed against children remains problematic (e.g. in Colombia and the DRCongo),children’s access to judicial proceedings tends to be very limited, and special measures to protect them when they are included tend to remain exceptional [ 56 ]. On the other hand, it should be noted that the first case concluded at the International Criminal Court in The Hague related to the recruitment and conscription of child soldiers in the Eastern DRCongo, for which Thomas Lubanga was sentenced in 2012 [ 62 ]. One area of transitional justice that has arguably affected children the most concerns the systems and procedures for reparations set up in many jurisdictions [ 29 ]. Following the Van Boven/Bassiouni Principles [ 63 ], the right to reparation for victims of serious human rights violations is not limited to monetary compensation, but also includes four other categories of reparation: restitution of property and rights, rehabilitation measures (such as material and psychological assistance), satisfaction (e.g., judicial investigations, apologies, memorials,…), and guarantees of non-repetition in the future of the past violations (focused on the reform of state institutions). Moreover, children are particularly affected by the rehabilitation measures that aim to reintegrate and resocialize them into regular society after the violent conflict has ended. Some authors also suggest that children are no longer exclusively seen as passive subjects who can benefit from certain services and privileges, but that they can also be conceived of as active actors who possess interesting ideas and are able to make proposals about their own future. To take these into account when designing rehabilitation and reintegration programmes is far from an easy task, but very much in line with a ‘process-oriented approach’ to reparations [ 64 ]. An important report argues that much more work needs to be done to reform institutions in such a way that they create child-focused and child-friendly environments away from hostilities and conflict [ 29 ]. The above lines thus make clear that the large number of children affected by armed conflict pose huge challenges for transitional justice mechanisms, both in focusing on child victims of conflict, and in allowing children to participate in the proceedings of such mechanisms.

What about perpetrators of serious crimes?

The field of transitional justice is not only concerned with the consequences of atrocities for victims, but also aims at establishing the accountability of the perpetrators of serious crimes and human rights violations. The case of child soldiering hereby raises a particular issue, namely that these children cannot only be regarded as victims of armed conflict, but are also perpetrators of serious crimes. Often forced by militia leaders or commanders to kill or torture members of their community or even their family, the children find themselves trapped in the military logic and find it difficult to return to their communities. These situations are very good examples of the so-called ‘role reversals’ that are well-known in transitional justice, as well as in criminology and victimology, namely when victims become offenders and vice versa [ 65 ]. The fact that child soldiers cannot be held criminally responsible for their criminal acts under a certain age (cf. supra) raises serious problems in terms of accountability, one of the key issues of any transitional justice. It also creates the need to develop other than purely criminal or judicial forms of accountability for child soldiers in order for them to assume responsibility for their cruel deeds, and hence become members of society and the community again. Examples of ‘alternative’ forms of accountability can be found for example in traditional conflict resolution and justice mechanisms that include all stakeholders (victims, perpetrators, community), who discuss the background of the violence and its actors, and propose solutions (reparations, reconciliation, reintegration), sometimes by means of traditional rituals, such as ‘Mato Oput’ in Uganda [ 66 ].

Psychosocial perspectives

Rehabilitation and reintegration processes.

For years, humanitarian interventions for former child soldiers – mostly framed as ‘DD(R)R-programmes’ (Disarmament, Demobilisation, (Rehabilitation) and Reintegration)—predominately have included efforts to ‘repair’ these children from presumed damage caused by traumatic experiences suffered during warfare [ 67 ], particularly given the widely demonstrated high prevalence rates of symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) [ 22 , 23 , 68 – 70 ], depression and anxiety [ 69 , 71 ], and externalizing problems in different forms [ 72 – 74 ] in this group. Mainly operating in inpatient rehabilitation centres, interventions have traditionally focussed on children’s healthy recovery by means of trauma-focused counseling or group therapy, aiming to facilitate their re-adaptation and return to their families and communities [ 75 ]. These first initiatives have gradually expanded their scope, including for example vocational training activities and psycho-educative programmes [ 67 , 76 , 77 ]. Furthermore, interventions have increasingly involved more long-term support, including follow-up of the child and his family, even after the child´s return to the community [ 67 , 76 , 78 ]. Although hard scientific evidence on the outcomes of these programmes is scarce, the available intervention research shows potential for reducing symptoms of psychosocial distress in former child soldiers. Nonetheless, looking beyond psychological symptomatology, accounts remain of children and youths whose ‘rehabilitation and reintegration process’ evolves problematically, and who continue to experience difficulties in several areas (education, job, mental and physical health, social relationships, etc.) [ 79 , 80 ]. As we discuss in the following, in the literature these observed difficulties have been attributed to ongoing processes of discrimination, stigmatisation and even expulsion, provoked by the child´s family and previous living environment.

Stigmatisation processes and the victim-perpetrator dilemma

The ongoing stigmatization of and discrimination against returned former child soldiers, as shown in many studies [ 72 , 75 , 80 – 82 ] appears to be inspired by two elements: the feelings and views of the civilian communities, and, closely related, the nature of humanitarian programming in conflict and post-conflict contexts [ 79 ]. First, stigmatization and discrimination imply that the members of the communities where former child soldiers return to, not (only) perceive these children as victims [ 83 ]. They are equally considered as perpetrators, having committed atrocities against members of their own community [ 79 ]. Secondly, this process is often aggravated by the fact that humanitarian aid and intervention agencies use categorical approaches, in which certain target groups—in particular former child soldiers—are supported, and many others are not, in an effort to effectively distribute scarce resources [ 78 , 79 , 83 ]. These practices shape the public notion that former child soldiers are ‘rewarded’ for the atrocities committed, and moreover, that their civilian victims are not recognized nor ‘compensated’, enhancing sentiments of injustice [ 79 ]. Consequently—and considered as a normal reaction to post-conflict − people may experience deep feelings of revenge and hatred, rendering it impossible to look at returned child soldiers (only) as victims [ 22 , 84 ]. More generally, the population at large still seems to feel highly ‘victimized’, with many needs unmet, culminating in the projection of these feelings towards one of the few ‘visible causes’ of their own war trauma, being the former child soldiers.

Above, also the nature of humanitarian programming influences processes of stigmatization and discrimination on a community level. Humanitarian programmes for former child soldiers—and in particular sensitization interventions—have strongly emphasized the ‘victimhood’ of conscripted children, not only in contexts where children were obviously forcibly recruited, but also where children and youth seem to indicate that joining the armed forces was (partly) their own choice. This image of children as victims of armed conflicts and recruitment, promoted by humanitarian programmes, is grounded in two main dynamics. First, many DD(R)R-programmes—and related interventions—are framed from the ‘protection angle’ of the CRC, whereby children should be protected against the devastating impact and consequences of armed conflict, and, where needed, the necessary support and care should be provided. Second, being developed and implemented by international, Western-based non-governmental organisations, many of these programmes depart from a particular view on children and ‘childhood’, which may differ from local conceptualizations of childhood and child developmental processes. The social sciences have for long debated the premises of ‘childhood’, and the cross-cultural validity of particular age limits [ 9 ]. It is widely recognized that transitions to adulthood may differ across cultures, as other indicators than age (e.g., sexual activity, economic independency, rites of passage) tend to demarcate childhood [ 10 ]. Important individual differences too make it difficult to draw a universal age limit between ‘children’ and ‘adults’. Moreover, ‘childhood’ itself is generally differentiated into several developmental stages (e.g., early infancy, middle childhood, adolescence), which are often related to biological, cognitive, social and emotional changes in children’s development. This raises questions whether, for example, adolescents are able (cognitively, emotionally, socially,…) to judge the consequences of their choices, such as joining armed forces or groups or taking part in acts of violence. On the other hand, recent studies have emphasized the ‘agency’ of (former) child soldiers [ 20 , 5 ]. By giving them ‘voice’ (through interviews and other ‘participative’ methodologies), it has been demonstrated how these recruited youths themselves often stress having joined the armed force or group out of their own free will.

Conclusions on mono-disciplinary perspectives: limitations

In the following paragraphs and by way of conclusion on the mono-disciplinary perspectives, we will highlight some of the commonalities and differences of the three disciplinary perspectives on the ‘victimhood’—and ‘perpetrator-hood’ of child soldiers, and in particular point out some of the discipline’s limitations.

Under children’s rights law, child soldiers are predominantly considered as victims if recruited and used in hostilities under the legally accepted minimum age. Children may be seen as perpetrators of crimes if they have reached the minimum age of criminal responsibility (MACR), but the MACR greatly varies across countries. However, notwithstanding the acknowledgment of victimhood, little attention is paid to addressing that victimization; rather, children’s rights law focuses primarily on the prohibition of recruitment and use in hostilities.

Children’s rights law keeps facing difficult questions, for which it does not seem to find an answer within its own discipline. It seems to have difficulties in addressing the role reversal that transitional justice brings to bear. If child soldiers’ autonomy is emphasised, does that imply that they are to be held (criminally) responsible for their acts, and lose their victim status? Or alternatively, does not holding them criminally responsible come at the price of downplaying their autonomy, and of stressing their vulnerability and need for protection? Moreover, an emphasis on the autonomy of the child soldier in the context of armed conflict risks having individuating and de-contextualising effects. The impression may be created that a child has the full range of options, and therefore freely decides whether to become a child soldier. Many have pointed out that even so-called ‘voluntary’ recruitment is so much determined by the context and circumstances, that there is in fact very little free choice involved. Finally, children’s rights law fails to strike a balance between ‘victimhood’ and ‘perpetrator’-hood: below the MACR, it exclusively acknowledges victimhood; above the MACR, it resorts to criminal accountability, and thereby exclusively emphasizes perpetrator-hood. Whereas it has been argued that accountability does not always imply criminal responsibility [ 41 , 42 ], it remains utterly unclear what these alternatives could look like.

In sum, children’s rights law thus tend to rely on binary models (victim–perpetrator; below or above MACR; and child-adult) [ 85 ], thereby ignoring evidence from the psychosocial field and transitional justice that child soldiers are both victims and perpetrators.

The dominant approach in transitional justice is also to view children as victims of the armed conflict. Truth commissions that analyse the human rights violations and crimes committed invariably focus on the forcible recruitment of child soldiers, and the harsh conditions they serve outside of their choice, and point at the root causes of violent conflict and militarised societies. When proposing recommendations on reparations for victims, child soldiers tend to figure among those groups eligible for reparations as direct victims of the first generation. The same approach is found in national or international criminal courts that are expected to judge those who have committed international crimes, including the forcible recruitment of child soldiers. Former child soldiers are called as witnesses to report on their experiences and provide evidence of the crimes committed. In formalised procedures of this nature, very little attention is paid to child soldiers as perpetrators of heinous crimes by having killed, tortured and maimed during their period as a child soldier, sometimes even their own family members.

Here is one of the main challenges for transitional justice, and the mechanisms dealing with the crimes of the past: how is it possible to conceive of child soldiers as possessing this ‘double face’, as victims and as perpetrators alike? Victimology and criminology have become aware over the years of the mechanism of ‘role-reversal’ that may take place, whereby victims become tired of being harassed or treated in harsh ways and turn into offenders of similar acts, thus turning their own aggressors into victims. Potentially, this process can take place several times, thus blurring the boundaries between victims and perpetrators in the longer run. While these insights stem from ordinary or classical crimes outside of the political context of massive violence, it could be argued that they also bear relevance for the case of child soldiers. In fact, psychosocial approaches teach us that children also possess a degree of agency, albeit possibly lower than adults, and that they can be held accountable for their acts commensurate to their active involvement in activities of any sort; all this within a general context of ‘vulnerable offenders’ and geared towards avoiding secondary victimisation or re-traumatisation. However, because international children’s rights prohibit any criminal accountability under the age of 18, and definitely under 16, it would be very difficult to install some form of criminal accountability for child soldiers. But maybe other forms of accountability could be envisaged, not only to confront child soldiers with their deeds but also to allow their appropriate reintegration into communities and society at large. Examples may include traditional conflict resolution mechanisms—outside and separated of criminal justice systems—that provide a forum to discuss the past, to listen to victim experiences, and to allow offenders to assume responsibility for their acts.

Another challenge to transitional justice is to know whether former child soldiers, if also considered perpetrators, are still eligible for reparations as victims and under which conditions? Providing reparations to child soldiers who are not only perpetrators but also victims would constitute a major innovation in (inter)national law in periods of transitional or post-conflict justice.

Starting from a particular developmental view on children, and framed within the CRC (in particular the protection and provision of rights), psychosocial perspectives have put an overarching emphasis on the fact that former child soldiers are victims, and the ‘perpetrators’ part’ has been rarely considered in humanitarian programming and interventions aiming the rehabilitation and reintegration of these children. Also, in DDR(R)-programmes and other psychosocial interventions, remarkably little elements of reconciliation have been included, despite ongoing processes of stigmatization pointing at the hypothesis that the families and communities where these children are returning to (also) see them as perpetrators. By denying this connection between the individual and the social realm in the aftermath of conflicts, there is little space for successful reintegration processes—going beyond the short-term reduction of psychological symptomatology—and the hereto-connected necessary rebuilding of the social and communal networks.

Towards an inter-disciplinary dialogue: Beyond the binary distinction between victim- and perpetrator-hood

We have demonstrated that the complexity of the phenomenon of child soldiers cannot be analysed from one single discipline. The previous section was devoted to an in-depth analysis of three (mono-)disciplinary viewpoints on victim- and perpetrator-hood of child soldiers, and showed the limitations of each disciplinary perspective on its own. In what follows, we offer some building blocks for an interdisciplinary dialogue by flagging three learning points, which highlight some of the strengths of each discipline. Key to this interdisciplinary dialogue is the growing awareness within all three disciplines, but admittedly only marginally within children’s rights law, that only by moving beyond the binary distinction between victimhood and perpetrator-hood, the complexity of childhood soldiering can be better grasped. In transitional justice, the concept of role reversal has been instructive: child soldiers may be both perpetrators and victims. In psychosocial studies, emphasis has been put on the ‘agency’ of (former) child soldiers, and it has become clear how child soldiers themselves often stress that joining the armed force or group was (partially) out of their own free will. Hence, child soldiers’ perpetrator-hood is not only part of the way child soldiers are perceived in the communities they return to, but equally of the way they see themselves. These findings plea for more contextualized approaches, which try to understand the nuanced and complex realities of young people’s entry into fighting forces, including underlying root causes, as well as local views on the motives to persist or to abandon practices of child soldiering [ 10 , 86 ]. Drawing on these central points, we hereafter discuss three points opening up future perspectives.

Children’s right to participation

Children’s rights, in particular also in their legal articulation in the CRC, have put and continue to keep children in their own right on the agenda. Whereas in an earlier period, it may have been important to simply make the point that children do have rights, nowadays we may have to develop more sophisticated arguments on which rights they have, and how these rights relate to each other and to the rights of others. In particular, it would be highly beneficial to clarify that children’s rights are a smart mix of so-called provision, protection and participation rights. Footnote 2 In addition to establishing the right mix between these three types of rights, the importance of participation rights deserves further recognition. Participation of children may well go beyond their involvement in concrete programming issues, to fundamental processes of rethinking the accountability and responsibility of children for the acts committed and the reconciliation processes that need to take place. An open-minded perspective, in which local conceptualisations and individual and contextual differences can play a role, is thereby a prerequisite.

Alternative ways of holding child soldiers accountable

Transitional justice is home to a variety of non-judicial and non-legal mechanisms that address the human rights violations and international crimes committed during periods of armed struggle. The key question is to conceptualise new ways of holding former child soldiers accountable for the crimes or violations they have committed or been involved in. At this stage of international law, and given the strict requirements as to the age of criminal responsibility, it is hard to imagine how international and even national criminal tribunals or courts could indict former child soldiers. For this reason, it seems more fruitful to think about other, non-judicial and non-criminal, institutions and procedures of transitional justice that allow more flexibility. Firstly, truth commissions can promote some forms of non-judicial accountability, although they are foremost focused on unearthing concrete facts and sketching the patterns of human rights violations and international crimes. This can be organised by naming names of alleged perpetrators in the final report (although seldom done in practice), or inviting individuals and organisations to come forward and explain their actions of the past (as was the case in South Africa). Also, in the case of the South African truth commission, the Amnesty Committee had the competence to award amnesties to applicants, under certain conditions. It is thinkable to use such formats for former child soldiers, the more so because truth commissions sometimes provide a space to children, thus far mostly as victims of crimes and violations (e.g., Sierra Leone). A second type of non-judicial forms of accountability relates to community dialogues, sometimes established in the context of a truth commission (e.g., East Timor) or as a free-standing mechanism (e.g., Uganda) to reflect on the past, the suffering of victims and the accountability of offenders [ 87 ]. In both countries mentioned, the community meetings have taken the form of ‘traditional conflict resolution’ sessions, whereby all participants—victims and perpetrators—in the end engage in reconciliation, and use traditional rituals to be reintegrated in society. Such procedures not only allow community members to know who was responsible for (some of) the atrocities, but also enable offenders to assume active responsibility and become full-fledged members of society, and even create the conditions for reparations to victims. Such mechanisms also offer ample space to take the material, medical and psychological needs of children duly into account and provide the necessary support hereto. Finally, a third type of non-criminal accountability can be found outside the field of violent conflict and transitional justice, namely in a genuine juvenile justice approach for ordinary crimes, as existing in several countries worldwide. Such systems acknowledge that minors may be perpetrators of criminal offenses, but are also sensitive to seeing these youngsters as victims of their personal and social environments. That is why many juvenile justice systems also provide special safeguards (such as a specific justice system for children; specific attention for effective and child-sensitive participation; and in relation to sentencing, in particular in the case of deprivation of liberty) [ 43 ] and allow for diversion measures. Moreover, the experiences of juvenile justice systems may also inspire and inform transitional justice mechanisms to introduce novel procedures and forms of sensitivity towards the needs of children.

Connecting individual and social healing

Children’s rights law and psychosocial studies tend to ignore the importance of reconciliation, the importance of which has been documented in transitional justice. Individual healing seems indispensably connected to social healing and to the re-establishment of broader social and community networks that are often disrupted or even destroyed by the impact of warfare (and the use of civilians in war strategies, including child soldiers). The families, communities and societies where former child soldiers return to often have changed considerably following prolonged armed conflict. The terminology used in this field is striking, with terms such as ‘re’ -habilitation and ‘re’ -integration, implying that life could be turned back to ‘normal’ as it was before conflict erupted [ 88 ]. Individual rehabilitation and reintegration processes should therefore be connected thoroughly with efforts to rebuild social networks [ 77 ]. Furthermore, interventions on an individual and social level may need to be connected to developments and initiatives on the wider national (state) level, such as peace processes, amnesty acts and transitional justice processes. Rebuilding communities and societies after protracted armed conflict therefore seems to require—as the transitional justice field clearly demonstrates—in-depth processes of reconciliation, also when children are involved as perpetrators (even when forcibly recruited).

Implications for policy and practice

In the previous sub-section, we have flagged how interdisciplinary encounters may assist in better grasping the complex victimhood and perpetrator-hood dynamics that characterizes child soldiers. Children’s rights can make sure that sufficient attention is paid to children on their own, in particular by drawing attention to the importance of participation. Psychosocial studies have revealed the complex victim-perpetrator dynamic in the self-perception of child soldiers and in the way their families and communities see them. Transitional justice has emphasized the reconciliation dimension (social and societal), and offers inspiration for dealing with the perpetrator side outside a criminal accountability logic. What do these research findings imply for policy and practice?

First of all, the global humanitarian agenda may have to move away from the excessive focus on recruitment of children, and pay more attention to issues of rehabilitation, reintegration and reconciliation, in an integrated and comprehensive way. It also seems untenable to continue to emphasize unilaterally the victimhood of child soldiers, as for example has been done in the work of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the UN and in the lobby work of many children’s rights organizations.

Secondly, a ‘categorical’ approach that targets ‘the most vulnerable’ groups, such as child soldiers, is questionable. More coherent and coordinated interventions seem needed, beyond a categorical approach, and attention is needed to build robust, mainstream systems of different types of care to support these interventions.

Thirdly, processes of rehabilitation, reintegration and reconciliation may have to extend their scope beyond the individual recovery of affected youth, in order to include also the recovery of communities and entire societies, with as ultimate goal a long-term peace building process with preventive capacities towards a new resurgence of the conflict. What may be needed here is an approach that simultaneously addresses individual, community and societal aspects of rehabilitation and reintegration. Hereby, one should carefully address the complex elements of children’s involvement with armed groups, including possible voluntary involvement, and the complex victim-perpetrator dynamics. Also, reconciliation may have to become an integral part of interventions aiming at the rehabilitation and reintegration of former child soldiers. Inevitably, this will require more attention being paid to root causes of conflict, as well as long-term commitments not only through humanitarian, but also development assistance.

Finally, the interdisciplinary dialogue strongly emphasizes the importance of making sure that children affected by armed conflict themselves are the starting and central point of reference, and that their participation in policy making and interventions may be crucial for success.

The selective and limited understanding of what is at stake with child soldiers’ recovery and reintegration in each of our disciplines encouraged us to engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue between children’s rights law, transitional justice and psychosocial approaches. This dialogue has helped us to even better understand the limits and potential of each of our own disciplines. Whereas it has not led to a clear-cut grand design, it surely has identified crucial insights on the way forward beyond a binary distinction between victimhood and perpetrator-hood: participation of former child soldiers themselves in conceptual analysis, policy making and interventions seems difficult to escape from; alternative ways of accountability so as to acknowledge the perpetrator-hood dimension deserver further investigation; and individual, social and societal healing may well be much more interconnected than currently accepted.

In October 2009, the conference “Rehabilitation, Reintegration and Reconciliation of War-Affected Children” was held in Brussels. Scholars, policy makers and practitioners from all over the world, came together to discuss the theme of war-affected children from the perspective of three connected, and yet distinct, disciplines: children’s rights, psychosocial wellbeing and transitional justice. In September 2013, a follow-up conference was organised in Kampala, by the same organisations and War Child in Uganda: “Children and youth affected by armed conflict: Where to go from here?” ( www.kampala2013.ugent.be ). More than 150 academics, practitioners and policy makers globally, including a large representation from Southern countries, attended this conference, shared their experiences and knowledge, and discussed the way forward in the field of rehabilitation and reintegration processes of children and adolescents affected by armed conflicts.

Whereas the typology of protection, provision and participation rights has its limitations and setbacks [ 63 ], it remains a useful didactic device to capture the key objectives of children’s rights.

Abbreviations

Convention on the Rights of the Child

Disarmament, Demobilisation, (Rehabilitation) and Reintegration

Minimum Age of Criminal Responsibility

Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict

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Authors contributed out of their own background to both the disciplinary sections (Wouter Vandenhole: children’s rights law; Stephan Parmentier: transitional justice; and Cindy Mels and Ilse Derluyn: psychosocial approaches). All authors contributed equally to the other sections, and several in-depth discussions with all authors present were held to discuss the manuscript in-depth. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Derluyn, I., Vandenhole, W., Parmentier, S. et al. Victims and/or perpetrators? Towards an interdisciplinary dialogue on child soldiers. BMC Int Health Hum Rights 15 , 28 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12914-015-0068-5

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• Child soldiers
• Perpetrator-hood
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Breaking’s Olympic Debut

A sport’s journey from the streets of new york all the way to the paris games..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. And this is “The Daily.”

So my name is Gabriel “Kwikstep” Dionisio.

Rokafella, R-O-K-A-F-E-L-L-A.

I go by Kid Glyde. I represent Dynamic Rockers. I’m from Queens, New York.

This year at the Olympic Games, there’s one sport that’s on stage for the first time — breakdancing.

I’m excited that people are going to be exposed to it on that kind of stage.

They’re going to see breaking. They’re going to see hip-hop. They’re going to feel it. They’re going to — you know what I’m saying? So it’s going to be an experience.

Today, my colleague, Jonathan Abrams, tells the story of how it went from the streets of New York all the way to the Paris games.

But I’m also concerned that it’s not being represented at its fullest cultural capacity.

People are clueless to what this even is. And people are going to be really surprised.

And the debate that journey has inspired about whether treating breakdancing as just another sport might be a mistake.

This comes from a culture that had to go through so much just to exist. So are you going to do right by us?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

It’s Friday, August 9. Jonathan, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Sabrina.

So, Jonathan, we’re going to talk today about the Olympics. And I think something that catches people’s attention is when the Olympics adds new sports. The Olympics is this ancient thing. So, I find that kind of surprising when new things pop up. And you’ve been writing specifically about the new event that is debuting this year in Paris, and that is breakdancing.

Yeah, a lot of people in the community refer to it as “breaking.” Breakdancing is kind of a term that they have said was created by mainstream media and not a term that they use. So it’s almost frowned upon.

Ah. OK, breaking. Got it.

So it’s been a little bit of a journey these last few years to get it to the Olympics. And this is such a special watershed moment. It’s kind of crazy to think that breakdancers are going to be at the Olympic Games. They’re going to be mixing along with LeBron James, with Kevin Durant, with Simone Biles, all these athletes you historically think of being involved and intertwined with the games. You’re going to have a component of hip-hop right there alongside with them.

And it’s joining a class of new sports recently added to the Olympics, like skateboarding and rock climbing and surfing. And if you look at these sports, what they all have in common is that they’re trying to get a younger audience to watch the games.

And what the International Olympic Committee — they’ve been frank about what they’re trying to do — is that they’re trying to go for that younger audience because viewership has been way, way down. And so these ancient games are trying to modernize themselves by changing the rules and welcoming these new events to have a newer, younger, more diverse viewership.

OK, so breakdancing — oh, sorry, breaking — is here to try to breathe some new life into the Olympic Games — expand the audience, as you say. But I don’t really think of breaking as a sport, I mean, never mind a competitive Olympic sport.

Lots of people make that argument, Sabrina, but competition has been part of breaking since its inception in the Bronx in the 1970s. At that time, New York City is basically in this state of disrepair. The construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway cuts through the heart of the South Bronx, and it displaces thousands of residents. Crime levels rise, unemployment increases. These large buildings are sitting vacant because of white flight. And property owners, some are facing default, and they start burning their buildings in order to cash in on the insurance value. And people, especially the Black and Brown people in the Bronx, they’re feeling this sense of utter hopelessness. And the culture of hip hop grows out of that despair. It was a way for these marginalized communities to take something back and to have something for themselves.

And breaking is a key component of hip-hop, because when hip-hop first formed and came along, it was presented as this vivacious, multifaceted gem, where you had four distinct tenants and components. One was lyricism, the artists words going along a track of music. One is turntablism, or being a DJ, and that’s scratching records. The other one is graffiti, or writing. And then the last one is breaking. And that’s the physical expression of hip-hop, dancing to the music.

And so these latchkey kids in the Bronx would throw these massive parties where breaking was born. And people, they came together, and they formed crews. And they competed against one another. And they danced to make a name for themselves. They danced to earn respect in their street, in their neighborhood, and in their city. And that was how they cultivated self-esteem and made something of themselves when they really had nothing else.

OK, so in these poor neighborhoods in the Bronx, in this very turbulent time, kids were finding themselves finding inspiration in breaking. Why exactly did they call it breaking? Why that word?

Breaking comes from these pioneering DJs being able to figure out how to extend the breaks for songs. So say there’s a drum break in a famous song where it’s a snippet, and then the song will continue.

And they were the most popular parts of the songs, where kids would dance for 10, 15 seconds and then stop.

DJ’s like DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash. They were innovators and engineers because they figured out how to extend those breaks.

And once they were able to loop them endlessly, then kids were able to extend their dances and be able to dance and be creative with it and form the circles. And that’s where breaking came from.

So what did it actually look like?

There is no way I can accurately describe breaking just through words. I can try to say that it’s graceful or powerful or athletic, and all those words seem to fall flat. Breaking is a call and response. It’s a back and forth conversation. It’s almost like trumped up jazz.

Picture this. You’re going into a crowded party. There’s people everywhere. Music is thumping. If you’re walking to the cypher, which is the circle where breakers perform and compete in, you finally get to the front and what you see is people doing these most amazing moves, moves that you don’t think are possible with the human body.

They’re spinning, contorting their bodies into pretzels, stopping on a dime, bending backwards, and doing windmills and airflares. And then the next person is going to come in and challenge them. And what breaking is, it’s attitude. It’s an expression of yourself. It’s energy balled up.

And when did breaking go beyond the streets of the Bronx and really kind of emerge as a sport?

Well, before it got to that level, it had to become part of the mainstream culture. And breaking started to hit that level around the early to mid 1980s. And at this point, people may know “Rapper’s Delight.” They can maybe say “a hip hop, the hippie to hippie, hip hop.” Everybody knows that song by then.

But these movies, like “Flashdance” and “Wild Style,” are also starting to come out, and they’re starting to capture hip-hop’s infancy. And one of the main ones that comes out in 1984 is “Beat Street,” and that’s pivotal.

Bronx rockers. Gino, hey, come on.

Yo. Let’s serve.

There’s a scene of the movie with these crews coming together in a club.

And there’s anticipation. There is adrenaline. It looks like they may fight. But no, instead of fighting, a dance battle breaks out.

And if you’ve never seen this, like I said earlier, about words and being able to describe it, if somebody described breakdancing to you and you had never seen it in person, you wouldn’t have a good clue as to what it was.

But now, for the first time, in movie theaters from LA to New York, you can actually see what it is. And then you have these pioneering groups, like Rock Steady Crew and Dynamic Rockers, Zulu Kings, New York City Breakers, they all start to be in these movies and do these demonstrations globally. And that inspires a whole generation of kids to get into breakdancing.

This is the newest craze. It’s called breakdancing.

So as the popularity of breakdancing continues, experts say it’s OK to dance, as long as you just watch your step.

It’s the Big Breakdance Contest from the Roxy, with host Leslie —

And at this point, we’re starting to see judges and prizes be introduced into breaking. Then in 1990, a German breaker set up a breakdance competition in Germany known as Battle of the Year. And 2001 was a pivotal year because it’s the first year that Red Bull has its Lord of the Floors competition.

History in the making, y’all.

And that, again, convened all the best breakers to be able to compete against one another to measure themselves up. But there’s also the carrot at the end of the stick.

The runner-up of the 2001 Red Bull Lords of the Floor is —

There’s a multi-thousand dollar cash prize that’s awarded to the top talent.

The winners, Los Angeles Breakers. Come and get your checks.

So you start to see the trappings of this thing that was created in New York City in the Bronx in the 1970s start to leave its beginnings a little bit and become more of a competition and more of a sport through Red Bull and these other entities that are sponsoring it.

Y’all loving it or what? Give a big round of applause to all the contestants.

We’d like to thank Jaimeson Keegan and the whole Red Bull crew.

OK, so breaking is going mainstream in a very big way. But in my mind, there’s a big difference between a Red Bull event and the Olympics. So how do we get from here to there?

It’s actually a bit of a wild story. So nearly three decades ago, this global governing body of dance, International Dance Sport, is recognized by the International Olympic Committee, and they want to bring dance to the Olympics. So they want to have ballroom dancing. And they suggest that, and they get rebuffed.

So they eventually rebrand themselves as World Dance Sport Federation, and they find out that it’s not foxtrot or salsa or ballroom that the Olympic thinks could have a shot. It’s breaking. Breaking is highly watchable, easily viewable on social media. And it comes along as the Olympics is reevaluating what they’re going to use as a sport to try and gain that younger audience.

There was a testing period in 2018.

Winter Olympic Games just got a little more exciting. Breakdancing will now be part of the Youth Olympic Games. And there’s still a search for —

They debuted breaking at the Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires.

3, 2, 1! It’s battle time!

And what happens is that it exceeds almost every expectation by every metric possible. There was more than 50,000 people who attended the two-day event in 2018. There was over 2.5 million social media impressions, according to the International Olympic Committee. I mean, it seems like it aligns itself perfectly with the Olympics mission of trying to skewer to a younger audience. And once you see those numbers, that pretty much locked up breaking for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.

The Olympic Games are changing, and the future of breaking is coming.

We’ll be right back.

OK, so now we’re at the Games. Everybody’s watching how this is going to go, which must be pretty exciting for breakers.

You would think so. But there’s a lot of skepticism and tension from many of these veterans and pioneers and purists of breaking.

And what do they say? Why do they not feel excited about this?

Well, I think anytime you take something and strip it away from its roots — and let’s be honest, Paris 2024 is very, very, very far away from Bronx 1970s.

[LAUGHS]: That is true.

It is not going to be the same thing or presented in the same thing. I think that’s what the purists and the pioneers are afraid of.

But Jonathan, couldn’t you also make the case that skateboarding is also a specific kind of culture and that it also has all of its own peculiarities and is also potentially hard to judge by a bunch of Olympic judges?

To some extent, yeah. But breaking, it’s just different in a lot of ways. The pioneers and the purists, the ones who invented this thing will argue that it’s more than just a hobby or even a sport. It’s a lifestyle. It’s the product of a culture. It’s something that was born from Black and Brown people’s struggles in a deeply turbulent time in American history and is a way for people to express themselves, to tell their stories, to build self-confidence.

And on top of that, there’s a lot of breakers who just aren’t happy with how this arrived at the Olympics in the first place. It arrived in the hands of the World Dance Sport Federation. And remember, that’s an organization that wasn’t even associated with breaking. They were trying to put ballroom dancing into the Olympics way before they ever thought about breaking.

So back in 2017, a bunch of breakers, they got together and they signed a petition essentially protesting this organization. And they were saying, you don’t represent us. You’re not from our community, but you’re taking our art form and using it to advance your own goals. And all of this has left a lot of breakers really worried and concerned about what exactly this weekend is going to look like for breaking.

OK, let’s dig into that. What will breaking look like on stage in Paris? What can we expect?

Right, so there’s a lot of questions about how it’s going to actually look. In Paris, you’re going to have some of the crucial components of breaking. You’re going to have attitude. You’re going to have breakers. They’re going to be challenging each other. There’s going to be athleticism. [MUSIC PLAYING]

But there’s also going to be judges. A breaker is going to go get a score. Then the next breaker is going to go and get a score. So you can kind of see those seeds of the origin of this thing that was born in New York in the 1970s. But it’s definitely something different, and it’s more sterile and sanitized.

There’s going to be 16 men and 16 women who will go across two days of competition. There’s going to be nine judges, and they’re going to score the breakers based on five criteria — vocabulary, technique, execution, originality, and lastly, musicality.

And break those down for me. What do they actually mean?

The vocabulary is not how many words somebody can say. It’s the array of moves that a breaker deploys. And technique covers the breaker’s body control and their use of space. Execution consists of the cleanliness of one’s moves.

Then originality is improvising during their rounds, being able to react to what their opponent is doing. And then musicality is staying on beat with the music. They’re not going to know the music beforehand, so they’re going to have to really tune their moves to what’s going on to the beat.

OK, so this is how the judges are actually going to do it. But what about kind of what we know about breaking, the spirit of competition, the kind of outdoing each other, the attitude it brings, like the showboating? Is that taken into account in how it’s going to go with the Olympics?

Yeah, I can guarantee you this, Sabrina, that this is going to be the only Olympic sport with the misbehavior button.

What’s that?

The judges will be able to hit a misbehavior button if competitiveness crosses into crassness, if they deem that to be the case.

What’s an example of something that would get a misbehavior button?

Say if you finish off a move with the freeze and stick up your middle finger at your opponent.

[LAUGHS]: OK, fair enough. Got it. OK, misbehavior button. So this sport, of course, started here in the US. I have to ask, who are the Americans competing this year? Tell me about them.

Yeah, somebody that I’ve talked to a lot leading up to the Games is Sunny Choi, who was the first American woman to qualify for the Games.

All right, switching it up, all the way to USA, first entry, Sunny.

She’s Korean-American. She’s from Tennessee. She’s ironically the only New Yorker — she now lives in New York — who is competing in Paris at the Games.

All right, Sunny slay. Oh, you started as a gymnast? Is that true?

Yeah, so I actually, I watched the Olympics growing up.

She has a background in gymnastics, and she was working at Estée Lauder when she decided to go into breaking full-time.

Some people have been like, you’re a very unlikely Olympian. And I’m like, yeah, kind of. I had always envisioned myself going to the Olympics as a gymnast, and then I never thought I would have the chance again. And so it coming back full circle is amazing.

Woo! Victor.

OK, Victor.

What you got?

On the men’s side, you have Victor Montalvo, who goes by “B-Boy Victor.” And he’s a two-time Red Bull World One champion. He’s from Florida.

So my dad and his twin brother used to break back in Mexico. And they actually taught me, my brother, and my cousin.

His father was a pioneer in the Mexican breaking scene.

I was introduced into breaking at the age of six years old. And I took it serious at the age of 10.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah, yeah.

So breaking is really in Victor’s blood. And he’s definitely a favorite to medal on the men’s side.

Heavy round.

Still go where the action is.

Victor, what you got?

Victor with the eye contact, going straight into it. He’s like, I see you, and I got you.

OK, so I’m assuming these Americans are poised to win this fundamentally American sport.

Eh, not necessarily, Sabrina.

Breaking is such a global entity now that I feel like America has really fallen behind some of these other countries and when it’s more popular and when people do it more often. So you look at this field and there’s breakers from Japan, from the Netherlands, from France, from Kazakhstan, from all over the world. On the women’s side, there’s B-Girl Nika from Lithuania.

And last year, she won the 2023 world title at the age of 16.

Wow, amazing. A Lithuanian girl has the world title, actually.

Yeah, and she’s an amazing story. And I think she’s emblematic of breaking and its evolution because she discovered breaking on YouTube at the age of five and within just about a decade is one of the world’s best breakers in the world and will be heavily favored to win a gold medal at the first Olympic breaking competition.

Just to go back to the tension around breaking in the Olympics that we started with, Jonathan, and the question of it leaving its roots, becoming detached from the place and the culture it sprung from, is there an argument that that’s already happened, that as people are kind of wanting to pull it back toward where it came from, it’s already gone. It already went out there. Is there any going back?

Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think we’re at this crossroads where you have breaking’s authenticity at stake. And breaking is about that expression from the heart. It’s about being able to show your attitude, your charisma, who you are as a person through your dance. And the pioneers and the purists are going to be watching this to see what part of the soul and the struggle exists as this thing that they invented, nurtured, and cultivated reaches its biggest stage ever.

But it is out there. And for somebody to be able to be in a foreign country and just study the art form on YouTube and be able to become world class leaders in it, it says something, one, about the art form and how wide-ranging and impactful it can be. And it also just says that this isn’t just New York’s anymore. This is global.

And perhaps the people performing on that stage are what breakdancing is now, right, in some ways?

Yeah, and we’re going to see people, men and women from different countries all over the world represented in Paris. And in some ways, it’s very, very far away from what was invented in New York in the 1970s.

But at the same time, seeing people from different countries and men and women be the best at breaking that they can possibly be is also exposing breaking to a whole new generation. And exposing breaking at the Olympics could be the vessel that keeps it alive for the next generation.

Jonathan, thank you.

Sabrina, anytime.

Here’s what else you should know today. On Thursday, former President Donald Trump held a news conference at Mar-a-Lago. It was his first public appearance since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee.

And I look forward to the debates because I think we have to set the record straight.

In his remarks, Trump proposed three dates in September for debates with the vice president.

I haven’t recalibrated strategy at all. It’s the same policies — open borders, weak on crime.

Trump insisted that little had shifted in the contest, despite polling showing a tightening race.

Listen, I had 107,000 people in New Jersey. You didn’t report it. I’m so glad you asked. What did she have yesterday? 2,000 people? If I ever had 2,000 people, you’d say my campaign is finished.

It was an effort by the former President to recapture some political momentum, as the new Democratic ticket has continued to dominate the news coverage. During his remarks, ABC confirmed that it would host the two candidates for a debate on September 10th.

A quick reminder to catch a new episode of “The Interview” right here tomorrow. This week, Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks with Republican Senator James Lankford, including about Republicans who turned on him when he tried to pass bipartisan immigration reforms.

I did have several folks saying, I’ll destroy you if you do this, because although I like you, I like President Trump better. And he’s got to be elected for the future of the country. And you can’t take this issue off the table.

Today’s episode was produced by Sydney Harper and Luke Vander Ploeg, with help from Shannon Lin and Will Reid. It was edited by Lexie Diao and MJ Davis Lin, with help from Ben Calhoun, contains original music by Dan Powell, Marion Lozano, and Diane Wong, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. See you on Monday.

• Apple Podcasts
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Hosted by Sabrina Tavernise

Featuring Jonathan Abrams

Produced by Sydney Harper Luke Vander Ploeg Shannon M. Lin and Will Reid

Edited by Lexie Diao MJ Davis Lin and Ben Calhoun

Original music by Dan Powell Marion Lozano and Diane Wong

Engineered by Alyssa Moxley

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube

More than 50 years after its inception, “breaking” — not “break dancing,” a term coined by the media and disdained by practitioners — will debut as an Olympic sport.

Jonathan Abrams, who writes about the intersection of sports and culture, explains how breaking’s big moment came about.

On today’s episode

Jonathan Abrams , a Times reporter covering national culture news.

Background reading

The Olympic battles in breaking will be a watershed moment for a dance form conceived and cultivated by Black and Hispanic youth in the Bronx during the 1970s.

Breakers are grappling with hip-hop’s Olympic moment. Will their art translate into sport?

There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.

We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.

The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Michael Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Rob Szypko, Elisheba Ittoop, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Ben Calhoun, Susan Lee, Lexie Diao, Mary Wilson, Alex Stern, Sophia Lanman, Shannon Lin, Diane Wong, Devon Taylor, Alyssa Moxley, Olivia Natt, Daniel Ramirez and Brendan Klinkenberg.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sofia Milan, Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer, Jeffrey Miranda, Maddy Masiello, Isabella Anderson, Nina Lassam and Nick Pitman.

Jonathan Abrams writes about the intersections of sports and culture and the changing cultural scenes in the South. More about Jonathan Abrams

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