Social and Religious Connections in Forced Conscription of Child Soldiers

Armed conflicts generally traumatize children caught up in the fiasco and confusions of warfare. Most children are disorientated or forced into the frontlines as combatants, amour bearers, cooks or sex slaves of combatants.... [ view full abstract ]

Armed conflicts generally traumatize children caught up in the fiasco and confusions of warfare. Most children are disorientated or forced into the frontlines as combatants, amour bearers, cooks or sex slaves of combatants. Children forcibly conscripted into wars are usually drawn from the lowest class of the societal stratum. The affluent and warlords always ‘export’ their families to safe havens in far away oversea countries and enroll them in choice schools with uninterrupted programs and luxurious lifestyles, while children of the poor suffer in bushes and trenches without food, clothing and Medicare. Presently, wars on religious ideologies have joined the train of child abductions and forced conscriptions with children as young as nine years being trained and deployed to attack different soft targets as suicide bombers.

This presentation thus tries to explore the impact of social and religious inequalities on the forced conscription and use of child soldiers in armed conflicts. The role of class inequalities, education, economic opportunities and deprivations, information, resource distribution and religious extremism, fanaticism, bigotry and heretics and their roles in conscriptions will be critically examined. Finally, adjustment problems and guilt management crisis on children will be examined, with possible solutions as the way forward