Child Reintegration Essay

Children, Armed Conflict, and Reintegration
“We had not only lost our childhood in the war, but our lives had been tainted by the same experiences that still caused us great pain and sadness” (Beah, 2007, 190). Conflict takes away the childhood of many children. When the child is enlisted, not only is their childhood taken away, there life is taken from them. Child soldiers are a growing concern within the international community. In an effort to counter the use of children in conflict the international community, especially the United Nations, have created protections and protocols in order to protect children who are exposed to armed conflict and those who have the potential to be indoctrinated into the war effort. Recruitment of children into armed conflict has been a topic recently touched upon in Africa, and more narrowly in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone saw a massive surge of the use of child soldiers on both sides of fighting. When looking at child soldiers, both boys and girls, it is important to look at not only the life of the child soldier during the war, but also the life before the war, and the reintegration processes.
Defining Child Soldier Defining the term “child soldier” is an extremely complex (Shepler, 2014). When Western countries intervened in the civil war in
In Sierra Leone childhood is distinctly different from our Western model of thinking. “…A youth is someone who is no longer a child, but is not yet a ‘big man’ or ‘big women’” (Shepler, 2014, 44). The way Sierra Leoneans define childhood and adulthood is drastically different from our preconceptions of the two terms. By looking at both the Western definition and the Sierra Leonean definition of child soldiers, we can then conclude a more generalizable