Child soldiers

The twenty-first century has seen the continued recruitment and deployment of child soldiers. Such number more than 300 000 in the contemporary world. Children and young adults are particularly enmeshed in civil wars; or in situations of potential anarchy where the traditional restraints normally imposed by codes of honourable warfare and chivalry are absent. The 1998 Statute (the Rome Statute) of the International Criminal Court has banned the conscription and enlistment of children under 15 years of age into armed forces for use in combat and other operational military activities. The International Labour Organisation Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention 182, enacted in 2000, commits all States who ratify to take measures to prohibit and eliminate this "worst form of child labour" which includes armed conflict. The child soldler of today is enmeshed in a triad of anarchic civil war, light-weight weaponry, and drug or alcohol addiction. He is usually involved in a quasi-military gang-like situation, dangerously armed, and is bonded to a group of other compunctionless combatants led by an older teenager. Such kill with impunity in the absence of any identifiable conventions of war. Children and young adolescents who are exposed to violent trauma inevitably develop behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and social problems, sometimes for life, after the specific circumstances of combat which led to their recruitment, have passed. Most child soldiers have never been to school and almost all are illiterate. Ongoing national and international advocacy, to prevent, ban, and rehabilitate child soldiers has become a critical global, humanitarian and public health goal. © 200