Will no one think of the children?
The topic of child soldiers is a provocative and highly discussed one, and while it's pretty difficult to grasp it without becoming biased, we can take a brief look and list some of the historical facts about this long-lasting social phenomenon.
There are evidently some hundred thousand underage children in armed groups of rebels or military government forces and some are mind-bogglingly young, as little as eight years old. Technological advancement (the creation of lighter automatic weapons) surely contributed to the increased use of child soldiers, as they are simple to operate with and easily accessible in military circles and rebel groups.
The poverty of families living on war and conflict zones is also one of the decisive factors in this business and some military organizations are fast to recruit as many underprivileged kids as possible. The girls are not safe either, in some countries a third or more of all child soldiers were reported to be girls and of course the old archetype of conquering an enemy country through raping their women (or underage girls) is still very much present to this day.
The brutal truth is that these children are being robbed of their childhood and brutally thrown in the cold-blooded adult world of war, which undoubtedly affects and alters the child's perception of reality and the world as such. Going through bloodshed at such a young age (or any other age) definitely leaves a person deeply scarred and the psychological consequences of such events can be devastating, they could even define the person in question completely – through a diagnosis of PTSD or perhaps a detached, apathetic attitude towards life in general.
The delegates in the Human Rights Council discussed the topic as whole and came up with a concept of youth centres where the heavy burden of stigma - being a child affected by war - would be lifted from these kids' shoulders. The countries still need to unite about the solution, though, and in this instance they ought to forget about their own personal agendas, empty rhetoric and flashy pseudo-political phrases and slogans. We need to cut to the chase and find the real problem, focus on the causes, not the symptoms, as the saying goes in the holistic medicine terms.
