child soldiers

Child Soldiers

Poor African children are forced into being a child soldier after they have no one else to care for them. They go to military bases for safety because they thought the soldiers would help them but instead they just took them in and forced them into being child soldiers. These are just some of the few horrible things that happen to child soldiers. That is why I think that these child soldiers are victims and defiantly not perpetrators. 

Child soldiers are also put in a position where they need to listen to their commanders and are sometimes even forced to suicide bomb sometimes. The children because they are in a position with no other family most of the time the commanders begin to become father figures to them and then are given drugs by these father figures. Most of the time for the suicide bombing children it’s not in Africa it’s in the middle east and sometimes even in some parts of South America. These children are taken away from their families and forced to suicide bomb which could be considered homicide because you’re forcing someone to put on a bomb and kill them selves so I think that could be considered homicide.

After the war child soldiers are still having war induced trauma. One former child soldier said that after the war he could see blood running from the faucet and the shower when there was actually water. He couldn’t sleep at night because he just had nightmares about the war. In other words being a child soldier really screwed him for a year or two.

I can see why people might think these innocent children could be perpetrators. People could say that they are killing people which they were but they were forced and had nowhere else to go. People might ask, “Why couldn’t they just escape and run away?” First of all they were on a military base so that would be pretty hard to escape and also these children have nowhere else to go, that’s the reason why they came to the army base in the first place. And finally, I could see how people might think that they are suicide bombing but they’re really not, they’re being forced to suicide bomb and the bombers are getting killed, too.

In conclusion, child soldiers are victims. They were forced to be a child soldier it was not a choice. Not only African children are child soldiers but there are child soldiers on every continent except Antarctica so if you can think about that that means there are child soldiers in North America and Europe and if you can imagine it there are millions of child soldiers around the world. So once again child soldiers are victims.