Children Without Childhoods
by Masha Williams
One of the elements that most shapes a person's life and character is one's childhood-that carefree, happy time when the most important things to worry about are cleaning one's room and remembering one's multiplication tables. Or at least, this is the case in most developed countries. Childhood is something completely different for many children, some as young as eight, in many parts of Africa. Whereas in places like the United States, children worry about the next day because of how much homework they have that night, many African children worry about the next day for a completely different reason: they don't know whether they will live to see it.
As we have seen with the extent of psychological damage demonstrated in soldiers returning from Iraq, war puts extreme stress on a person's emotional and mental health as well as the physical risks, of course. If even adults who are better conditioned to cope with the atrocities they are forced to witness are so deeply affected by war, you can imagine the effect on a psyche as fragile as that of a child.
A very important aspect of any child's life is continuous interaction with family, the one group of people that will love and care for the child unconditionally, while also serving as role models and pillars of support during those vital formative years. For those forced to become child soldiers, the only family they know is their group of fellow child soldiers and the brutal older troops charged with indoctrinating and disciplining them. They know no love, but only anger, and the only role models they have are those who regularly mistreat them-starving them, beating them, and forcing weapons into their small and ungainly hands.
Not only are these children separated from their families, they are often forced to witness, or even commit, crimes against them. Mariatu, a young woman from Sierra Leone, was 12 when rebel forces attacking her village gave her a gun and a choice: either to kill her father, or to become a sex slave. When she, unable to harm someone so dear to her, chose the latter, they killed him anyway as she watched and sent her to a camp where she was forced to be a sex slave and a scout for the next three years. They plied her with drugs to make her bloodthirsty and fearless and forced her to witness horrors untold. “Our aim was to do bad,” she told a New York Times reporter. “Our aim was to see blood.”
Many of these children without childhoods require years of social and psychological aid to cope with the haunting atrocities that become an intrinsic part of their lives from the day they are forced to give up their childhoods, their families, and their homes and take part in conflicts they did not create. Watching someone kill your family or amputate the arms of several thousand people, as Mariatu had to, is not something that is forgotten in a day, or a year, or ever, and neither is the guilt stemming from those things she had to do herself. But, although their lives cannot be rewound, they can be repaired.
The International Committee of the Red Cross booklet on ending children’s involvement in war contains one quote that particularly jumps off the page: "Their pasts cannot be changed, but their futures can." For the 300,000 child soldiers out there today, as well as for the thousands more who have been liberated from their hellish captivity, hope still exists. Rehabilitation programs, such as the one in Sierra Leone, organized by the Red Cross, are seeking to rebuild these shattered lives, and they are succeeding. Those who have been subjected to such childhoods are being successfully reintegrated into society, and more and more laws are being introduced so that in the future, no child will ever have to make the choice of whether to kill or die.
