Recounts the stories of child soldiers in Rwanda, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and Afghanistan in terms of the societal and economic pressures that lead these children to become soldiers and the impact of their decisions on their own lives and those of their families and cultures. In Rwanda, 16-year-old Francois was forced to murder his cousins to prove tribal allegiance, and 10 years later, he drifts on the edge of society, unemployed. Luis, a 12-year-old Colombian, joined the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to exact revenge for the murder of his parents. By 14, he was making bombs and terrorizing innocent people. In Sri Lanka, 17-year-old Ida Carmelita joined the Tamil Tigers; three years later she was brutally raped and murdered in her own home. In Uganda, Joseph Kony abducts young boys and girls to serve in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). In 2001, the first American casualty in Afghanistan was likely killed by a 14-year-old boy. Effective ways to end the practice of childsoldiers (as well as to aid such children into integrating back into society) is to limit the flow of small arms and light weapons to nations where children are at risk of being recruited, to implement the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to support the newly formed International Criminal Court in Rome, to protect demobilized child soldiers, and to sensitize regular military forces worldwide to the personal and moral consequences of confronting children on the battlefield.
