Children, Not Soldiers

Recruiting children under the age of 15 years and using them to actively participate in hostilities is forbidden under international law and amounts to an international crime. Nonetheless, parties continue to enlist and conscript children, putting their lives in danger by exploiting them, very often not only for military purposes. After outlining the legal foundations of the prohibition on recruiting and using children, this chapter aims at providing an overview of the tools and strategies, including the UN architecture on children and armed conflict, designed and implemented to thwart the phenomenon of child soldiering. The chapter offers some critical reflections on the necessity to implement effective child-friendly post-conflict and peace-building efforts, in particular disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration processes. In fact, those efforts are still predominantly concerned with adult male fighters and, in most instances, they are unable to adequately address the specific needs of children formerly associated with armed forces or armed non-state actors, including groups labeled as terrorist.