Child Soldiers

You hear gunshots, yelling. Voices echo in your mind. Voices. Child voices. Then it all stops. All of it. No guns. No voices. Violence. Death. Those to words correlate. A dynamic duo, an inseparable pair. War and soldiers. Again, another perfect pair, but what about soldiers and children, or actually... children soldiers. War torn countries are everywhere, but they are starting to act out of desperation, and this leads to child soldiers. There are many issues with this, from being inhumane, to breaking several laws of war. Child soldiers are a big topic at the moment, but not the children themselves, but if they should or shouldn’t be given amnesty. Due to them criminals, many think they should be locked up. Although some forget that they

They aren’t invincible, they are just regular children under the influence of drugs who know how to kill people with ease. That said they are also affected by the war, from loss, to sanity. They all lost something, and that something may have kept them from becoming tiny murdering machines. “Despite this, in the last ten years over two million children have been killed, over one million orphaned, over six million have been left seriously injured or permanently disabled and over 10 million have been diagnosed with psychological trauma.” This quote shows the sheer amount of children who have been affected by this issue in some way, it also shows the devastating outcome of war. All the loss they have experienced means that they need help, not stale jail

Many adults are left with ptsd, but what about kids, if these experiences can leave adults debilitated, what about the children. Children’s brains aren’t fully developed, so it can become much worse, which is why child soldiers should be given help instead being prosecuted. “More than half of the country’s health facilities are out of service, water facilities have been destroyed and more than 15 million children are in need of water and sanitation facilities.” In desperate times people may do desperate things, as long as the survive, people will do anything; same goes for children. Another example of requiring aid involves a child soldier, Omar Khadr, held at Guantanamo Bay. “They will never see the video of his interrogation by Canadian intelligence agents where he is lying on the floor crying for his mother.”(Andrea Prasow). As one could clearly see, the calamitous event of being separated from his mother, has left him distraught and forlorn. Unfortunately, this fate is shared among many child soldiers, either separation, or sometimes even being orphaned according to Invisible Children, an organization founded to spread awareness and stop the use of child soldiers. “Over one million orphaned, over six million have been left seriously injured or permanently disabled and over 10 million have been diagnosed with psychological trauma.”(Invisible Children). Those are large