The child soldiers who are recruited in DRC and Afghanistan and Somalia and Yemen and all the other places—are they responsible for buying into the adults’ war?
The short answer is "no." The long answer is, "it depends." Mostly it depends on how you conceptualize responsibility,
mens rea, brainwashing/indoctrination and the legal capacity to commit crimes. Let's put it another way - when I was 16, of my own volition, I jumped onto an adult man and used a machete to torture him psychologically until he pissed himself. It was totally of my own volition, it was completely voluntary, no one was around me forcing me to do it.
At 16, did I have the legal capacity to: understand right and wrong, intend to commit a violent action and then execute it, know where I was/who I was/what was happening, etc etc? Most legal and forensic experts would say that yes, I have the legal competence to stand trial and I might even be asked to stand trial as an adult - such as in the cases in Sierra Leone during the Taylor trials, David Crane held the cut-off age for prosecution of child soldiers at 15. Meaning, anyone over the age of 15 was "fair game." Dallaire goes into this case in more detail in his book.
Essentially, and if you look at the Ongwen case this also seems accurate, any "crimes" committed before the age of 15 were forgiven. And when I look at something like what happened with T - I was 11, there was another adult there, he had a gun. Sometimes I acted alone especially during the training process of other kids, but I was even younger still when that began. At age 8 (the age I was recruited, the age I was first raped, the age that most kids are only just beginning to develop a deep sense of affective empathy) I planned to kill F (who owned the home) and went through with it. It just failed. Should I be charged with attempted murder?
In my opinion,
objectively - no. That objective answer comes from thinking about it as a legal case, that could be applied to any child. Personally, I am conflicted. For me, I know without a doubt, 100%, I have killed people. (To be fair, this was never under my own volition - the person I actually, physically killed, and those killed as a result of my actions) I have tortured them and I have planned acts of murder and violence and then followed through with them. As
myself a grown-up who can logistically understand the causality of my behavior, I would argue that Crane may have gotten it wrong.
That even a child who behaves like I did - even a teenager, or even perhaps an adult - may not deserve prosecution but instead intensive rehabilitation (and it is fortunate that other people in my life agreed. My therapist who broke confidentiality did not call the police. Because while I ended up in a locked facility in the gang violence unit - I was never imprisoned, nor faced a single legal consequence for my behavior. The focus was on mental health - we had other kids there who weren't criminals in different units, interacted with them regularly, did group therapy, got to go outside for walks 4 times a day, ended up at the CSI/RD, etc.)
Adult Weemie knows there’s more to the story.
I read thru the entire proceedings of the Ongwen verdict where they describe how he challenged orders, acted totally autonomously, abused others privately sexually and physically, and was given a great deal of latitude to act independently once he became a commander. But then you're like, you know, how old was he when this all started? (Other people say he was 9 or 10, he says he was 14) to claim that there is some magical distinction between a 9 year old who is indoctrinated into an armed group and an
18 year old
major of the group - where does that distinction actually
end?
When is it that they transform from a victim, into purely a perpetrator? Is there a transformation or are both things simultaneously true? (B, my first therapist, says that according to transactional analysis, victim-perpetrator-rescuer are all aspects of the same triangle.) And knowing my personal experiences with rehabilitation, and knowing my personal experiences with developing empathy
in my thirties when people say "once you're an adult, that's it, nothing will ever change."
My experience with this, and even my experiences with other adult violent offenders, show that this is not
true.
The children recruited (you were not even given such an illusory choice)
I suppose this is accurate. I say recruitment, but what I really mean, is - my role changed. Us 3 were told that we were special, that we were more than just servile. My experience of the first time that I was made to hurt someone else, before it happened I didn't want to do it. After it happened, I felt like I'd accomplished something. The adult in the room said I did, they gave me rewards, I got lots of money and shit, you know?
So that makes it easier to transform your internal image into a participant instead of essentially a meaningless object, which the other children around me were other than us 3 (and according to Kyle, and I saw them out and about, there were other children - even the guys at Superstore said "we knew it happened because we saw them on bikes.") And while we were trained together, we were always pitted against one another.
It wasn't like they were my brothers-in-arms, I was competing with them. And I am very competitive.
I was
inducted is perhaps a better term, same with a lot of these kids.
It was really helpful but also pretty distressing. It's great to know there's other people to relate to. It's also soul crushing.
