Child soldiers in West Africa

A child soldier is, according to the United Nations definition, anyone under the age of 18 recruited by armed forces or armed groups to fight, spy, carry cargo, perform messenger tasks or for sexual purposes.

For decades, child recruitment was a brutal feature of conflict in West Africa. Between 1989 and 2003, the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone — likewise spilling over into border regions of Guinea — enlisted thousands of children into the ranks of bloody militias and irregular armies. Most of them were kidnapped during attacks on villages.

Armed groups such as the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), led by Charles Taylor, and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone, headed by Foday Sankoh, made child recruitment part of their military strategy. The youngsters were often subjected to the ferocious assimilation of violence, forced to take drugs and commit atrocities to sever any links with their former life.

According to official estimates, some 300,000 children are still being used as soldiers in armed conflicts in various regions of the world, in Africa and in such other countries as Syria, Myanmar and Afghanistan. In Colombia, the use of minors by armed groups has quadrupled in 5 years. Various studies estimate that between 30% and 40% of the worldwide total are girls, who remain unseen because, aside from fighting, they are used as household slaves or subjected to sexual violence.