Politics November 27, 2016
In recent years, we’ve come to know the Ishmael Beahs and the Michel Chikwanines of the world. They are the hundreds of thousands of children of war. They are little boys severed from families, bearing AK-47s slung across their small backs like leaden backpacks, brown-brown beneath their nostrils. Finally the world has begun to mourn its lost sons. But what about its daughters?
According to a 2007 summary report of recent CIDA research, 40 percent of all child soldiers are little girls. Once abducted into these deeply patriarchal military forces, these girl soldiers aren’t just doing the “female” jobs. While militias will specifically seek out girls for domestic and sexual purposes, the girls’ experiences once within the bush entails a much broader and much darker scope. Not only are they raped and compelled to complete domestic tasks, they are also forced to kill.
Even if they are able to escape, local DDR (Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration) programs are not quick to aid in their rehabilitation.
According to the same report, 72 percent of girl soldiers in Northern Uganda received weapons and military training and eight percent received advanced training. They were trained to kill alongside boys on the front lines — but unlike the boys beside them, the girls had to cook, clean, carry heavy loads, sing and dance for male morale and perform sexual favors at any time, whether consensual or not.
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Even now, it is common to find officials who believe that a girl soldier’s life is simply housework and weekly chores. For this reason, it is much harder for a female child soldier to find aid with DDR programs. This is often because DDR services have regulations in place that keep women from rehabilitation. For instance, many programs offer help to girls only once they have turned in a weapon, though many are not provided with permanent weapons by militant forces. Without having a weapon to trade in for services, girls are barred from receiving the help that they desperately need.
This contributes to the widespread marginalization of female child soldiers in DDR centers seeking rehabilitation. In fact, between 1998-2003 at a DDR in Sierra Leone, the marginalization became so gross that the ratio of boy soldiers to girl soldiers in the program was 12 to four.
One escaped girl soldier and HIV positive mother, Mary, describes her homecoming. “Most of us [women] that come back from the bush are left on our own, and no one cares what happens to us. So we have more problems now than we had in the bush.”
Here is the story of Mary’s plight and that of the astronomically high number of invisible girls and women like her.
Abduction
“On that day they separated us from our mothers—the mothers going back and we (sic) going forward. We were not allowed to look back. It was just that, to separate and to cry.” –girl soldier from Angola
Abducted for childbearing abilities which “ensure a constant pool of forced and compliant labour” and trained to kill because they embody the ideal of the ultimate child soldier, girl soldiers present a priceless resource to terrorist organizations Boko Haram, FARC and the LRA.
Child soldier forces are often utilized because children do not initially present themselves as a threat and because engaging in combat with a child presents a moral dilemma for opponents. The large proportion of girls represented in child soldier forces is no accident — girls are uniquely sought out in child soldier recruitment because they are viewed as “harmless females.”
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Because girls are acknowledged as essentials by any rebel force, girl soldiers on average are kept within forces for much longer than their male counterparts. While the average length of activity for a boy in Northern Uganda is three years, for a girl soldier this number skyrockets to six to seven years.
But to only analyze the domestic and sexual reasons why rebels abduct girls for seven years is to only know half the story. The purpose of a girl soldier’s abduction before she comes to the bush multiplies once she actually arrives in the bush.
Survival inside the bush
“Our only motive to exist was killing. That is the only thing we thought about.” –girl soldier from Sierra Leone
Although not every rebel force arms its girls (Boko Haram, for example, keeps them in the domestic sphere and sexual slavery while FARC chooses to arm), female child soldiers sometimes commit violence and even voluntarily join rebel forces as a means of protecting themselves and securing power.
The New York Times journalist Brigit Katz explains, “Sometimes – though not usually – girl soldiers transform from frightened recruits to vicious fighters, emboldened by a sort of power that they would not have acquired in the patriarchal communities where they were raised.”
However, like the house slaves of America’s colonial past, domestic child soldiers “deliberately excelled” in domestic tasks in order to keep from being sent into the fields of combat.
So as a means of protecting themselves without arms and without being in the fields, many victims of rebel abduction become bush wives. Bush wives are women who, often after being raped or sexually assaulted by several group members, are chosen by one rebel to belong to him only.
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Although it’s a situation comparable to sexual slavery, some girls seek out bush marriages as a form of protection. In the bush, the rank of the girl is elevated to that of her bush husband. She then receives a level of respect proportionate to his status.
So after enduring the garishness of war in a way that only girl soldiers can, these women are left with some uniquely garish psychological scars. At one rehabilitation school in northern Uganda, 87.3 percent of child soldiers experience ten or more episodes of PTSD. At the local level, this mental illness often goes undiagnosed. Instead, these episodes are said to be the manifestation of cen, the haunting of the spirits whom a girl soldier has killed at war.
Survival outside the bush
“Since I came back, I have not been one year with my people, but there have just been problems, problems, problems…You know, they don’t love me anymore. They don’t love me anymore…They despise me now.” –girl soldier from Sierra Leone
Now, flash forward to Mary at the present. After successfully escaping the bush, she returned home with the children she had conceived in the bush. However, when she finally made it back to her family, her mother would not allow Mary and her children to live with her, as the community has spread rumors that she led a massacre that devastated the region. They threatened to “burn her in [her] hut alive” if she returned.
But even if Mary had family support, she would still experience trouble. The DDR services that any ex-rebel soldier needs are often unavailable to girls. As summarized by the CIDA summary report, “In phases I and II of the programme, the ‘wives’ of male combatants, as well as their dependents, were not eligible for entry.”
But the stigma that ex-girl soldiers experience does not stop at the doors of the DDR.
In their hometowns, ex-bush wives like Mary are stigmatized for being single mothers and for having lost their virginity outside of marriage. As a result, these women cannot find financial stability with another man. In this region, it is important that a woman have a husband; lacking a father hits the children’s financial hopes hard, as there will be no land for them to inherit.
“Land is a real issue for the women who have returned,” says Mary. “What then will happen to our children when they grow up? They will also have nowhere to settle. There is no land for us to cultivate on to feed these children.”
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And even though a staggering 37 percent percent of girl soldiers experience conceive children in the bush, those women and children who return are stigmatized and landless. In addition, girl soldiers often come home HIV positive with no way to afford the proper treatment.
For girl soldiers, the fight both within the bush and outside is equally difficult. Faced with the challenges of killing, subservience, domesticity, sexual assault, pregnancy, HIV and a hoard of other gender-specific illnesses, being haunted by cen, being landless, being single mothers and living in extreme poverty, it’s easy to understand the very common emotion that Mary expresses.
“When it comes to taking care of our children, then life in the bush was better because you can just go and rob things forcefully from people. But here you have to work.”
And here they have to work harder than boy soldiers, at greater odds and with less support.
