Are child soldiers the same as child criminals?

     Go out, shoot, be fed drugs, repeat, be killed in the process or be freed, only to meet the uncomfortable bars of a jail cell. This is the life of most child soldiers. Once finally freed out of this brutal system they are punished for murder and have to spend the beginning of a proper life, locked up. Most child soldiers are forced into fighting and have no control over their actions. However some believe that child soldiers should be punished because if they are not then the number of child soldiers will continue growing. Rehabilitation should be the aim not punishment.

     Almost all the time child soldiers are forced into fighting, by the adult commanders or by themselves. A lot of the time they have no say in becoming a soldier. If a war is going on in the country and soldiers are needed to fight, children are often recruited. Because their brain has not fully developed, they can easily be shaped to think new things. Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier states that a way the commanders ‘brainwash’ you is to “Feed you drugs and then kill people in front of you to desensitize you and then be fed more drugs”. Is forcing them to take drugs and then shooting someone right in front of their eyes really how we want to raise a generation of children? Children often apply to become child soldiers as well. Even though they choose to apply, they are not necessarily ‘forced’ into joining but there can be huge pressure to that it almost feels as though they are being forced to. Because war is almost always in 3rd world countries and countries that have a lot of poverty, children think that going to a military camp will provide food and shelter, something they don’t have. “Children go to military camps because the don’t know what to do with their life anymore”. Most of the child soldiers no longer have families because they were killed and have no idea what to do. Some of these children who have witnessed their families being killed join military camps to get revenge. People think that fighting is a way that people can take their anger out but once out on the field everything changes and ideas of revenge seem to slip away as fear comes flooding in. By the time children realize that it’s not what they want, it’s too late and they’d probably be dead.

     In order to stay alive in the battle field they need to do whatever the adult commanders say, this means that they don’t have much control over their actions. The commanders usually control the children using fear and ‘brainwashing’ them. Fear is easily used to control the child soldiers because most of them have had a very difficult past. “Because you have lost everything that is there to you, this is how you bring children to war, you destroy their towns, their families...”. They haunt the children using their past’s and because they don’t have anything left they listen. “and then you can manipulate them and drug them so they do whatever you want them to do”. It is human nature to attach on to something, a group of people that you can call family. So when children are left without any thing, they look to the group of other child soldiers and commanders. They have no control over who they get to be with and it’s not their fault that they want someone to call family. “[You] Become so removed from exhibiting human emotion so this becomes your life, your reality, the group becomes your family”

     Some people think that child soldiers should be punished as they are dangerous after have being known nothing but killing. Omar Khadr, a former child soldier who was put into jail for killing Army Sgt. First Class Christopher Speer. For most people this seems like a normal war crime or that Omar would be the victim as he was forced to kill. But because “when Khadr was angry at his guards, he would recall how he had killed a U.S. soldier and that would make him happy” it makes you wonder about how dangerous he really is. Because he feels pride in killing Speer it can be scary to let him back out when he thinks it is okay to kill. When child soldiers get to this stage they then start to become child criminals.

Perpetrator or Victim. The problem with Child Soldiers

Child Soldiers weak mentally and physically. And the torture they have to endure is not right. Also the fact that they get controlled from a young age is very wrong. With many having their parents taken away as well as killed, even you would have felt some sympathy. As a child soldier things are different. Your life is controlled, and you can’t do anything about it. Being fed drugs, being manipulated at a young age. It is very scary stuff, and yet people still do it.

On the other hand, some of them were teenagers. And as some might argue, they still had a choice. They chose to fight others. They chose to kill. They believe they were not influenced, and actually fought off of their own rage. They were used. But people didn’t know. And we still refuse to understand this.


The first reason why Child Soldiers should not be prosecuted is that they were too young to understand. For one, they are young. When you were a young child, you did a lot of different things. Of which I'm sure not all of them were the best decisions, and I’m sure you didn’t understand why someone got mad at you. Well this is the same thing. Those kids were young and had their parents either killed or taken away from them. So now they listen to the person who killed them as they were too young to understand, and just needed someone to go to. Now they praise their war leaders as they grow up in this new and dangerous world and at the same time, they take pride in their actions. A good example of this is Khadr. He was child soldier who ended up killing Sergeant 1st Class Christopher Speer as well as wounding five others. He has pleaded guilty to five criminal charges including murder in the violation of war for the killing of Speer. He is the first Child Soldier in Western countries to be prosecuted for War violations


Their brains are very undeveloped as we know that they get fully developed only by the age of 25. Not only that but they are fed drugs. Making them even more unaware of what goes on. The mentality they have, is kill or get killed. As they have seen many of their close friends from the camp lose their lives. It is catastrophic what happens to these children at such a young age, and it is up to us to fix it. Although this is the case, there of course are many reasons why they should be prosecuted.


These mostly revolve around the fact that they still had a choice. And that they chose wrongly. Well of course they could choose. We can all choose but not all of us make the best decisions. When given the position of power, and wanting revenge on what happened at a young age, as well as being manipulated, people can do insane things. Like kill others. Most actions are caused from their leaders as they praise them.