Social Science Research Council

In nearly every war and civil conflict, children are among the principal victims. The situation has worsened in recent years because civil wars and conflicts without clearly defined state actors have grown more prominent and children suffer more in these. Not only do they suffer from bombs and other violence against civilians, they are all too often drawn into direct participation in these wars. Children fight as soldiers; they are abducted into servitude and sexual exploitation. They suffer from the spread of AIDS and other diseases that accompany combat. They are among the most bereft when conflict ends, in need of rehabilitation and help. This is not all new—the very word 'infantry' derives from the French word for child. But it is especially acute now, and it demands attention.

An unprecedented number of children have been drawn into active participation in warfare. Many more are directly affected. Yet in fact we cannot say how many. No serious data exist to confirm or challenge the estimates that there are perhaps 300,000 child soldiers bearing arms today. Perhaps ten times as many are affected in others ways, but again, this is an estimate. Hard data do not exist, and producing such hard data is one of the aims of the project proposed here. Without such data, those who seek to help children affected by armed conflict cannot do so as effectively as they should. They cannot deploy resources wisely enough; they cannot evaluate the effectiveness of different modes of intervention; they cannot determine what local conditions protect children and which put them more at risk. They are left to act on anecdotes, and funders are left without clear evidence of whether their resources are really helping.

Many child soldiers are coerced into fighting, others are pushed to it by poverty and crisis in their communities, still others may be seduced by promises of glory or at least excitement. How many fit each category is not known; neither is how best to tailor responses to each different situation. In short, it is clear that mobilizing children in combat or visiting upon them violence and illness and exploitation holds terrible consequences for their development and for the peace and stability of generations to come. But the specifics of just what is going on and how best to respond are much less clear.

To try to overcome this deficit in usable knowledge, an SSRC-organized research consortium was formed, bringing together United Nations agencies, humanitarian NGOs, and centers of research. Members of the consortium were committed to sharing the knowledge they have—not just with each other but openly—and producing a usable synthesis.

The Children and Armed Conflict Program completed Phase One of its research work in 2005. The main focus in 2006 was on finalizing, editing and preparing final reports for publication and distribution. These reports analyzed the work carried out for the Data Collection Project that was conducted in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Colombia and Sri Lanka. This project aimed at developing inventories of existing data on CAC globally and in each of the four countries; establishing protocols on methodologies and tools and data collection on CAC; producing new disaggregated data on the impact of armed conflict on children in the four countries; and developing the capacity of local actors for research and advocacy on CAC. The Sri Lanka report has now been published and was distributed to local, national and international policy-makers, NGOs, and other stakeholders within Sri Lanka and elsewhere. The remaining reports on Angola and DRC are currently in the final stages of publication and will be widely distributed within their respective countries and internationally. The country coordinator for the Colombia study also plans to individually publish journal articles using the findings of the Data Collection Project. In addition to these project publications, Alcinda Honwana, the former CAC Program Director, also published Child Soldiers in Africa, which sheds light on how children are recruited into armed groups, what they encounter, and how they come to terms with their experiences.