Child soldiers

As a tagline to my previous post about gangs and violence, I remembered hearing about child soldiers. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, realize that many, many countries throughout the world 'recruit' children as young as eight as cannon fodder (a.k.a. 'soldiers). If you remember, this was done in Vietnam and it's definitely being done in gangs in the US.

This is a hard concept to grasp - that people would deliberately put their children, the future of their country, in a situation that may mean maiming or death. The concept of child soldiering is wrong on so many levels that I don't feel I could even begin to write about them. Human Rights Watch, however, has some information on child soldiering - as part of their Childrens Rights campaign.

Additional resources:

Amnesty International
BBC's Children of Conflict
Childsoldiers.org
The United Nations