Childhood ends amid blood and gore

2024 marked the thirty-fifth anniversary of a UN commitment to protect children from being recruited as soldiers. However, armed groups have increased the recruitment and use of children in armed con-flict. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was hailed as a historic agreement when it was adopted by world leaders in 1989, and it has inspired governments to pass laws protecting children from violence and exploitation. Around a decade later, a protocol prohibiting the recruitment and use as soldiers of all children under 18 years of age was adopted. To date, it has been ratified by 173 countries.

Instead of ending the practice, armed groups have increased recruitment and use of children for armed conflict purposes, from Colombia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to the Lake Chad basin, Mozambique, the Sahel, Sudan, Somalia, Syria and Haiti.

Most of the impacted children were abducted and forcibly recruited. Most of these children are girls who have suffered rape and sexual violence, and have been bought, sold and trafficked. On Tuesday, the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, declared that the increase in the use of military force by governments and regimes has wreaked havoc on chil-dren, in situations such as Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including Gaza; Sudan; Lebanon; Myanmar and Ukraine.

“The cries of these children echo across conflict zones, but far too often, the world remains silent,” said the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, Virginia Gamba.

“Their pain is a stain on our collective conscience. We must do better—because every moment we delay, another child becomes just another number in the long list of conflict related casualties and violations in the children and armed conflict reports.”

Gamba called for the granting of safe and unimpeded humanitarian access to children, the implementa-tion of international laws, the elimination of wide impact explosives in populated areas, the prohibition of the military use of schools, and the prohibition and elimination of anti-personnel landmines.

“As we move into 2025, let us choose compassion over indifference and peace over war’” added the senior UN official. “Together, we can rewrite the stories of these children—not with fear and loss, but with healing and hope”.

Meanwhile, the number of children being recruited into armed groups in Haiti has increased by 70 per cent over the past year, according to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). The unprecedented spike also reveals the alarming deterioration of child protection amid escalating violence in the Caribbean nation. According to the latest estimates, children now comprise up to half of all armed group members, with recruitment driven by widespread poverty, lack of education and collapse of essential services.

The situation in the country’s capital, Port-au-Prince, is significantly alarming, with 1.2 million children living under constant threat of armed violence. An estimated 25 percent of all 703,000 internally dis-placed persons are children, living under dire conditions and exposed to multiple threats.

The deteriorating security situation has led to a sharp rise in violence against Haiti’s most vulnerable populations. Sexual violence and rape have become rampant, with reports from the Office of the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict indicating a tenfold in-crease in children exposed to sexual violence this year alone.

This year, UNICEF provided support services, including psychosocial support and community sensitiza-tion to over 25,000 people affected by sexual and gender-based violence in 2024.

Seventy-five years since the ratification of the Geneva Conventions, a former child soldier-turned foreign minister of Sierra Leone has urged greater international support for the key accords, highlighting their importance in rehabilitating him and tens of thousands of his fellow compatriots following the country’s bitter civil war.

Here a moving plea by a child stirs hope.

“I stand here today as a former child soldier, forcefully recruited during the civil conflict that decimated over 50,000 of my compatriots… I wouldn’t be the person I am today without the critical support of the ICRC and the international community,” Musa Timothy Kabba told Members of the Security Council in Geneva in August 2024, referring to UN-partner the International Committee of the Red Cross, founded in the Swiss city in 1863 to protect and provide humanitarian assistance in line with accords designed to protect people in conflict.

Addressing the forum gathered at UN Geneva to mark the moment in 1949 when the international community revised three earlier Conventions - concerning the protection of soldiers wounded in battle, victims of conflict at sea and prisoners of war, adding a fourth to protect civilians impacted by war - Kabba said that he “need not dwell upon the trauma of those years” as a young soldier.

“But I do need to acknowledge here today, in this birthplace of modern global humanitarianism, that it was the ICRC which profoundly helped me to overcome…the trauma of my war experience and to be reabsorbed in normal society”, after the country’s civil war in the 1990s, “during which most of the car-dinal principles of the Geneva Conventions were violated”.(UN News)