Child Soldiering

Chris Blattman has an old post on 'child soldiering' which is a pervasive problem, particularly in certain war-torn parts of the developing world. One of the problems with this subject is not that it is ignored by the developed world. Quite the opposite - he notes numerous bestsellers, motion pictures, media coverage and political involvement just in 2006-2007 alone. The problem, he says, is how little is devoted to understanding the causes of this problem. What constraints and incentives do governments face to make it optimal for them to recruit child soldiers? Simplistic moralizing will not help us better understanding the problem, let alone the solution. He writes:

"What has been most upsetting to me is the how little actual information and investigation has gone into understanding the causes of child soldiering and what tactics might be effective at tackling this most terrible of issues. Too much of the analysis and policy-making is based on myth, supposition, and outdated information. Too often it seems as though emotion and activism trump careful investigation. Stomping out the recruitment and use of child soldiers, however, will take more than moral revulsion and grand speeches. Rather we must strive to understand the motivations and constraints that drive government armies and rebel groups to recruit and arm children."

Chris's own research has found that in Uganda, one of the more notorious countries with pervasive child soldiering, the Lord's Resistance Army was three times more likely to target and recruit a 14-year-old compared to a 9-year-old (though the myth, he says, is that it's the 9-year-olds that have been targeted) or even a 21-year-old. His interpretations of his field research suggests that young adolescents are disproportionately targeted for three reasons:

because they were overrepresented in the population; because they were more effective guerrillas than younger children; and (perhaps most importantly) because they were more easily indoctrinated and disoriented than young adults—the older the recruit, the less likely they were to buy into the fear and propaganda, and the more likely they were to know their location and attempt escape. Youth who were children and orphaned at the time of abduction were also much more likely to stay with the rebel group once abducted, suggesting a fourth determinant of child soldiering: the quality of the life to which one can return.

Update: You can find the data Chris uses for his research here. It's entitled The Survey of War Affected Youth (SWAY), and is amazingly a representative panel of youth affected by war in apparently developing countries. Also, here is a slide presentation of the SWAY data.