What makes child recruitment into armed conflict more likely? Violations against children in armed conflict pose a significant challenge to conflict resolution, long-term peacebuilding efforts, and international stability, yet little data are available on a global scale to understand the scope and causes of child recruitment into conflict. This article makes two contributions towards closing this analytical gap. First, utilising annual reports of the United Nations Secretary-General on children and armed conflict, this article codes child recruitment and other grave violations against children for 28 countries from 2006 to 2015 producing a new data set. Second, using this data set, this article examines the broad role of displacement in shaping child recruitment into armed conflict. Ultimately, this article finds that displacement within a country is positively and statistically significantly correlated with violations against children in armed conflict to include child recruitment and introduces policy recommendations for engaging this finding.

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Development policies advancing the Women, Peace and Security agenda enjoy an established trajectory across international organizations. This is evident within United Nations programs that engage displaced populations where children are particularly vulnerable to conflict dynamics. This article argues that existing gender-based development policies mitigate the impact of conflict on children through empowering displaced women as peacebuilding agents. Using United Nations data, fieldwork, and elite interviews, this article employs a case study of Iraq to show that the implementation of gender-based development policies correlates with reduced rates of grave violations against children in conflict settings. These findings point to the peacebuilding potential of displaced women through their ability to mitigate the economic and social impacts of conflict dynamics on children. Policy programs within the United Nations Women, Peace and Security framework should engage this connection between displaced women and the protection of children to strengthen and improve peacebuilding outcomes in conflict environments.