‘And So They Ordered Me to Kill a Person’: Conceptualizing the Impacts of Child Soldiering on the Development of Moral Agency

Abstract

Approximately 300,000 child soldiers serve in various armed groups around the world, and become directly implicated in the perpetration of kidnappings, killings, and torture. Considering that children construct moral concepts and a sense of themselves as moral beings in the context of their everyday interactions with others, the concern with how their harrowing experiences of violence may affect their moral development is particularly compelling. To date, however, no research has been conducted examining how these youths grapple with the violence they have perpetrated and how they reconcile their own actions with a view of themselves as moral people. In this paper, I review the limitations of constructs relying on moral disengagement and post-traumatic stress, which are typically used for examining the aftermaths of violence perpetration, and outline a new framework grounded on the normative developmental process whereby children grapple with their experiences of wrongdoing.

Youths Making Sense of Political Conflict: Considering Protective and Maladaptive Possibilities

“…Barber describes this common theme among Bosnian adolescents as being associated with psychological trauma and continued suffering. Although we unhesitatingly agree with Barber that there are psychological risks associated with these forms of meaning [Wainryb, 2011], we also agree with Daiute that it is important to ponder how 'being able to express this bleak message also expresses the figured world of possibility and change' (p. 253). In particular, we note that this narrator's telling conveys a reflective process of searching for, and failing to find self-relevant meaning in what is happening to her.…”

“…Notably, this troubling numbing of agency is most evident in what adolescents don't say. For instance, when asked to describe an event in which he had harmed another person, a 14-year-old Colombian former child soldier constructed the following account: 'So that, so that day, well, when they ordered me to kill someone and so -we went, we left like, like three and -we got there and, and, we killed a cop and, then we left, well, the guerrilla told me to kill someone, so then they ordered me, then we got there and, and we killed a cop and then we returned to -returned to our camp' [Wainryb, 2011]. This narrator's account is striking, in that the motivations, feelings, and thoughts underlying his own and others' actions are entirely left unstated -we don't know why he was ordered to kill the cop, why he obeyed, or how he felt about doing so.…”

Saints, and the Rest of Us: Broadening the Perspective on Moral Identity Development

“…We have begun to examine possible continuities in the way people construct their own agency around experiences of having harmed another person, asking whether some people are consistently more likely to, for example, view themselves as having acted badly due to forces beyond their control whereas others are consistently more likely to hold themselves responsible. Our data also suggest that some individuals tell elaborated, coherent, and psychologically framed stories about their own wrongdoing while others tell more fragmented and sparse accounts that leave out the explanations and meanings that make their own wrongdoing make sense [Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010a;Wainryb, 2011;Wainryb, Komolova, & Florsheim, 2010;Wainryb & Pasupathi, 2010]. We have speculated about the implications of these differences for both moral agency [Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010a;Wainryb, 2011;Wainryb & Pasupathi, 2010] and moral identity [Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010a;, but testing those speculations is an ongoing project.…”

“…Thus, normal adults are frequently engaged in crafting compromises between moral values and other considerations. Finally, research has shown that normal adults sometimes behave in ways that violate their moral principles, and oftentimes adults acknowledge this; in such occasions, people struggle to reconcile the contradictions between their actions and principles [Pasu-pathi & Wainryb, 2010a;Wainryb, 2011;Wainryb & Pasupathi, 2010]. Given these documented realities about the moral lives of normal, functional, healthy adults, the notion of "sainthood" or exemplar status as an endpoint -as the single, desirable endpoint -of moral development is not viable.…”

Guilt and Child Soldiers

“…10 It should be noted first that not all child soldiers are forced into conflict. Some of them volunteer to join armed conflicts either because of perceived opportunities or out of loyalty to the cause of the conflict (Wessells 2006;Boyden 2006;Wainryb 2011). But the cases where child soldiers feel guilt even when they are forced or coerced into committing violence are the most challenging.…”