Child soldiers and distributive justice: addressing the limits of law?

Abstract

This paper discusses the limitations of legal responses to the problem of child soldiery, beginning from the premise that the crime of using child soldiers is comprised of both the recruiter and the recruit. While legal approaches are addressed to the recruiter, because of the dearth of enforcement mechanisms, the protections established in international law have failed to prevent the recruitment of under-aged combatants. It remains to be seen how efficacious a deterrent the precedent-setting recent and on-going prosecutions of recruiters will be. Nonetheless, legal approaches do not address the recruit, and thus they fail to account for the complex of social reasons that prompt many children to join armed groups "voluntarily". This paper argues that the conditions that lead children to join armed groups are structural and, thus, must be addressed structurally through developing greater "distributive justice".

Constituting Omar Khadr: Cultural Racism, Childhood, and Citizenship

“…While his advocates argue that his status as a child soldier makes especially odious the Canadian government's failure to seek his repatriation, in fact international law relating to child soldiers does not forbid the trial and detention of children alleged to have committed war crimes. Rather, the relevant international law is focused on preventing both the recruitment of children into armed groups and their deployment according to varying age thresholds (Park ). In any event, being a child soldier has been one of the central grammars in the deeply polarized polemic on what was to be done with Omar Khadr.…”

“…Not least, a broad conception of child soldiers guides disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programming (DDR), which is the principal response advocated for child soldiers with the goals, generally, of removing children from militarized groups, reuniting them with their families, and reintegrating them into their communities through "psychological support and education, and economic opportunity" (Knight and € Ozerdem 2004:503, cited in Rivard 2010); these goals stand in stark contrast to the torture, trial, and detention of Khadr. argue that his status as a child soldier makes especially odious the Canadian government's failure to seek his repatriation, in fact international law relating to child soldiers does not forbid the trial and detention of children alleged to have committed war crimes. Rather, the relevant international law is focused on preventing both the recruitment of children into armed groups and their deployment according to varying age thresholds (Park 2010b). In any event, being a child soldier has been one of the central grammars in the deeply polarized polemic on what was to be done with Omar Khadr.…”

“…Thus, Khadr's redemption as the innocent child is predicated on disempowering and discrediting him, along with all other child soldiers, as incapable of political and personal choice. Thus, victimization becomes a code for childish incompetence, despite the scholarly evidence that children are social agents (James et al 1998) who are not only resilient, but also political (Cairns 1996), and that child soldiers are capable of reasonable decision making (Peters and Richards 1998;Park 2010b). In this discourse, Khadr-along with all other child soldiers-is de-culturalized through an appeal to the assumption that the nature of childhood is universally identical, that the experience of child soldiering is everywhere the same, and that specificities, including cultural differences, are overridden by the essential sameness of children, in particular as tabula rasa and incomplete persons.…”

“…Critical social science of childhood has long argued that children must be understood as active agents (James et al 1998). Despite the dominant construction of children as passive, dependent, and incomplete, a significant body of research demonstrates that children are capable of reasonable decision making and are political actors (Cairns 1996;Liebel 2003;Park 2010b). The recognition of children as active agents has prompted increasing problematization of the exclusion of children from full citizenship and has inspired calls for enabling and empowering children's participation as citizens rather than merely as passive wards (Roche 1999;Jans 2004;Park 2007).…”

“…There is no legal definition of a child soldier despite the existence of several treaties that outlaw the use of child soldiers (see Park ), and the inclusion of recruitment of children as a war crime in both the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the International Criminal Court. Such a capacious definition is normative and aspirational, but is arguably emerging as a customary understanding of the child soldier (or, in the new vocabulary, “child associated with an armed force or armed group” (UNICEF )), guiding international norms and policy.…”