Presentation #1

Child Soldiers

One of the groups presented on child soldiers. I think it’s a touchy topic to speak on because it’s a sad concept so it grabbed my interest immediately. Prior to this I heard of child soldiers in Africa but I didn’t know much about them. During this presentation I learned that in the 1980’s, Uganda’s citizen Alice Lakwena did not like how the Ugandan government was being run so she formed an army of children to help her fight her rights and this concept expanded into child soldiers. These children are kidnapped from various places but the most common place is in their own homes. Most families live in villages so during the night the kidnappers would break into their homes and steal their children. To prevent kidnapping many parents would send their children to shelters in town where the children were protected. Unfortunately not all the children could be protected so the captured children would go through a lot of torture from their kidnappers. They are abused, emotionally, mentally, physically and sexually. This leads to many psychological problems such as depression, aggressiveness, abusive relationships and being antisocial in their future lives. Malnourishment is a large problem with child soldiers too because they kidnappers do not care about how healthy the children are, their only concern is fighting Ugandan government. Since that is their only concern these children tend to grow up too fast and are not close to their family so this causes problems for former child soldiers to start their our families. I think the kidnapping and activities of child soldiers should be stopped because there are no positive effects of it. The Ugandan government will still overpower them so it is just killing off children who could possibly change the world some day.

Jasmine Westbrook