Music Playlist at MixPod.com

If you still are interested in watching our photo show, please visit this link:

I wanna watch the Photo Show NOW!!!

This video is only 40 seconds long and just shows the few pictures we took. It isn’t much because we aren’t too good at technicals! :S
Credits go to:

Clarissa’s sister’s Mac

Similar to the surveys we gave to children from selected schools, this survey of  four questions was given to 30 adults to know whether or not adults today have knowledge on the happenings about child soldiers.

Question 1:

Question 2:

Question 3:

Question 4:

This table represents the reason why people who answered the question “no” would not want to help these children.

This table represents for what the people who answered the question “yes” would do if they had the power and authority to help these children.

Nina Brenjo

Child soldier walks past street kiosk on the way to a U.N. disarmament camp in Liberian city of Buchanan.

Photo by REUTERS\Eric Kanalstein

From Sierra Leone to Congo, from Afghanistan to Kosovo, child soldiers are the war weapon of choice, “easily manipulated, intensely loyal, fearless and, most important, in endless supply”, the New York Times reports.

Human rights groups say there are 300,000 child soldiers in the world, and no sign of the problem going away. The changing nature of conflict, in Africa in particular, is the reason why children are still recruited as “four-foot killing (machines)”. Ideology was the main driver behind wars in Eritrea, Zimbabwe and most of the liberation struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. These days, the main goal of many conflicts, or at least many groups involved, is pillaging.

“There might have been a little rhetoric at the beginning,” the paper quotes Ishmael Beah, Sierra Leonean author of “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.” “But very quickly the ideology gets lost. And then it just becomes a bloodbath, a way for the commanders to plunder, a war of madness.”

Emmanuel Jal, a hip-hop artist and a former child soldier, describes in Britain’s Guardian the moment when he was enlisted at the age of seven to fight in south Sudan’s 21-year war:

“When most kids where playing soccer, watching cartoons and learning how to read and write, I was learning how to fight. I left my home when I was seven after I saw a close relative raped and people’s heads cut off by the government bombers… For years I was wielding an AK47, taller than myself.”

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits the recruitment and the use of children under 18 in any form of armed conflict, has been enforceable for the past five years. The United States and Britain, though, are among the countries which have refused to sign it.

The subject of child soldiers is becoming one of the celebrity causes of the Western world, the Observer’s Jason Cowley reports.

The recent Hollywood blockbuster Blood Diamond examines the problem of child soldiers in Sierra Leone, where orphaned children or those kidnapped in the conflict end up accepting their new family of rebel soldiers and become “drug-addicted killers, without pity or fear.” Then there’s God Grew Tired of Us, a documentary produced by Brad Pitt, with Nicole Kidman as a narrator.

Another first-person account that’s just been published is “What is the What”, written by U.S. author Dave Eggers in collaboration with Valentino Achak Deng, one of the so-called Lost Boys of Sudan who are now living in the United States.

Events such as Live 8 and Make Poverty History certainly helped raising the profile of Africa, Cowley says. And the successes of Blood Diamond and The Last King of Scotland, a film about Idi Amin’s rule of Uganda, showed Hollywood that “African stories, especially African war stories, sell.”

Even a coffee chain spotted a money-making opportunity. Starbucks is planning to use Beah’s book as the introductory title for its new book club. “… (an) odd choice for a sanitised coffee chain,” Cowley suggests. So, are we genuinely interested in the subject or, as Cowley asks, are these merely signs of our appetite for tales of “savagery”?

Article Source

www.alertnet.org/db/blogs/1265/2007/04/2-160449-1.htm

• Escape from violence at home

- beatings

- sexual abuse

- treated as slaves

• Mother beats her daughter
• -Father abuses/rapes his daughter
• - Step mother treats the girl as a slave
  • Escape from violence at home

• Not having a say in their future

Many girls run away from home to escape the arranged marriages their parents had planned for them.

• Expected of them to join/they expected of it themselves

Some of them may have to follow family tradition/culture where they have to fight.

e.g: warrior families

• Some join to assert their equality with boys

“If my brothers can do it, so could I” – Catherine.

She came from a warrior’s family and wanted to be like her brothers.

• Attraction to the army and guns

Some thought it was ‘cool’ to have weapons or wanted to follow their idols – influenced by films/images.

• Protect themselves from rape and abduction

The army served as protection for girls as they had weapons and could fight. No one would dare to abduct them as sex slave.

• Pressured to provide for and feed their families
• Protect female family members

Especially the oldest/only son in the family.
]]> http://thechildsoldiers.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/girls-boys/feed/ 1 thetriplec http://thechildsoldiers.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/results-of-the-true-or-false-questions/ http://thechildsoldiers.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/results-of-the-true-or-false-questions/#comments Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:19:44 +0000 thetriplec http://thechildsoldiers.wordpress.com/?p=243 ]]> True or False Questions

Q1:

The results from each school:

Q2:

The results from each school:

Q3:

The results from each school:

Q4:

The results from each school:

Q5:

The results from each school:

Q6:

The results to each school:

Q7:

The result from each school:

Q8:

The result from each school:

Quesion 1: All children should be able to receive an education

Question 2: No child should be a soldier

Quesion 3: Even if they become soldiers, they should receive education in their camps

Question 4: The children should get other jobs instead

Question 5: If girls become soldiers, they should only be helping out with cooking, cleaning etc and not fighting

Question 6: All guys, at the age of 18, should serve the army for a few years, instead of the country having child soldiers

OK, but for example commando it’s an extreme case, but Rambo at the end, it’s fast and furious!
He dies, but there’s all the action!

Yes, he kills a lot of people!
Yes, OK, but i didn’t think of killing people; i thought more about the fighting and shooting

Yes, but when he shoots, he kills people.
Yes.. [laughter] You see, at the beginning i didn’t think of that, I watched the television, and I didn’t know about the consequences and how it could happen, and so on. I didn’t think of that, I was still a kid. I was so impressed by the action, the way they handled weapons, the way they dressed. I said to myself that one day i would wear the same outfit.}

From this we can infer that she had been exposed to images of fighting at a young age but did not understand it properly. Without the proper understanding she did not know that fighting and killing was wrong but only wanted to experience the thrill of the action as she had seen her favourite character play such a role.

The place of an individual in society is determined by their family or clan, age, gender and religion. The traditions of warfare with its rules on the way war should be fought, includes ideas on who should be fighting and who should not. This too affects the number of child soldiers and determines its increase or decrease.

Afghanistan’s situation was so that all people from 15 years old to 80 years old had to fight- Mortaza, Afghanistan

Many a time, the radio and television are used as direct tools of recruitment. This is also mentioned in ‘Voluntarily: POLITICS & IDEOLOGY’ where they reflect and help to create or perpetuate the cultural values. These tools are the source of information about the conflict going on and it also serves as propaganda.

Under this section, of ‘CULTURE & TRADITION’, there is a lot of pressure from believes and tradition to continue them, even at the expense of risking one’s life. This segment is very much linked to ‘FAMILY & FRIENDS’. As it revolves a lot around pressure.

The children are also influenced by movies and movie characters. Click here to read an interview with a girl Germain.

Perpetuate = to prolong the existence of something.