| Dr.
David Rosen, Professor of Anthropology and Law, Fairleigh Dickinson
University, presented "Children at War: Cultural and Legal Models
of the Role of Child Soldiers in Contemporary Warfare" at the Rutgers
University Center for Children and Childhood Studies Regional Seminar
Series, "Rethinking Childhood in the Twenty-First Century."
Child soldiers play an important role in armed conflicts in many
areas of the world despite a major worldwide legal and humanitarian
effort to ban their use and recruitment. The international humanitarian
definition of the child - the so-called straight 18 position - defines
childhood as universally ending at age 18. This definition challenges
not only traditional definitions of childhood but also the empowerment
of youth in the context of globalization. The arguments about the
use and recruitment of child soldiers replicate many of the controversies
concerning the use of child labor. One difference, however, is that
the actions of child soldiers raise the issue of the criminal culpability
of children under arms. All these issues turn on the basic problem
of deciding who is a child. Using ethnographic and historical examples
of children at war in Africa, Europe and the Middle East this presentation
look at the issue of child soldiers in order to examine how the
culturally disputed boundaries between childhood and adulthood complicate
humanitarian and legal efforts to end the use of child soldiers.
Rosen offered three case studies of situations involving child soldiers.
In Sierra Leone, child soldiers fight prominently in the country's
civil war. The second is the intifada in Israel and Palestine, where
the role of children in the Palestinian uprising gets much coverage.
Finally, Rosen examined the historical case of Jewish youth resistance
to the Nazis in World War II.
Rosen explained that each of these cases puts forward a major challenge
to humanitarian ideas and to international law. In each instance
children appear as vital social and political actors who shape the
dynamics of violence and conflict.
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