New research is shedding light on factors driving recruitment of child soldiers in conflict zones. Citing a Ford Institute study, UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict Radhika Coomaraswamy recently stated, “there is a direct correlation between security at IDP camps and the recruitment of child soldiers.”
While there are concrete ways camp security can be be improved across the globe, Ford Institute Director Simon Reich argues, “the international community has to decide it’s going to put up the money. It’s a question of resources, a question of political will.” MediaGlobal’s Adelia Saunders points out that in this challenge, it is crucial to achieve robust camp protection, since “the presence of insufficient security forces may do more harm than good, alerting looters to the value of a camp without being able to adequately protect it.”
2 Comments | 
64. February 17th, 2008 Adam wrote:
Really a sad story and a terrible situation. If anyone has seen the movie “Blood Diamond” it deals with this exact thing and the way in which children are trained and targeted. CNN.com recently published a similar story.
67. February 21st, 2008 Anon wrote:
It really is. I have never seen the movie but I found an article with the quote of a 14 year old girl from Sierra Leone which is where I believe the film is set…
“I’ve seen people get their hands cut off, a ten-year-old girl raped and then die, and so many men and women burned alive . . . So many times I just cried inside my heart because I didn’t dare cry out loud.”
Convention on the Rights of the Child, a child is any persons under the age of 18. Interestingly though, an article in it states that in armed conflict zones, the age is fifteen instead.
http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/crp/promises/soldiers.html