5
Introduction
The idea behind this work generated during my four-months Public Information
Internship at the United Nations (UN) Office of the Special Representative of the
Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict (OSRSG CAAC), located in
the UN Headquarters in New York City.
The Office of the SRSG CAAC serves to protect the rights of children affected by
war, with a special focus on the release and reintegration of child soldiers. The
mission of its mandate is put in practice with the support of the United Nations
Children’s Fund (UNICEF), which has a pivotal role particularly in relation to field
missions.
At the outset, it must be said that the present work does not intend to focus on the
political aspects of the issue of child soldiers, nor on the conduct of United Nations
in this regard. Rather, after a necessary introduction to key concepts, it aims at
providing a communication-based analysis of the UN’s work, taking the OSRSG
CAAC as a specific case study.
This thesis argues that, despite its being a nonprofit organization, United Nations
efforts to bring about an end to child recruitment can be analyzed not only through
a communication perspective, but also with an actual marketing-oriented approach.
Even though nonprofit organizations such as the UN do not seek to increment their
profit, they do have a mission and specific goals – whether it is preventing sexual
violence, fighting diseases, further development, or “maintaining international
peace and security”.
1
Any of these goals are ultimately achieved by influencing
relevant people (or stakeholders, in marketing jargon). Thus, both profit and
nonprofit organizations “are in the behavioral influence business, and that is
precisely what marketing is all about”.
2
In fact, the marketing discipline in none
other than psychology and communications principles, applied to economy and
used by its actors – typically profit organizations. But the fact that normally these
principles are used to sell cookies or to persuade that an eau de toilette has
1
United Nations, Charter of the United Nations and statute of the International Court of Justice.
United Nations, New York, 1945, p.3.
2
A. R. Andreasen, P. Kotler, Strategic marketing for non-profit organizations, New York, Pearsons,
2008, p. 4.
6
aphrodisiac power it is just a contingency, not a necessary condition. Marketing
strategies can be used – and should be used, I argue – also by any organization that
aims at influencing defined targets in order to achieve specific goals. And, in this
respect, United Nations makes no exception in its attempt to stop the plague of
child soldiers.
The thesis is structured in six chapters. The first one will introduce the reader to
the issue of child soldiering, ranging between the official definitions supported by
the UN and NGOs, and alternative perspectives provided by different scholars. The
second and the third chapters will respectively provide an historical and a legal
overview of the role of children in war, exploring past, present, and future
trajectories. The fourth chapter will examine the evolution of the political
communication landscape to the present days, preparing the ground for the fifth
chapter, which will investigate the work of the UN in terms of communication. The
sixth and last chapter is a communication-based case study of the work of the UN
OSRSG CAAC in relation to its two-decade long fight against child recruitment
and use.
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1. What is a child soldier?
1.1. The dominant view
According to United Nations, a child soldier is “any person below eighteen years
of age who is, or who has been, recruited or used by an armed force or armed group
in any capacity”
3
, regardless the voluntary or coercive nature of the recruitment.
Such position, known as straight eighteen, was officially formalized in the
Conventions on the Rights of the Child
4
and, later, in The Paris Principles
5
(see
chapter 3).
However, the term child soldier does not only define young combatants who take
up arms and fight on the frontlines. The definition also includes children used as
informers, suicide bombers, human shields, informers, spies, sexual slaves, as well
as children who are abducted, indoctrinated, or forced to witness or take part in
beheadings, immolations, summary executions. Recruitment and use of children
often results in severe physical and psychological trauma, which persist after the
conflicts have ended.
The public sphere’s opinion of child soldiers – built, propagated, and supported not
only by United Nations, but also by governments, NGOs and media – often
suggests that child-soldiering is the product of modern, post-colonial conflict.
6
This
vision also tends to describe child soldiers always as victims, and their recruiters as
perpetrators. These two rigid categories are presented as unquestionable: child
soldiers’ innocence (and right to immunity) and recruiters’ guilt are both far beyond
dispute. This is the belief that has driven all the political and military actions of the
UN-led international community in the last decades.
7
3
United Nations, The Paris Principles: the principles and guidelines on children associated with
armed forces or armed groups. New York, United Nations, 2007, p. 7.
4
United Nations, Convention on the rights of the child, in General Assembly resolution 44/25 20
November 1989. Retrieved from http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx
5
United Nations, The Paris Principles, op. cit., New York, United Nations, 2007.
6
G. Maçhel, Impact of Armed Conflict on Children. New York, United Nations, 1996, p.13.
7
To give just one notorious example, after the end of the Sierra Leone civil war, the UN Special Court
for Sierra Leone decided not to call to account all those under eighteen children who were responsible
for atrocious war crimes. This decision was supported and determined by the pressures made by
United States and all the major NGOs. See D. M. Rosen, Armies of the young: child soldiers in war
and terrorism. Piscataway, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 2005, p. 291.
8
Regarding the first assumption that describes the child soldier phenomenon as a
recent trend, history itself can teach us how this view is widely untrue (see chapter
2).
While as far as considering child combatants solely as victims, a deeper
anthropological analysis becomes necessary to understand the foundations of this
apparent certainty.
1.2. Childhood theories
The raising of children, their role in the community, and the modalities with which
family and community are built around them vary significantly depending on
historical and geographical contingencies, so much that “our common
understandings about children are narrowly culture-bound”.
8
In ancient times, childhood was seen mainly seen through a utilitarian perspective,
for which a child was primarily a resource, chiefly valued in terms of participation
to the family’s activities and labor.
9
Back then, children were largely used as
workers (farm-hands, child-minders, traders, craft workers) and this practice was
what made them valuable to adults and communities. Childhood was perceived as
a sort of dead time that was needed by the child in order to finally become a rational
adult – the only real subject of life, literature, art, history.
10
The further we go back in time, the more the infant is object of killing, beating,
sexual violence, and abandonment.
11
In general, the child was not considered as
subject of rights, which were prerogative of adults.
12
In the western world, the situation evolved gradually. One of the main change
happened under the influence of Christianity, which severely prohibited the
infanticide and the violence against the weakest. European Humanism and
Renaissance also contributed substantially to the evolution of the role of the child
8
D. F. Lancy, The anthropology of childhood: cherubs, chattel, changelings, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2008, inside cover.
9
Ivi, p. 27.
10
R. Barthes, Pour une histoire de l’enfance, in “Lettres nouvelles”, February 1955.
11
L. deMause, The history of childhood, Jason Aronson Inc, 1995, p.4. Trad. it. Lucia Bonardi,
Milano, Emme Edizioni, 1983.
12
Adulthood is, obviously, an historically-determined concept as well.
9
within society, especially in relation to the new attention given to the child’s
education.
Afterwards, in the wake of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
13
Romanticism gave great
respect and consideration towards childhood, which started to be seen as precious
and valuable.
14
At the beginning of the 20
th
century, the Freudian theories emphasized the
importance of the relationship of the child with the parents and other people for his
harmonious psychological development.
15
But only in the post-World War II era,
societies started a diffuse debate on notions such as ‘childhood’, ‘infancy’,
‘puberty’ and ‘adulthood’, with all the moral, juridical, and political implications
that follow. Infants were gradually valued for their contribution to their parents’
emotional and psychological wellbeing, rather than simple material resources.
Throughout 20
th
century, also child mortality became a matter of great public
concern, and “the fight to limit child labor and child insurance, indeed any practice
that permitted parents to earn a return from their children, became of the […]
century’s great civil rights crusades, with strong moral overtones.”
16
While in recent times the idea of childhood as something to protect and cherish
became unanimous, less coherent are the opinions whether children are
accountable for their actions. Contemporary psychological and pedagogical studies
support the vision of children as subjects capable of making decisions and acting
in an independent way. However, the narrative offered by UN, NGOs, and
governments often seem to imply a different consideration of the idea of child.
Such view, inspired by earlier child development theories
17
, describe children as
universally immature – irrational creatures
18
, regarded as passive, incidental
victims or inconsequential actors.
19
It should be no surprise that this view of childhood unavoidably leads to an idea of
child soldier as a powerless victim at the mercy of ruthless adults, irrespective of
13
J.J. Rousseau, Émile ou De l'éducation, Paris, 1762; trad. it. Pier Antonio Vizzotto, Emilio, Milan,
E. Trevisini, 1908.
14
P. Y. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, Random House USA, 1965.
15
See S. Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, Vienna, 1917; trad. it. M. Tonin
Degana, Introduzione alla psicanalisi. Milan, Bollati Boringhieri, 1978.
16
D. F. Lancy, op. cit., p. 71.
17
See J. Piaget, The psichology of the child, New York, Basic Books, 1969.
18
D. Rosen, Armies of the young, op. cit., p. 196.
19
M. G. Wessels, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 35, No. 5 (Sep., 1998), pp. 635-646.
10
any contextual or cultural contingency. In fact, it must be taken into account that
the child soldier term – if we accept the definition previously formulated – is a
domain that can include very varied situations; an eleven years old girl raped and
forcibly recruited by Boko Haram could be considered a child soldier – and
therefore a victim – as much as a seventeen years old Sierra Leonean war criminal
who voluntarily joined an armed group.
As a consequence of these profound divergences about the idea of childhood,
important questions about child soldiers’ accountability obviously arise. Should the
international community consider all under eighteen soldiers as exploited,
powerless and then faultless individuals?
1.3. An alternative analysis
Despite the current near-universal acceptance of the straight eighteen position, this
limit is not without controversy. First of all, it should not be forgotten that children
comprise approximately half the population of today’s war-torn countries.
Therefore, pragmatically speaking, it is quite unrealistic to expect that all such
persons be excluded from adult’s life until of the age of eighteen, and perhaps
especially so in countries where life expectancy runs around fifty.
20
In parallel to this simple but eloquent fact, recent anthropological studies
have
challenged the straight eighteen interpretation of reality. Both Rosen
21
and
Boyden
22
, moving from the idea that childhood is a social construct and not a
universal axiom, believe that the notion of childhood supported by the global public
sphere is essentially a western-derived concept, and should not be accepted as
objectively true. Boyden points out that this model of childhood “has resulted from
the historical interplay of the Judeo-Christian belief system and changes in the
productive and demographic base of society corresponding with capitalist
20
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Population Prospects, 2015.
retrieved from https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Publications/Files/WPP2015_Volume-I_Comprehensive-
Tables.pdf
21
Ibidem
22
S. Shepler (curated by), Conflicted Childhoods: Fighting Over Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone,
Berkeley, University of California, 2005.
11
development.”
23
Rosen also underlines that the straight eighteen standard is in
contrast even with western societies’ idea of childhood and justice itself; in fact,
while the UN-led international community asserts that every child soldier is a
victim – no matter what crimes were committed – children under eighteen are often
sentenced as adults in the United States themselves.
24
In this regard, Rosen challenges the widespread point of view that sees child
soldiers as unquestionable victims whose infancy has been robbed. In war
scenarios, he observes, joining armies or armed groups gives sometimes more
chances to survive than being a civilian. Moreover, being soldier in a context of
poverty and without future prospects sometimes can be, he argues, the only way
out to achieve power and respect within the community.
25
Rosen’s studies also unveil other misconceptions about the child soldiering practice
and its origins. For instance, he disproves the argument that considers child
soldiering an effect of a new, unregulated type of conflict devoid of any ideological
motivation. This view has taken hold in United Nations, humanitarian groups,
journalists, and scholars; these subjects portray ‘traditional’ warfare as a regulated
and ideological event, fought by soldier against soldier, in opposition to
contemporary conflicts, described as anomic and chaotic
26
, which would lead to an
intensive use of children on the battlefields.
This predominant view also claims that some of the features of recent history
conflict – such as the presence of new lightweight weapons – have contributed to
facilitate the participation of children in hostilities
27
. However, Rosen refuses this
theory, pointing out that there is no concrete evidence of any connection between
23
Ivi, p. 192.
24
Every year, 200.000 children are processed as adults in the U.S. See D. M. Rosen, Armies of the
young, op. cit., p. 202.
25
Ivi, p. XV.
26
R.D Kaplan, The coming anarchy: how scarcity, overpopulation and crime are rapidly destroying
the social fabric of our planet, in “Atlantic Monthly”, February 1994, pp. 44-76. Cited in Rosen,
Armies of the young, op. cit., p. 17.
27
Olara Otunnu, first UN SRSG for Children and Armed Conflict, stated that “the development and
proliferation of lightweight automatic weapons has made it possible for very young children to bear
and use arms”. First report of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and
Armed Conflict to the General Assembly, A/53/482, 1998.
Human Rights Watch supported this theory, saying that “technological progress […] contributed to an
increasing use of child soldiers”. Human Rights Watch, Facts about child soldiers, 2001. Retrieved
from www.hrw.org/campaigns/crp/facts/htm.
12
new technologies and the involvement of children in war. To support his claim, he
underlines how the AK-47 (the most common weapon used by child soldiers on a
global scale) is not actually lighter than older, commonly-used weapons.
28
Despite the clarity of this evidence, the international community, media and most
of scholars continue to depict child soldiering as a somehow new phenomenon.
Yet, not only scholars’ studies, but history itself tells us a very different story.
28
D. Rosen, Armies of the young, op. cit., p. 24.
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