Table Of ContentChild Soldiers in the
Western Imagination
The Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies
The Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies is dedicated to increasing our
understanding of children and childhoods, past and present, throughout the
world. Children’s voices and experiences are central. Authors come from a
variety of fields, including anthropology, criminal justice, history, literature,
psychology, religion, and sociology. The books in this series are intended
for students, scholars, practitioners, and those who formulate policies that
affect children’s everyday lives and futures.
Edited by Myra Bluebond-L angner, Board of Governors Professor of Anthro-
pology, Rutgers University and True Colours Chair in Palliative Care for Chil-
dren and Young People, University College London, Institute of Child Health.
Advisory Board
Perri Klass, New York University
Jill Korbin, Case Western Reserve University
Bambi Schieffelin, New York University
Enid Schildkraut, American Museum of Natural History and Museum for
African Art
Child Soldiers in the
Western Imagination
From Patriots to Victims
DAVID M. ROSEN
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY AND LONDON
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING- IN- PUBLICATION DATA
Rosen, David M., 1944–
Child soldiers in the Western imagination : from patriots to victims / David M.
Rosen.
pages cm. — (The Rutgers series in childhood studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0 – 8135– 6371–8 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0 – 8135– 6370–1
(pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0 –8 135–6 372–5 (pdf) — ISBN 978– 0– 8135–7 289– 5
(epub)
1. Child soldiers. 2. Children and war. 3. Child soldiers— History. 4. Children
and war— History. 5. Child soldiers— Case studies. 6. Children and war— Case
studies. 7. Childhood— Cross- cultural studies. I. Title. II. Title: From patriots to
victims.
UB418.C45R68 2014
355.0083— dc23 2014049320
A British Cataloging-i n- Publication record for this book is available
from the British Library.
Copyright © 2015 by David M. Rosen
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For Tori and Sarah
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
1 A Tale of Two Orphans 1
2 The Struggle over Child Recruitment 32
3 Child Soldiers in World War II 76
4 The Child Soldier in Popular Culture 102
5 Modern Child Soldiers 134
6 The Politics and Culture of Childhood Vulnerability 174
Notes 189
Selected Bibliography 221
Index 233
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
C
hild soldiers have captured my attention and imagination for the past
decade and a half, and have been the focus of much of my scholarly work.
In an era when the “child soldier problem” emerged as a central concern
for international humanitarian and children’s rights organizations, I came
to realize that there had been “child soldiers” throughout history and
across the globe: what was new was the perception that they constituted
a “problem.” My first book, Armies of the Young, complicated the picture of
child soldiers presented by humanitarian and human rights organizations
by looking at some of the specific instances in which children played a role
in armed conflict. I highlighted the varieties of circumstances and motiva-
tions that could bring children into battle.
This book explores child soldiers through a different lens, and frames
the question in another way: What has changed in our cultural imagina-
tion that has so profoundly altered our understanding of the compati-
bility— or rather, incompatibility— of children, the military, and war? It
examines the transformation of our understanding of child soldiers over
the past two centuries, by looking both at the presence of children in the
military and how they have been imagined in politics, popular culture, lit-
erature, and the arts. Though my focus is primarily on the West, especially
Great Britain and the United States, I also examine how this transforma-
tion has influenced common understandings of child soldiers throughout
the international community.
Throughout much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, chil-
dren and youth were an unremarkable feature of military life. By the
middle of the nineteenth century, powerful new ideas about children and
childhood began to put pressure on the military recruitment of youngsters.
These ideas, that childhood is a highly distinct stage of life characterized
ix
x PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
by innocence, vulnerability, and the need for protection, remain central
to Western understandings of the child, and have increasingly rendered
childhood and military life incompatible. By the late twentieth century,
humanitarian and human rights groups invented the concept of the “child
soldier,” a term that, in its contemporary sense, denotes a person too
young to serve legitimately in the military.
This understanding of children as innocent and vulnerable is a power-
ful and pervasive idea. It has served as a general platform for social reform
in many areas of children’s lives. It was the basis of the nineteenth-c entury
Child Saver movement, which sought to rescue working-c lass children in
Great Britain and America from the evils of their environment. Not long
afterward, it was exported to the colonial world, where it became the tem-
plate for saving innocent children from the “evils” of their own societies
and cultures. This view of children has become the foundation stone of
virtually all contemporary international legal, humanitarian, and human
rights efforts to improve the lives of children, including severing any links
between childhood and military service. There is little or no room for
diversity or pluralism in this essentially monist model, which renders all
child soldiers as victims and all recruiters of children as deviant and crimi-
nal abusers of children.
The contemporary cultural construction of the child soldier is
grounded in the discourse of humanitarian, human rights, and children’s
rights advocacy, and law. This discourse imagines and posits the existence
of a universal child whose development, needs, and well- being are all indif-
ferent to context. The most striking features of this image of the child are
its mobility, transferability, and disconnectedness from history. Using this
cultural model, children’s rights advocates have little difficulty in codifying
simple, universally applicable, bright- line distinctions between childhood
and adulthood. In contrast, many fields involved in the study or represen-
tation of children, such as anthropology, history, and literature, take as
their central orientation the idea that there are a multiplicity of concepts
of childhood and adulthood, each codified and defined by age, ethnicity,
gender, history, location, and numerous other factors. Whereas the idea of
the “rights of the child,” a concept based upon a putative universal child,
seems self- evident and obvious to modern- day children’s rights advocates,
it often seems facile, overly simplistic, and ethnocentric to anthropologists
