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Child soldiers play the war games of adults; child soldiers develop in an underground of fear and despair. They live the horror of adult wars. Child soldiers know too much about a fractured fantasy world; a skewed, dystopian world. It's abnormal. It violates their rights to grow as a child into a balanced adult. The chances of ever being "balanced" are remote, unless they are helped. The world must bear responsibility.

In 2002, UNICEF defined a child soldier as any boy or girl, under the age of 18, fighting regularly or irregularly in armed combat. Finally, by the very act of definition, it was being globally recognized as a critical phenomena. And the statistics are frightening. Approximately 300,000 children fight in about thirty conflicts. 30% of armed forces recruit girls who are often sexually abused. That sounds bad enough. But there is more. In addition, nearly half a million children serve in armies not involved in war. That means 40 percent of the world's armed organizations recruit children.

WHERE ARE THE CHILD SOLDIERS PLAYING WAR GAMES? Between 1999 and 2004, it was recorded:

1. AFRICA For 14 years, Liberia was ripped apart by civil war, only ending as recently as 2003. Children were literally wrenched from their homes to fight. Government troops from Cote d'Ivoire recruited ex child soldiers from Liberia for their war. "I left Liberia to go fight in Cte d'Ivoire in November 2004 and fought for a full week," said a 15-year-old Liberian boy. "My commander and I just came back a few days ago. We came to recruit more boys and take them back for our operation." www.afrol.com Money and clothing were offered as an enticement. Perhaps to a poor child, that sounds attractive enough to go to war. In neighboring Sierra Leone, where an 11 year conflict was only settled in 1999, it was recorded that child soldiers participated also in amputations, rape, beheadings and burning people alive. www.thesituation.co.uk Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi utilize child soldiers.

2. ASIA In Myanmar (Burma), children are abducted, brutally treated, and then forced into combat. There are more child soldiers here than anywhere else in the world. 50,000 child soldiers work for government and rebel armies. Children as young as seven work as human shields. "The God's Army', a breakaway Karen group led by two 12-year-old twins, focused world attention on the plight of child soldiers fighting for ethnic armed groups when they took over

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