Charu Lata Hogg
Good evening, everybody. We’re going to start this event shortly, but before we do so, there will be a five minute documentary, which is going to be screened here, and then we’ll all take to the stage, and you can hear the wonderful speakers speak.
Video Subtitles
Since 2012, children in the Central African Republic have taken part as fighters and other roles in armed groups. Many carry physical and mental scars. Going home can mean facing stigma and hostility. We asked a group of young people from the community what life is like for children after they leave armed groups and what could improve reintegration.
Narration
Challenges young people meet when they leave are isolation. Immediately after they leave, there is mistrust and suspicion in the group. The challenges they meet are risk of stigmatization. Immediately after they leave, they risk to be killed. A longer time after they leave, they can set up their own armed group. With regard to these young people, the community have two possible attitudes: welcoming or not welcoming. When they go back to their homes, the young people are treated as liars.
Narration
There are young people who have no access to support when they leave the armed groups because they don’t want to disclose their past.
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International organisations provide services to help children reintegrate into their communities, but these are often not adequate. What are the issues with existing programmes?
Narration
The programmes of support are not provided at the right time. It’s very often too late. The programme often creates problems in the community, for example, revenge and robberies.
Narration
Girls, they fear speaking face-to-face with people. For the young people who have been injured, the programme is not sufficient.
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How can programming be improved?
Narration
The changes that are needed are youth participation, listening to the opinion of both parties and socioeconomic support, listen to the opinions of young people, design the projects together with the young people.
Narration
The type of support that will have the most positive impact on the young people who leave armed groups are; participation of the young people, access to different trainings and awareness raising. Our recommendation is to ask NGOs to train young people on the use of the kits, we want the NGOS to train young people with vocational activities. The Government must do its best to inform the young people about their rights. There are some good things in the programmes: encouragement, economic assistance and return to school, but they should ask the youth about their ideas for projects.
Video Subtitles
Better timed, longer-term support, inclusivity, greater community sensitivity, overcoming stigma, listening to those affected. War Child calls for: children to be listened to – to help design the programmes that serve them, communities to be at the heart of reintegration to ensure children and host communities get the support they need, increased and sustainable funding for reintegration and for all children associated with armed groups to access the help they need, no matter who, no matter where.
Charu Lata Hogg
Hello again and welcome to this programme on reintegration of child soldiers. There’s a few house rules to begin with before I start introducing myself and my fellow speakers. The event is on the record. It will be livestreamed, and we have some reports that War Child has produced, and they’re on the side. Please do pick up a copy. In case you want to tweet this event, the hashtag is #CHEvents. Now, I’d like to introduce my fellow panellists I have with me, and in the order in which they will speak: Rocco Blume, who’s the Head of Policy and Advocacy at War Child UK. In his role, Rocco co-ordinates research and advocacy efforts on children’s protection, mental health and development. He’s currently focused on improving the provision of reintegration for children, formerly involved in armed forces. And then, I have Paddy, who says his description should be very succinct, and I should simply describe him as a globally renowned Humanitarian Photojournalist. Rosie, here with us, is the Head of the Gender Equality Unit and the Head of the Office of the Prime Minister’s Special Representative on Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict at the FCO. She leads work on girls’ education, women, peace and security, preventing sexual violence in conflict, and sexual exploitation and abuse and LGBT rights. My name is Charu Hogg, and I’m the – I’m an Associate Fellow with the Asia Programme at Chatham House. So, over to you, Rocco.
Rocco Blume
Thank you very much. I’m going to take to the lectern and give a PowerPoint presentation, which I believe should be on your screens, just there. Very good. Okay, so, good evening, everyone. Great to see you all. Thank you, Charu, and thank you to Chatham House for partnering with us on this event. The film you just saw took place in Central African Republic. We took it six – we made that film six weeks ago, and it gives a flavour of the kind of issues that we want to share with you tonight. So, War Child, together with our partners, works in 15 countries around the world affected by conflict, and we work with children to support their education, protection and psychosocial wellbeing, and in all the conflicts that we work in, we see children who have ended up in armed forces and armed groups. Child recruitment is a grave violation of children’s rights, and whilst some children are formally released from armed groups, others escape, but what happens to children after that? After they have left the armed group, what does their future hold?
For the last seven years, War Child has operated programmes that have reintegrated thousands of children back into their communities in the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, and while running these programmes, we’ve experienced a number of challenges that have limited the access of children to these vital services. So, I want to run through some of those challenges that we’ve faced, but before I start, let’s just consider who are these child soldiers. What does a child soldier look like? A common perception is that a child soldier will be from Africa, will be male, and will have a weapon and be engaged in combat, but it’s far more complex than that, and that’s a myth that needs to be busted.
So, you’ll have on the screen there the definition of a children – a child associated with an armed force or armed group, and this is the definition agreed by the United Nations. And, as you can see there, a child associated with an armed force or armed group refers to any person below 18 years of age, who is or who has been recruited or used by an armed force or armed group in any capacity, including boys and girls used as fighters, cooks, porters, messengers, spies or for sexual purposes. It’s critical to understand that when a child is part of an armed group, whatever their role, as those listed there, they are extremely vulnerable. So, the majority of children, who are recruited and used, are in non-state armed groups like Islamic State, Boko Haram in Nigeria, groups that commit human rights violations. So, a child in that environment is extremely vulnerable, and then, when demobilisation and reintegration takes place, it’s critical that all the children that have been in a group can access services, not just boys who have guns, as if a gun is a certificate that you have been in a group. So, that’s another myth we need to bust, that girls, children without weapons, should not be locked out of these processes.
Where do you find children associated with armed forces and armed groups? The map you can see there, the red and orange marked countries, those are the places. So, as you can see, it’s a fully global problem. Most countries that are experiencing protracted intrastate conflict see the phenomena of child recruitment, including middle income countries, like Columbia and Iraq, as well as the poorest fragile states, Afghanistan and those Central African states you can see there. It’s very difficult to accurately estimate the total number of children who are in armed groups, and estimates vary from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, but as you can see, it’s a global phenomena, and at least 124,000 children have been released from armed groups over the last 20 years, due to the collective efforts of child protection agencies. We know, also, that the number of children in armed groups is increasing every year.
The next question, how do children end up in an armed group? So, these pictures you can see in front of you, I think, are quite familiar, familiar images. How do all those children end up in those photographs? I should add, these are not War Child photographs. These are taken from open sources, but just to take you through a few of the images there, in the top right-hand corner you can see a still from an Islamic State propaganda film taken in Iraq, and we know that the Islamic State group have used children in a number of roles in their propaganda films, and we’ve – know they’ve used children to commit atrocities. We don’t know how those children have ended up in that photograph. They may have been volunteered by their parents, they may have been abducted, they may have been orphaned, they may have joined because of livelihood needs, because there was no other way for them to access a livelihood. The photo underneath, on the bottom right-hand side, is a young woman from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who joined an armed group at the age of 13 and left when she was 18. So, a significant chunk of her childhood was spent in an armed group, and during that time she went through many roles as a fighter and a domestic servant. We know that the issue of girls, recruitment and use, their experiences in armed groups, their experiences afterwards is, there’s not enough known about this topic. It’s as if they are an invisible group. Very often, girls are held onto by the armed group. They may have children. So, their engagement is highly complex.
The bottom left-hand corner photograph you can see there is still in Iraq. That is a photograph of the Government-backed armed group that fought against the Islamic State, and it was mobilised by religious leaders and community leaders encouraging children, or youth and other fighting-aged, people to join up to fight. So, this was a very positive encouragement that was being made for young people to go and fight. And the last photograph is from South Sudan, and that is a photograph of a armed group that is – was fighting against the Central Government. Those boys are between the age of 12 and 15, and they come from an extremely poor community, where there’s a very high arms proliferation, and in the context of extreme poverty and militarisation within a community, some of those would have said that they had voluntarily joined, but it leads us to question what is – how voluntary can recruitment to an armed group be in these extreme circumstances?
So, a few things to bear in mind from this, children have extremely varied experiences within armed groups. They may be in a group for a few months or a few years. They may experience, witness or commit extreme violence, or they may experience very little violence, and they may have experienced sexual violence, had physical injuries, conditions of neglect, or leave with mental health and psychosocial issues. So, they will have experienced things that no child should, and upon leaving a group, they will need to have support to re-join society, and society will need support to re-join the child, and to make that link again.
So, when we talk about reintegration, we’re talking about supporting a child to shed the identity of the group that they’ve been in. It means a child coming home and a community embracing that child, the child not returning to the group, for their reintegration to be sustainable, and recognising the risks and the challenges faced by both the child and the community in that process. And I’m afraid this is a rather horrible diagram, with far too many words on it, not good for a PowerPoint presentation, but I share this because this is War Child’s model for how we understand and operate reintegration. There are several stages through which a child should be supported to find their way back into society. So, we have a stage where we identify the child’s needs, and their vulnerabilities and their strengths. We support a child to understand the different services they may need, be it legal advice or education or housing, and then a much longer-term process, whereby they are supported to engage with their community, and the stigma of being in an armed group is challenged.
So, in the report that you’ll have copies of there, you can take some time to look through that in some more detail. So, coming onto the challenges that we found with our research. The critical challenge is a lack of funding. The reintegration sector is hugely underfunded. We often, as War Child, receive grants that can last around six to 12 months, but not much longer, and that means programmes may end before the full impact of reintegration is felt by that child. Everyone agrees there needs to be more funding, the United Nations, member states of the UN, NGOs, we write reports about this, but, shockingly, between 2012 and 2016, we saw a 33% decrease in available funds for reintegration. So, our first recommendation is there needs to be a reversal of this decline in funding. There needs to be – there need to be multi-year grants that provide predictable, sustainable funding for child – children’s reintegration, and we need a new approach to reintegration that sees it not as a humanitarian intervention, but a development and a security and stabilisation intervention that supports the stabilisation of a country that has experienced conflict.
The next issue is that of putting communities at the heart of reintegration planning. So, these are – this is a photograph of two of our young programme participants in the Central African Republic. The global humanitarian system is responding to more crises than ever before, and donors have extremely difficult decisions to make about where to invest their funds, and when reintegration is seen as a short-term response, donors will inherently design programmes and funding streams that are based on what they see as children’s needs and community needs. So, child participation in programme design is rarely encouraged, but families and communities are the first responders when it comes to a child’s reintegration. A child will arrive back into their community, and their family, community leaders, all of those people that they have left behind will be the first people that they will see, and their best place to take care of the child and to promote their recovery. So, organisations like War Child and our other partners and UN agencies, we must focus our work on supporting them in this role. Only children know what will fill them with a sense of joy and accomplishment, and a chance of finding their place back in a community, and that central feeling that you have a value in society, that you’re loved, that is reintegration. So, the film that you saw at the beginning demonstrates that it’s not only possible to engage children and youth, but it must be a core component of our programming and providing accountability to children and communities.
And the final point that I’d like to share is that of where there is no reintegration, where there are children who’ve been associated with armed groups, but there are no programmes, or very little programming. So, in the last decade, the increase in the number of violent extremist armed groups has led to national and global efforts to counter violent extremism, but too frequently, we’ve seen children in these groups as being seen as threats to national security, not as children. It’s a phenomena that’s new. Where we once saw universal sympathy for a child forced to carry a weapon, now we’re seeing that sympathy ebb away, which is shocking, just because of the nature of the group that a child has been forced to join. We see laws and policies in countries like Iraq, Nigeria and Somalia being introduced that prioritise national security over a children’s – a child’s rights, and in some cases, we see violations of children’s rights, including detention, torture, abuse and a denial of access to services. In Iraq right now, 1,500 children are being held in detention, on suspicion of being associated with Islamic State.
So, in the long-term, what does this mean, when children have gone through terrible experiences, but they’re unable to re-join society? What does that do to the child, and what does that do to society? So, children in extremist groups, we would say, like any others, are entitled to rehabilitation and reintegration. Governments, donors, UN agencies need to depoliticise and destigmatise children’s association with these groups to enable them to reintegrate.
And I’d like to leave you with this image. So, this is a rather fantastic picture that was drawn by a boy called James, who is a participant in one of our programmes in South Sudan, and he was associated with an armed group, and two years ago he left that armed group through a disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration process, and this is his picture of that experience, and I share it because he clearly gets across so much about what it means to him, what reintegration means to him. You can see, in one corner, weapons that have been cast aside, and in the other corner, a pretty solid school building. You can see all those people gathered around the table, the whole community. People with disabilities, old, young, men and women, people in uniforms, and they’re gathered around that table. It seems to signify the transition from a situation of war, a conflict, to that of peace, and above it all, the banner saying ‘peace’ and the national flag, and someone like James, living in South Sudan, he wouldn’t have experienced much peace in his life. There have only been a couple of years of peace, in the last decade or so, in South Sudan. So, this is his imagining of peace, and I think, for us as humanitarian organisations, governments, the whole – all of us, the more we can do to tackle those challenges that we looked at just then, we can help to deliver on the kind of hope that is expressed in this picture of what peace can look like. So, thank you very much for listening [applause].
Paddy Dowling
Hi, good evening, all, can you hear me okay? Great, thanks very much, Charu, for your wonderful introduction earlier, and thanks, Rocco, for – that was really, really, inspiring, the work you do at War Child is absolutely incredible. My name’s Paddy Dowling. I work as a Humanitarian Photojournalist all over the world, taking portraits and telling stories, and I’m bringing them home for you to read in The Independent. I also work for Al Jazeera in the Middle East, and I also work for a whole host of United Nations agencies and NGOs all over the world. I spend so much of my time walking around wondering, “What on earth am I doing? Am I actually making any difference at all? Is this going to help? Are people going to even read this?” We live in a world where media is so sanitised now that the mere talk of a child carrying a gun, you know, social media, kind of, erupts in uproar. So, it’s a very, very difficult line to cross. I work in places like Syria and Gaza, and all over the Middle East. I’ve just come back from a trip in Lebanon, where I was doing an expose on Palestinian refugees living in incarceration in camps there, and, you know, we talk about children of armed conflict and child soldiers. You know, they don’t have to carry a gun to be – to fall into that category. To grow up in a household where a gun is put on the table with a packet of cigarettes and a mobile phone is not acceptable.
So, it’s everywhere, every stone I turn seems to be a miserable, miserable story, and a lot, a lot of suffering. I was in Uganda quite recently, commissioned to go out for The Independent and with an amazing foundation, based in the Middle East, called Education Above All, who focus very heavily on the protection of education in security and conflict. And I remember you always think in every trip that you go to, and every time you’re in the field, that you’ve heard the worst possible story, and Uganda, Northern Uganda was a time that I think I’d felt most levelled in my whole life, talking to two young men, who had been abducted at the age of 14 and taken off into the bush for initiation into an armed group. And the room was just swallowed by this silence for a huge period of time, and they eventually spoke and eventually shared their stories, and, you know, the patterns were very, very similar, in terms of recruitment. You know, parents were often – their parent might have been killed, the child is led off into the bush for training, and they’re brought back, a month later, taught to kill, steal, beat, and size and age has no real barrier here. You’d often think if a child is too small to carry a gun, perhaps you ought not to be carrying one, but, you know, the evil that is around us is so great that the barrel gets shortened or the magazine gets emptied to just a couple of bullets, and this child is still dragging this gun in the dirt like some sort of toy.
So, these are the things we’re up against all the time. Then, talk about global funding and, for this problem, as Rocco talked about, you know, a plaster is not going to help. These children are deeply, deeply traumatised. What they’ve seen, they’ve been shunned by family, they’ve been shunned by their community as social pariahs. So, what can we do to reintegrate them, to welcome them back into the community? You know, it must be incredibly frustrating for the agencies like United Nations in New York where they’re trying desperately, broker deals with warlords and rebel leader groups and Commanders, but, you know, you’ve got thousands of children still waiting in places like CAR and DRC for reintegration, but there’s no money. There’s no money, and that, I think, is probably the hardest thing to accept, that we live in a day where reintegration, you know, it’s – there’s a lot that’s going on. There’s some great work being done. People like War Child, people like Forest Whitaker. I’m always astounded, when the most privileged give so much of their time. Forest Whitaker was filming the Last King of Scotland and was so compelled by the need to do something there that he set up the Whitaker Peace and Development Initiative, and I saw children, or young men now, at 22-years-old, who had been abducted as young as eight, who are now advocates going into the community and telling them, you know, “This is okay, these aren’t bad people. They just need help and time and support.”
And I – you – I remember talking to a young boy of 13-years-old in Bidi Bidi refugee camp in Northern Uganda, and he described how he’d left in a hurry. You know, South Sudan, the conflict in South Sudan, kind of, saw 2.3 million people leave, 800,000 of which went into Northern Uganda, and he described the conditions in which he’d left, absolutely atrocious, completely scarring for a child. He didn’t have to carry a gun, but he’s carrying that all the time, and such is life that he couldn’t enrol into school ‘cause he didn’t have a pair of shoes. So, he has to wait another year, left with this noise in his head. We have to do more, we have to do more. I have to do my bit and go out there and continue to write stories, and I hope that you continue to read them, but there are lots and lots of stories all over the world to look at. You know, it’s not just places like South Sudan, DRC. There’s Colombia, children of cartel groups, but thank you, Rocco, for what you’re doing, it’s absolutely amazing, and, you know, hopefully, we get in the field and do some work together this year. Great, thanks very much.
Charu Lata Hogg
Thank you, Paddy.
Rosy Cave
Good evening, everyone. I’m Rosy, as Charu said, and I am the Head of the Gender Equality Unit at the Foreign Office. I feel like I’m going to be the most boring person on this panel, ‘cause I’m going to talk about Government policy, but I’ll try and make it interesting. I wanted to really both convey the very strong commitment that the youth – UK Government has to tackling children in armed conflict, but give you some examples of how we do that at the multilateral level, as well as talking about what we do nationally, but, importantly, what we’re trying to do internally to make sure that we can get better at this issue. So, the UK is very much committed to ending the recruitment and use of child soldiers, and to protecting all children affected by armed conflict, ensuring they receive the necessary support and are properly equipped to rebuild the future, their futures. This does include securing better protection for education in conflict, and delivering psychosocial support, ensuring that we take a gender and age responsive approach, considering the different ways in which boys and girls are affected by conflict, and the roles that they play both in ending conflict and in building peace.
We are a Member of the UN Security Council, and as a Member, Permanent Member, it’s important for us to use that role to make sure that this issue is integrated into the geographic debates and discussions that take part in the Security Council. We want to make sure that UN operations retain the necessary capacity to address child protection issues. So, for example, on the International Day Against the Use of Child Soldiers, we took part in a Security Council Arria meeting, which is an opportunity to really try and get traction amongst Security Members and Wider UN – Security Council Members and wider UN member states on protecting children and shrinking humanitarian spaces.
So, we were specifically calling for better integration of the children and armed conflict portfolio into the Security Council country-specific discussions, as opposed to just the thematic debates. We’re often challenged by that. People only want to talk about these types of issues if the debate is only focused on that issue, and yet, with some of the country examples that the two previous speakers mentioned, we want to make sure that this issue is tackled in those debates as well. We want greater endorsement and implementation of the key international commitments pertaining to the children and armed conflict agenda. That includes the Safe Schools Declaration, which we’re really pleased to have endorsed in April 2018. We strongly encourage other states to do the same, and the Vancouver Principles and the Paris Principles, as well as OPAC. We’re very keen to work with states on this agenda, and offer our support to help them make progress on committing to those international principles, etc. I think, importantly, say, for the Safe Schools Declaration, people were surprised that we were able to endorse that. So, it’s useful for us to share the process that we went through, across different government departments, to enable that to happen, because often some people see that as a barrier to endorsing it, but if they can hear how we managed to achieve it, that can be helpful.
We are a Member of the Security Council’s CAC working group, which also gives us an opportunity to really press the listed parties in the Secretary General’s Annual CAC report to enter into concrete UN action plans to verify and release all – any child soldiers and prevent recruitment, and we’re also the single largest financial contributor to the Office of the UN Special Representative for CAC. Over the past five years, we have provided £800,000, and in this financial year, we have provided an additional £500,000, and we’re very keen to work with the SRSG on – and her office and the valuable work that they’re doing.
In terms of supporting children’s access to long-term reintegration programming, we plan to do that through our membership of the Global Coalition for Reintegration. We are a Member of the Friends of the Reintegration Group and that’s a really good opportunity for us to discuss with other states how to really make progress on this, and reports like War Child’s report, thank you very much for that, are really helpful in providing evidence and – from a number of different countries, to enable – to inform our discussions. I think many of you will know that part of what the SRSG has been promoting is a specific fund for reintegration. We absolutely recognise the point one of your key findings, in terms of the need for sustainable funding to make progress on this agenda, but I think we’re very keen to have a better understanding of how to improve a sustainable reintegration, so that we know where the money will be specifically targeted to make progress on it. And I think a lot of the issues highlighted in the War Child report, in terms of, like, the importance of community engagement, making sure that we’re using local knowledge, we’re increasing children’s participation in the design of policy and programming, and strengthening mechanisms at the informal level, all really practical examples of how we can take this agenda forward, and therefore, that’s what money should be invested in to progress the agenda.
In terms of, sort of, moving more to a national example, South Sudan, you mentioned it, is a case study in your report. I think for us, as the UK Government working in South Sudan, we’re very clear that South Sudan has a very poor track record on children in armed conflict. It is the only country where there is work to address all six grave violations, and the SRSG on CAC has highlighted it in her report, where many of, or the majority of the violations are actually committed by Government forces. So, we support UNMIS and UNICEF, who currently engage in work on reintegration of child soldiers, and that includes both deradicalization and rehabilitation. We’re also looking at providing some very targeted support to a specific geographic location, and working with children to tackle these issues, supporting children who are forcibly recruited, and some girls, who’ve been subjected to sexual slavery and forced marriage.
At the local level, in South Sudan, we are Members of the Group of Friends on CAC, which co-ordinates political support on this agenda, and that can range from lobbying on the release of child soldiers or pushing for progress on UN action plans for armed forces and armed groups. But as I said right at the beginning, I very strongly believe that, actually, to be effective multilaterally and bilaterally, we really need to be good ourselves. We need to make sure that we have the right capacity and capability, and that we’re co-ordinating effectively across the governments. So, I think one of the things that I’m really pleased my colleague, Erin, has managed to take forward is the creation of a cross-government working group on children and armed conflict. So, the FCO is joined by our DIFD and MoD colleagues to really try and progress this agenda. It’s a useful forum for us to meet regularly to review what we are doing, but also, to identify where there might be challenges and where we need to be doing more. That might sound really basic, but that is progress in Government, trust me, and I think, importantly, going back to the value that civil society and other stakeholders can play in helping us progress this agenda, we do invite externals to come and share the work that they’re doing, the findings that they’ve got, the advocacy points that they want to raise, because it really helps us understand the issue better. We’re lucky, in the FCO, to have a very large network overseas, but for some of us who work in the Foreign Office in Whitehall, it’s very rare to get outside of the building. So, it’s useful to hear what’s actually happening on the ground, what really needs to happen to change this agenda.
In terms of what the actual group does, coming back to it, we originally focused on the Safe Schools Declaration and making sure that we were delivering on the guidelines that we have endorsed. We see quality education, mental health and psychosocial support as vital elements of the work we want to do and support on reintegration. We’re a key supporter of Education Cannot Wait initiative, which, as you all know, aims to ensure that access to education for children in crises is possible, and that links to a campaign that the FCO was very involved in last year and still continues to work closely with DIFD on, the Leave No Girl Behind campaign, where we want to see all girls get a quality education by 2030. So, 12 years of quality education by 2030. We also want that for boys, but the Leave No Girl Behind campaign focuses quite a lot on girls. So, also, DIFD’s Safe to Learn campaign, which is dedicated to ending violence in schools, and includes a call for others to endorse the Safe Schools Declaration, and DIFD supported War Child’s Learn to Live campaign, raising awareness of the importance of education and mental health provisions for children affected by conflict, with an agreed aid match there.
I think some of you will be aware that the MoD is really progressing this agenda. They recently published their Joint Services publication on Human Security, and that includes children in armed conflict. There’s an awful lot of training that they’re doing internally to make sure that people understand what this issue is. So, what’s the policy, but how do they practically apply that in operations, and I know Rocco has been involved very closely with the MoD, in providing training on that issue, which is great, and I think over the next few years, we’ll see how that actually translates into operations on the ground. I think, importantly, also, we try and join the dots between the CAC policy issue and other policy issues that we work on. We’ll be hosting an international conference on preventing sexual violence in conflict, in November this year, and issues like support to all survivors, including children born of rape, but also, thinking about children associated with armed groups, those that have been subjected to sexual slavery and other forms of sexual violence, we want to make sure that those issues are coming through, when we focus on ending sexual violence in conflict.
And my last points, just re-emphasising the importance of civil society and the work that NGOs are doing around the world. It is absolutely vital, both the practical support that is being provided, but also, that research and evidence. The evidence is hugely helpful for us to make the case why we need to increase funding, why we need to strengthen our policy positions on this issue. So, please do continue with that. We very much hope that we can raise this issue within the UN again with Belgium, with War Child, with others, to make sure that this issue doesn’t disappear and that it is integrated into all the relevant geographic debates that are happening. Thank you [applause].
Charu Lata Hogg
Well, thank you very much, Rosy, Paddy, Rocco for these very heartfelt and rich presentations. I think all of us have – are thinking and perhaps have a lot of questions in our minds to put forward to our speakers. But before we dive into the questions and I open the floor, we have a question already by a Member, who has not been able to attend, and her question is – the name of the Member is Catherine McKenzie, who says, “How can reintegration programmes support people who were recruited as children, but are now over the age of 18, when they’re demobilised?” When we get an answer to this question, I will rapidly open up the floor. Would you like to go for it, Rocco?
Rocco Blume
Yes, I’ve got a shot, thank you. It’s a brilliant question. It’s highly pertinent for the work we do. We have a term that we use in War Child, that a child becomes timed out when they reach the age of 18. The services, the sometimes very comprehensive services that are available, education and maybe residential care, that are available, suddenly, on the 18th birthday, become unavailable, because of the age of the child. Their needs may not change. Their needs may become more complex, but the provision of services sometimes stop. So, unfortunately, there’s not a positive answer that there is a new approach or some way that these needs are being dealt with. It’s a significant problem, and it’s one that we really want to bring some more attention to in our sector and with donors as well. So…
Charu Lata Hogg
Thank you very much. Yes, the gentleman in the middle, please.
Euan Grant
Thank you very much indeed. The name’s Euan Grant. I’m a former Law Enforcement Intelligence Analyst, covering transnational organised crime. I’ve worked in Puntland in Somalia, my colleague has worked – these are as contractors, my colleague has worked in South Sudan. My question is admittedly more about prevention and identification of where they might be and who are the people funding and the logistics of these conflicts that ends up in these children being recruited? Are – who, in the international organisations, member states of the UN as member states, civilian and military, the UN, other international organisations like the AU, and of course the EU, the US clearly is a major player, and small and large NGOs working together or not working together, who’s working together to improve knowledge and awareness of what is going on and where? I would urge you – Mr Dowling mentioned something, I think was very relevant, he mentioned the very valuable work of Forest Whitaker. Today is the 43rd anniversary of the raid on Entebbe Airport. I think that might be a good reason to look at all the organisations, with the huge logistic network there, and say, “Are the UN really getting together?”
Charu Lata Hogg
I’m afraid I’ll have to cut you short here, because we have to open the floor to others. Thank you very much.
Euan Grant
Are UN and the others really working together?
Charu Lata Hogg
Thank you. We’ll take a couple more questions. Yes, please.
Mark Capera
Hi, thanks. I’m Mark Capera. I’m a Teacher from East London. To what extent does the definition of child soldier that we were given, to what extent would that apply to, say, a child gang member, and the favela in Rio de Janeiro? To what extent would that apply to, say, a child gang member in London? To what extent, say, would that apply to Shamima Begum?
Charu Lata Hogg
Thank you. Any further questions before – yes, please.
Sarah Adamczyk
Hi, I’m Sarah Adamczyk with the Humanitarian Policy Group at the Overseas Development Institute. You mentioned quite a bit about stigma, the stigma that comes with being a child soldier. I’m just drawing, kind of, on my ex – on my work last year, in North East Nigeria, where there was also then, and I don’t know how you address this, stigma associated with having gone through rehabilitation or deradicalization programmes itself, where people didn’t want to say that they had gone through those because of the stigma on that. And also, Rocco, I was glad you mentioned the countering violent extremism or preventing violent extremism, how that is being utilised by, particularly in Iraq, but also in Nigeria, to quite broadly paint entire groups and very opaque screening processes, which is sweeping up, often, victims themselves in this, but they’re using the language of rehabilitation, reintegration in that context, too, and, again, how do you try to counter some of those trends?
Charu Lata Hogg
Thank you. Should we take these three questions? The question on prevention, Rosy, would you like to?
Rosy Cave
I don’t actually have an answer to that, but I think it’s an interesting point, and I think that would be one to take to our colleagues who work on serious and organised crime to find out what they’re doing about the transnational linkages.
Charu Lata Hogg
Thank you. Rocco, do you want to come in on that, quickly?
Rocco Blume
Yeah, I can reflect on that. So, when you asked about the collaboration of international organisations with NGOs to improve knowledge and awareness, so, in all the countries where UN missions are operating, where there is a conflict, Iraq, South Sudan, all these places, there is something called the monitoring and reporting mechanism, which brings together all of the UN agencies and NGOs to monitor where child recruitment is taking place. So, evidence is gathered, and it’s submitted to the Secretary General, and every year the United Nations publishes a report, which identifies the groups or governments that are recruiting children. So, there’s a whole process in place to gather information, to identify where it’s taking place and to hold to account governments that are doing this. All the evidence is gathered. Some governments care, others don’t. In South Sudan, for ten years the South Sudanese Government has been listed for child recruitment, it still goes on. Other places like Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, for periods, child recruitment took place, but they took the process seriously and they stopped the practice. Prevention is a core part of what we’re talking about when we talk about reintegration. There’s no point in reintegrating children if there’s no effort to stop recruitment in the first place. So, it does need to be invested in.
Charu Lata Hogg
Thank you. Just to add, the monitoring of violations is on six grave violations. There are six violations, it’s not just child recruitment, and I think one of the issues that we should consider collectively are the intersectional linkages between these violations and how to make the response more comprehensive. Our second question was on the definitional issue, and would anybody like to take it? Or I can dive in?
Paddy Dowling
No, go.
Charu Lata Hogg
Well, essentially, the definition of child soldiering, or as it draws from in the – in terms of legal parlance, as it is defined within international humanitarian law, that involves the association of children with armed forces or armed groups. So, in the context, so, in situations of armed conflict. So, it has to legally satisfy the condition of being one where there is a situation of armed conflict, there are identifiable armed actors, including armed forces and armed groups, but you have – you’re very right to say, “What about kids who are involved in gang warfare, and where is the – where does the criminality element end, and where does it become something which is much bigger?” I mean, there you have, you know, numerous ways of looking at it, which is, is it international armed conflict, is it a national – is it a conflict in which an actual – legally, does it satisfy the conditions of an armed conflict? So, no, these children who are in war with armed groups wouldn’t technically be qualified or looked at as child soldiers.
Member
Having lived in Colombia, I would argue that the conflict in Colombia is actually a national gang warfare for drugs, I would argue, personally. So, that – there’s the boundaries, but could we have a comment on Shamima Begum, because, surely, she is involved in…?
Charu Lata Hogg
Colombia is on the agenda of the Security Council, it has been labelled as a situation where armed conflict does exist, and in Colombia, you’ve had the lens of both the Special Representative of the Secretary General on Sexual Violence and the Special Representative of Children in Armed Conflict. You know, they examined the situation because it is technically regarded as one of armed conflict, whatever the causative factors.
The third question was about violent extremism and how we approach reintegration, once these – this label is cast, in a way, and it draws me to the one of the points you were making, Rocco, about, you know, we have to get the security sector involved, we have to somehow – but isn’t the securitisation of the issue of sexual – of children in armed conflict in itself then – has a harmful and detrimental impact on the agenda? Don’t you think it could have that impact? If we take it out of the humanitarian space and the human rights space and throw it within the framing of a security issue, doesn’t it have a harmful – and I think that’s exactly what you were trying to touch on.
Rocco Blume
It’s a very important and very nuanced point you’re making there, so, yeah. When we see children being – children who’ve been associated with extremist groups being labelled as security threats, and we’ll see their rights being taken away from them, that is because there’s – and we would argue, a misunderstanding of the nature of their recruitment. I think to the point about why children join armed groups, or how is it different from being in an armed gang? A child joining a group like Boko Haram or the Islamic State group or an armed gang in Lewisham or South Central Los Angeles, many of the same factors drive their recruitment, why young boys, young men get involved in violence, why they seek to be part of a group. The factors are the same, but in those conflicts that are described as Islamic extremist, that particular designation of religion is seen first and foremost, instead of all the other factors. So, we would argue that there needs to be far more nuanced understanding of why children join armed groups, and the children that join Islamic extremist groups, their membership is for many reasons.
The point about why it needs to be treated as more than a humanitarian response, of course, children who are militarised present an ongoing threat to security everywhere, not just in Syria or Iraq, but every – in every conflict. So, the attempt to demilitarise them, demilitarise communities contributes towards security and stabilisation and peacebuilding, but it’s an important point that we don’t exceptionalise those children who are in extremist groups and say that they are different from those kids who are in other groups.
Charu Lata Hogg
Thank you, any further questions? Yes, please.
Member
You were talking just there about securitisation, and Rosy, you mentioned something. Rosy, you mentioned how the MoD can play a role in this, and I wonder how, if it’s going to move not just to humanitarian response, but being careful about the use of the word ‘securitisation’, how – what role can the MoD play?
Rosy Cave
That’s a good question, and I can link it with some of the points before as well. I think – so, I think there’s a responsibility that the MoD already implements, in terms of human rights training, with the partner nations that it engages with, and I think when you look at a context like Nigeria, in terms of the support that we provide, there’s definitely a component around human rights training there. I think issues around how women and girls, as well as men and boys, who manage to escape or are released from Boko Haram, how they’re treated, is an issue for us, and the Gender Equality Unit is definitely something that’s on our radar, in terms of the assumption of being radicalised, and therefore, how long you’re in detention before you’re actually released back to your families and your communities and what actually happens in those detention centres. But I think with the MoD moving forward, with its human security approach and with its Joint Services publication, that’s clearly giving very strong guidance, both around what the policy is on children in armed conflict on issues like modern slavery, women, peace and security, protection of civilians, and translating what that policy means into a very operational guidance for Members of the Armed Forces. And I think it’s also recognising the fact that those, sort of, human security issues haven’t always been integrated right from the outset, in terms of training integration into operations, etc., and so it’s useful to make sure that all Members of the Armed Forces at whatever role and rank, are understanding what the issues are, and both how to prevent and respond to them.
Charu Lata Hogg
Thank you very much. We’re almost running out of time, but I’d like to hand the floor to Paddy, who hasn’t had a chance to say much at this moment. Any last words before we end?
Paddy Dowling
No, and there’s some amazing work being done. Don’t think this is all doom and gloom. It’s people like Rocco, on my right, and, you know, Rosy are doing some amazing stuff. I just find it very, very sad when, you know, the great work of the United Nations, in trying to broker a deal with various rebel groups, is met with a lack of budget, and sometimes, you know, I’ve heard this where a Group Commander will say, “We’ve got three – okay, we’ll release these children. We’ve got 3,000 soldiers to release. What are you going to do with them?” 3,000, and the response often is, “Oh my God, I didn’t realise there was that many. We actually don’t have sufficient things in place to be able to make that work. Keep hold of them for a bit.” So, when I hear things like that, something is drastically wrong, and looking towards Rosy, on my left, I, kind of, almost implore the British Government to do more, and to try and help more, ‘cause this problem is not going to go away.
Charu Lata Hogg
I think that’s a very fitting end to this discussion. Thank you, everybody, for being here with us today. Thank you very much to our great panellists, and lovely to have you with us, and please do tweet [applause].
