shortly before been willing to kill and who had never received an adequate foundation of moral development,

end of the Cold War ushered in an era of ethnopolitical conflicts that are seldom fought on well-defined battlefields

increasingly internal,

characterized by butchery; violence against women, and atrocities sometimes committed by former neighbors.

80 percent of the victims are noncombatants, mostly women and children.

children serve as combatants or as cooks, informants, porters, bodyguards, sentries, and spies.

children participate in relatively unstructured but politically motivated acts of violence, such as throwing stones or planting bombs.

far greater problem than suggested by the scant attention it has received.

found from Central America to the Great Lakes region of Central Africa, and from Belfast in the north to Angola in the south.

The problem defies gender boundaries.

Typically, sexual victimization is a part of soldiering for girls, many of whom are forced to become "soldiers' wives." After the conflict ends, families and local communities may reject the girls as impure or unsuitable for marriage. Desperate to survive, many former girl soldiers become prostitutes.

The use of child soldiers violates international norms. The U. N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), signed in 1989 and ratified by more than 160 nations, establishes 15 years as the minimum recruitment age. In fact, most countries have endorsed an optional protocol that boosts the minimum recruitment age to 18 years.

Yes," he said. He would have done "what he had to do." When asked what he wanted for the future, he said, "I only want to go to school."

in developing countries, in which children constitute nearly half the population and in which children are often reared in a system that mixes war, poverty, violence, hunger, environmental degradation, and political instability.

Many Angolan children report nightmares and flashbacks, display heightened aggressiveness, and suffer from hopelessness. Thousands of children-defined as people under 18 years of age-entered the military. For both parents and children, war had become normal.

Violent youths, however, may yet sabotage the cease-fire.

How widespread is child soldiering? Numbers are hard to come by. The destruction and turmoil of war make it difficult to create and preserve accurate records. Particularly in Africa, many countries have no history of keeping precise birth records.

military groups, governmental and rebel, make no attempt to document or accurately report the ages of the children they recruit.

The best estimate-which is admittedly soft-is that in the mid-1990s, there were about a quarter of a million child soldiers, current or recently demobilized.

decade-long conflict

became a member of the infamous S.B.U. or Small Boys Unit.

unquestioning obedience

extreme cruelty.

often high on marijuana or crack cocaine, many of the thousands of children who took part in Sierra Leone's 10-year civil war visited terrible atrocities on the civilian population.

child soldiers sometimes cut open the bellies of pregnant women just to see what sex the child was.

Without the power of the gun, the guerrillas, and their child recruits, would simply not have been able to terrorise the country in the way they did.

attempted to comprehend it's own 'insanity'. Chief among the questions being asked is how factions like the RUF were able to acquire their weapons?