Social Change and the Legal Construction of Child Soldier Recruitment in the Special Court for Sierra Leone

ABSTRACT

"Concern over the recruitment of child soldiers in armed conflicts has grown over the last decades. While public advocacy and media attention tend to focus public attention on the most egregious cases of child recruitment; emerging international law has actually had a more profound effect on the relationship between children and the military. What began as a relatively narrow concern with protecting children under 15 years old who served as combatants in armed forces and armed groups has evolved into an international effort to sever a broad range of connections between all persons under 18 years old and the military. Indeed; the entire legal concept of the ""child soldier"" has evolved to encompass a greater number of children engaged in a wider variety of activities than was previously the case.The drive to create a universal legal and moral standard has trumped any concerns about local understandings of child soldiers; which are treated not as legitimate expressions of local culture but rather as deviant and inhumane practices under international law. International humanitarian law is not merely ethnocentric; it is indeed intentionally ethnocentric. Its concern is not to respect local norms but rather to systematically alter them. The drafters who crafted the language of the first international treaty that barred the recruitment of children under 15 years old were keenly aware of significant cross-cultural variation in the ages of childhood; youth and adulthood. But their view that the participation of children and adolescents in combat was an ""inhumane practice"" made such considerations irrelevant. An examination of the development of international law and its application in Sierra Leone shows that as international law develops an increasingly expanded concept of the child soldier; the disjunction between the normative aspirations of law and the reality of local practice continues to grow."