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Child Soldiers

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Intro: Child soldiers have helped the world make decisions about rights of children and the crimes that some have committed . Child soldiers are children who are recruited by the government, taken from their parents, or join because the war is their only option. The children in these situations are under the age of 18 and are brought into the war to be fighters, cooks, suicide bombers, unnecessary purposes, human shields, messengers, or spies. Child soldiers have brought up many debates in the past as well as they will be in the future. One major debate within the topic of child soldiers is if the child soldiers should be given amnesty. Child Soldiers should not be given amnesty because child soldiers have mental disorders from the war, They have the potential to be dangerous, and because many children grew up in the war causing …show more content…

This point has brought up several debates that the Regional Academy on the United Nations (R.A.U.N) has brought up many times. The R.A.U.N. states,”There are three ways in which children are recruited - they are...forcibly recruited," (Markovic 2). Many child soldiers are forced to join the war if their villages get attacked. When this happens, the children are forced to be separated from their families and get thrown into the lifestyle of war. However, what Markovic fails to mention in that paragraph is that majority of child soldiers join on their own. Markovic later comes back to this point in a later paragraph on the same website and states the fact that a majority of child soldiers join the army out of their own will, (Markovic 4). Markovic addresses the very important fact that not all child soldiers are forced to join the war. Some children join as a last resort and others join because the war might seem welcoming. No matter the reason, there are some child soldiers who join because it is their choice. They were not forced or put on drugs. It was a conscious

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