Girl Fighters Neglected
by Swanee Hunt, Scripps Howard News Service
February 18, 2024

The image of a child brandishing a loaded gun and raiding an enemy village seems one for the storybooks. But it happens every day, from Sierra Leone to Liberia, Uganda to Sudan. The U.N. says some 300,000 children worldwide are recruited or abducted, then trained as fighters. The dark secret is that a growing number of these children are girls.

In Sierra Leone, a girl we'll call Agnes remembers her own abduction. When she was 9 years old, rebels staged a surprise attack. They rounded up about 50 people, locked them in a building and set it on fire. A junior commander pleaded for Agnes' life. As she was led away, the captured villagers, including her mother and father, were burned alive. She was forced to be the rebel commander's "wife."

Agnes, one of thousands of girls abducted into fighting forces, survived her country's brutal civil war. But you won't find her, or most of the other girls, among the official head count of child fighters. The government of Sierra Leone is slow to acknowledge the young girls in its own military and civil defense forces, although they readily accuse rebel armies of the same crime. In fact, both sides committed gruesome atrocities, forcing children to wield arms, treating them as pawns in a deadly game.

In a startling new report, "From Combat to Community: Women and Girls of Sierra Leone," by Inclusive Security: Women Waging Peace (a project I chair), researchers interviewed 50 former girl fighters who told rare, behind-the-scenes stories of life in guerrilla compounds and the opposing paramilitary camps. Some served as frontline fighters, others as medics, spies, or cooks. Girls witnessed brutal rituals and suffered violent sexual abuse. In rebel compounds, the captive wives were in charge of weapons distribution, food and loot. They commanded "small boys units" and "small girls units" of youngsters from 6 to 15 years old and organized raids.

This study debunks the myth of girls solely as victims of sex crimes by armed forces terrorizing villages and towns. The girls often became integral to a combat machine fueled by their own blood and tears. Of the estimated 45,000 children in the fighting forces, human rights groups say about 12,000 were girls—nearly double official statistics. These armies of children were released when the war ended in 2002. But when the government dismantled the fighting units, confiscated guns, and helped soldiers return home, only about 500 girl fighters were included in these programs. A mere fraction of those forced to live in the bush could take advantage of benefits for ex-combatants, including stipends, job training, and education.

That's where the girls were failed a second time. Not only did officials look the other way when girls were forced to fight; they neglected those struggling to return to civil life. Many were excluded from rehab programs because they were labeled "wives" or "camp followers," not "fighters." Some of those neglected ones are now simmering in anger.

Stepping into the breach, national women's and community groups have reached out to the abandoned girls. Although short on funds, they've offered counseling, training, and help with education. Some women whose own children were killed have opened their homes to former child soldiers and their babies. According to report co-author, Dyan Mazurana, "Girls were helped by widows who themselves were displaced, scraping together meager resources to get by." Agnes, now eighteen, was one of the lucky ones taught how to tailor clothes. She's free from her captor and raising her three small children alone. Hundreds of other girls, rejected by their families and with no chance of assistance from their soldier "husbands" or the state, survive on petty crime and prostitution.

Sierra Leone's program to disarm soldiers and return them to community life has been touted as a successful model for other countries. But the program has failed girls, and the consequences are troubling. Lack of financial benefits has led to sporadic rioting and attacks against international aid workers. Some girl ex-combatants have crossed borders to join armed groups in other regions. Who can blame them? They have to find a way to support their children—born in captivity. The exclusion of teen mothers from assistance programs means the exclusion of their offspring—a new generation of disaffected youth.

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