Untapped Potential: Adolescents Affected by Armed Conflict

“Adolescents? Why adolescents? Everybody knows that children are the most vulnerable!” a high-level United Nations official told the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children in the course of conducting research for the study presented here.

Descriptions of adolescents’ experiences of war and persecution in documentation collected by the Women’s Commission, however, show that adolescents are in desperate need of increased attention by the international community.

“I saw the bandits rape older women, and I saw them rape many girls who were just beginning to grow breasts,” a 12-year-old boy from Sofala, Mozambique is quoted in Children of Mozambique: The Cost of Survival (Boothby, et al.), describing what he saw while living in a house near a Renamo base. “The bandits raped the girls and left them there. Some girls were used by many different bandits; when one bandit finished with a girl another one took his place. I think some of the girls got sick and died of sickness because they were raped.”

“I am not an adult, and I am not a child. [I am] in the middle,” Mureramanzi, 20, from Rwanda, told Craig Cohen in No Home without Foundation: A Portrait of Child-headed Households in Rwanda. “I can do the work of men, but I never discuss things with them. The only adult I speak with is my grandmother, but she is worn down. I am not an adult, but I am a father. I provide for my family. I never think about getting married because life is too difficult. I never think about abandoning my brother and sister because even if I had to feed only myself, life would not be easier.” Since 1994 when his parents were killed in the genocide and he was 17, Mureramanzi has been responsible for his young brother and sister, ages six and nine. He sometimes does not eat so his siblings can eat. He never finished primary school.

Sarah, 17, was abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. “After the military training, I was given to a man called Otim,” Human Rights Watch reports her saying in The Scars of Death. “There were five women given to one man. The man I was given to was very rude to me; he thought I wanted to leave him and escape. He beat me many times with sticks. Now I’m going to be a mother soon. I don’t want to be a mother at this age. But it happened, and I must accept this.” And the Los Angeles Times quoted 14-year-old Vlora, a Kosovar refugee in Albania in April 1999: “Before school started, I didn’t do anything. I used to always think about my house and how they burned it down.”

A nongovernmental organization representative told the Women’s Commission, “They [adolescents] are the underserved of the underserved.” In the eyes of the international community, which has reached tremendous heights of political consensus around the subject of “innocent, vulnerable, children,” adolescents are woefully overlooked. In fact, for many decision-makers, adolescents do not seem like children at all, almost do not exist at all. They seem more like adults, able to care for themselves, or having more adult-like problems. And they may not look so innocent; they may be the perpetrators of violence. They may seem hard to deal with; they have opinions and can be demanding. Yet the costs of not focusing on adolescents are enormous: massive rights violations committed against adolescents, with long-term consequences for them and their communities as they attempt to endure and recover from armed conflict. Perhaps worst of all, adolescents’ strengths and potential as constructive contributors to their societies go largely unrecognized and unsupported by the international community, while those who seek to do them harm, such as by recruiting them into military service or involving them in criminal activities, recognize and utilize their capabilities very well.

Adolescents have distinct experiences in armed conflict, distinct needs and distinct capacities for recovering. They are heads of households. They mentor and tutor other children and provide friendship and companionship for one another. They generate a livelihood for themselves and their families, and take on leadership roles. These attributes must be increasingly seen and addressed.

Untapped Potential: Adolescents affected by armed conflict reminds decision-makers and others that when the rights of children are invoked, “children” include adolescents. It identifies and highlights work that has taken place and is underway to address adolescents’ circumstances. At the same time, it emphasizes how much needs to be done on behalf of and with this group. Most of all, it calls on the international community to tap its own potential to act in support of adolescents’ capacities and to promote their well-being and the stability of their families and societies.