Why would five youth cycle 2200 kilometres across Canada
?
Do you know anyone between the ages of nine and seventeen…and are they generally happy, well-fed, and protected?
Of course, right? But did you know that if you lived in parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America or Europe…the kids you’re thinking of could be among a quarter of a million children serving—or being forced to serve—in a military capacity?
Child Soldiers…
Imagine children signing up to become soldiers. Voluntarily—out of fear, a lack of alternatives, peer pressure, or a desire for revenge in a violent society. Imagine others being forcibly abducted by military groups, and kept as slaves.
According to the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, this is common.
I don’t know about you, but it’s hard for me to really imagine. But some of these children have told their stories in their own words, so we can have no doubt what it’s like. This is what they say:
The militia came to my village. They asked my older brother whether he was ready to join. He was just 17, and he said no; they shot him in the head. Then they asked me if I was ready to sign, so what could I do—I didn’t want to die. Taken from a BBC report of a former child soldier, forced into soldiery when he was 13 years old.
They gave me a uniform and told me that now I was in the army. They even gave me a new name: “Pisco”. They said that they would come back and kill my parents if I didn’t do as they said. Taken from a 2006 interview with a 17 year old former child soldier.
They took us to the barracks. They beat us with both their guns and boots. After 15 days my friend died from the beatings. They beat me repeatedly. Once I was beaten unconscious and taken to the hospital. When I regained consciousness I was taken back to the barracks and beaten again. I nearly died. I don’t know why they beat me. Ram, recruited in 2004 by the Maoists when he was 14 years old, describes to Human Rights Watch his capture by the Royal Nepal Army one year later (‘Children in the Ranks: The Maoists use of child soldiers in Nepal’, February 2007).
They give you a gun and you have to kill the best friend you have. They do it to see if they can trust you. If you don’t kill him, your friend will be ordered to kill you. I had to do it because otherwise I would have been killed. That’s why I got out. I couldn’t stand it any longer. A 17 year old boy who joined a paramilitary group aged 7 describes his experience (that’s right, he was ordered to shoot his best friend in the head at the age of seven years).
There was no one in charge of the dormitories, and on a nightly basis we were raped. The men and youths would come into our dormitory in the dark, and they would just rape us—you would just have a man on top of you, and you could not even see who it was. If we cried afterwards, we were beaten with hosepipes. We were so scared that we did not report the rapes. The youngest girl in our group was aged eleven, and she was raped repeatedly. A 19 year old girl describes her experience in the National Youth Service Training Program.
I feel pain from the rape, as if I have wounds inside, and I am afraid I have a disease. I would like to get tested but there is no one to help me. I was tested, but I was never told the result. The doctor said that it is better not to know. A 17 year old girl recounts her experience after being abducted by, and later rescued from the LRA, as reported by the Coalition in ‘Returning Home—Children’s perspectives on reintegration’, a case study released in February 2008 of children abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Teso, eastern Uganda.
These are the real words of real teenagers who escaped or were rescued. Teenagers who needed to tell their stories. As one 15 year old girl said in an interview with Amnesty International, “I would like you to give a message. Please do your best to tell the world what is happening to us, the children—so that other children don’t have to pass through this violence.”
She was abducted by the LRA and forced to kill a boy who had tried to escape.
What if it were someone you love?
If you’re like me and my friends, you have brothers or sisters, children or grandchildren, nieces or nephews—maybe even friends who are between nine and seventeen years old. And if you’re like us, the thought of them going into war to…
- fight trained soldiers
- spy on enemy camps
- lay mines or set explosives
- run errands in a warzone
- become the slaves of extreme political groups
- be sexually or physically abused
…That’s a thought that you’d rather not entertain. And it’s easy to push it aside, because there’s no chance of it ever happening to the people we love. But for hundreds of thousands of brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, grandparents, uncles, aunts and friends, there is no such luxury.
- According to the Huffington Post, Jospeh Kony, the leader of the LRA in Uganda, has had around 70 girls as his sex slaves (and the LRA has abducted as many as 66,000—that’s right, sixty-six thousand—children).
- In Liberia the LURD uses girls as young as eight years old…as slaves to tow ammunition and arms; according to an interview conducted by Amnesty International (reported by the Coalition).
- Al Jazeera reports that in Columbia, security forces “recruit” children as young as six by coming to their homes and forcing them to join.
- According to UNICEF, most groups use drugs or alcohol to weaken the children’s natural inhibitions and “encourage” them to kill—something which The Norwegian Council for Africa reports hinders efforts to reintegrate rescued kids.
- Although rehabilitation and reintegration help is available to the children who escape from servitude, the Coalition reports that girls are widely denied this assistance because their situation has stigmatized them in their society.
Please help us stop this
Before today, you may never have even known this kind of cruelty existed. For some reason, instead of the horrific facts of this world-wide problem drawing the attention of the Western media…we have to perform stunts.
So that is what we—myself and some others—are doing.
I’m Philip Schleihauf. I’m one of five youth who need to get your attention, and the attention of people like you. So we’re cycling across eastern Canada, from Ottawa to St John’s. 1,800 kilometres—1,100 miles—on bicycles. We’re not doing this to get exposure for ourselves. We’re doing it to get exposure for the two hundred and fifty thousand children who are being denied a happy childhood…being killed every day…being turned into killers…trapped in violence that they cannot escape by themselves.
You CAN help
There are dozens of great organizations you can donate to. But money isn’t what we want from you right now. There is something else we want you to do. Something surprisingly simple and surprisingly easy.
All we need from you is a handprint.
To find out how a simple handprint can help stop child soldiering…
