Innocents Lost
When Child Soldiers Go to War
by Jimmie Briggs

Description:

Ida fought for three years with Sri Lanka's female Tamil Tigers, one of the longest-surviving and successful guerilla movements in the world. She started at seventeen. Francois, a fourteen-year-old Rwandan child of mixed ethnicity, was forced by Hutu militiamen to hack to death his sister's Tutsi children. And fifteen-year-old Gueso is fighting in Columbia, a country where all the parties in conflict have used children to further their military objectives.

The phenomenon of child soldiers is not a new one, but the last several decades have seen a marked and tragic increase in their use, particularly in civil wars. Yet the growing exploitation of children in war is still little known. There are over 250,000 children fighting in three dozen conflicts around the world:  From the "little bees" of Columbia to the "baby brigades" of Sri Lanka, the subject of child soldiers is changing the face of war. Over the last six years, journalist Jimmie Briggs has been researching, writing about, and talking to these young combatants in Uganda, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Colombia, and Afghanistan. The personal and tragic stories of these children -- in their own voices, and in Briggs' moving accounts -- not only reveal the horror of children fighting, but focus on what is happening today, fifteen years since the first reports of the global phenomena of children in combat began to make headlines. Briggs takes us to the front, where child soldiers are learning to kill, and to the villages and rehabilitation centers where they are struggling to transcend the horror of the past and build new lives.

These stories of active and former child soldiers illustrate the different ways children are inducted into the military -- including abduction, voluntary enlistment, coercion, indoctrination, and physical threat -- as well as the various roles children perform as combatants. Innocents Lost puts human faces on child combatants around the world, and shines a beacon of hope into the dark worlds they inhabit.

Cogent, passionate, impeccably researched, and compellingly told, Innocents Lost is one of the most personal and powerful examinations yet of the lives of child soldiers and war-affected children.

Innocents Lost
When Child Soldiers Go to War
by Jimmie Briggs

ISBN: 9780465007981
ISBN-10: 0465007988
Publisher: Basic Books
Publication Date: 2005
Format: Hardcover, 188 pages
Book Type: New