Fighting the Liminal Line: Female Child Soldiers in Columbia: Women or Children?

Aug 1, 2011 by lkingston54

Posted under: Volume I, Issue 1

By Erica K. Lindegren, New College of Florida

International campaigns have put increased pressure on governments and military leaders to stop the recruitment of child soldiers and fund disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs, but these initiatives have not adequately addressed the particular needs and rights of female child soldiers. I use the example of Colombia to delineate how female child soldiers occupy a liminal position through their identity as girls with reproductive capabilities. I conclude that female child soldiers were treated like adult combatants, but lacked the same resources and rights. International legislation must recognize the rights of female child ex-combatants and include room for their voices to be heard in order to create more effective prevention and DDR programs.

Fighting the Liminal Line: Female Child Soldiers in Colombia: Women or Children?

The use of children as combatants has increasingly come to international attention in the past several decades. The United Nations, international and national non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the governments of many countries have worked to establish international legislation that recognizes the rights of children and sets a minimum age for recruitment in armed conflict. Despite these endeavors, children continue to be used as combatants, informants, and human shields across the globe. The question of what constitutes a child and what rights children have continues to be debated across cultures and nation-states. One huge omission in these discussions has been the lack of recognition of female child soldiers and the different struggles that girls face in recruitment, combat, and post conflict rehabilitation on a global scale. In the past decade, this omission has begun to be addressed, but international discourses and national programs for girl soldiers still remain vastly underfunded and under-researched on the whole. In this paper, I use the example of Colombia and prior research done on child soldiers to illustrate how female child soldiers occupy a liminal space in international and national discourse due to the specific challenges they face as children and as females.

The experiences of childhood and of violence are not universal, and this includes the childhood experienced by child soldiers. The age at which a person is considered a child or an adult is still unclear in international discourse and often depends on the cultural context. In Jill E. Korbin’s (2003) anthropological literature review of children and violence, she concludes that children’s voices have been mostly absent from anthropological research on childhood and violence. This observation extends to international legislation on girl child soldiers as well, or as Korbin (2003) elaborates, “Although it is perhaps simplistic to say that both childhood and violence are culturally constructed categories, it is nevertheless the case that violence is not a unitary phenomenon nor is childhood experienced similarly everywhere” (p. 432).

Many of the international frameworks for children’s rights have had lofty ideals but as a whole have failed to consider the lived experiences and larger structural issues of children, especially girls, affected by armed conflict. In Dyan Mazurana and Susan McKay’s article, “Child Soldiers: What About the Girls?” (2001), they highlighted the common threads of invisibility, being outside the system of reintegration, struggles for survival, and unique stories that wove the experiences of girl child soldiers together in international discourse. “When wars cut off food supplies or interrupt vaccination programs, malnutrition and illness endanger children of both sexes. And all children are subject to the psychological scars that accompany the wartime loss of family, home, and community. But because of their gender and reproductive status, many young girls’ experiences are distinct from those of boys” (Mazurana & McKay, 2001, p. 34).

Abigail Leibig (2005) questioned the ability of legal frameworks to provide sufficient protection for girl child soldiers in northern Uganda due to their narrow focus on child soldiers to the exclusion of other types of gender-based sexual violence and forced participation. She also critiqued the role of NGOs in child soldier campaigns, such as the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, who narrowly focused on the use of children in armed conflict rather than the impact of armed conflict on children. International law, as a result of campaigns like this, established a more targeted focus on the issue of children serving in combat, at the expense of marginalizing children affected by the extreme complexities of armed conflict in other capacities, such as systemic sexual violence. While I believe it is important to recognize the implications of systemic violence and the extremely dangerous circumstances that female civilians of all ages face in the midst of armed conflict, the liminal position of female child soldiers still remains very low on the international radar.

International Responses to the Use of Child Soldiers

International recognition of child soldiers began as early as the 1970s when the Additional Protocols of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 established 15 as the minimum age of recruitment or use in armed conflict, but did not explicitly address the involvement of children not directly involved in combat, such as those working in domestic positions. The Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) defined a child as any person under the age of 18, but the age of 15 was retained for minimum age of recruitment or participation in armed conflict. It also explicitly recognized the abuses faced by girls and offered protection for child soldiers, but failed to hold non-state actors accountable or offer any kind of enforcement mechanisms. Leibig (2009) critiqued the Optional Protocols for failing to create a body of law that protected female child soldiers. “Child soldiers do not fit into the categories laid out here: in most cases they are not sold, but abducted; they are not prostitutes because they don’t receive any material goods in exchange for their sexual servitude; child pornography and sex tourism are not applicable to child soldiers either… . In order for girl child soldiers to be fully protected by international law, their plight must be addressed clearly and specifically in the text of the document” (p. 16). The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW, 1985) protected women’s rights, and by extension the rights of girls, but, as Leibig (2009) pointed out, it also lacked mechanisms of enforcement and failed to address the specificities of child sexual abuse and forced marriage in the context of armed conflict as human rights violations.

More recent international legislation on child soldiers has focused on the ability of international courts to prosecute military leaders for underage recruitment and sexual violence as war crimes. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998) declared that the conscription or enlistment of children under the age of 15 was a war crime and also recognized rape, sexual slavery, and other forms of sexual violence as war crimes, providing a feasible basis for persecuting violators of human rights abuses specific to female child soldiers. The African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (1999) condemned the recruitment and use of children (defined as under the age of 18) in hostilities, yet again failed to include recognition of the experiences of female child soldiers. The 2007 Paris Commitments and Principles have been the most comprehensive international set of guidelines for addressing the needs of children associated with armed conflict to date, and explicitly addressed the experiences of girl child soldiers. It was endorsed by 95 countries pledging to respect the legal and operational principles needed to protect children from recruitment or use in armed conflict, yet still lacked enforcement mechanisms and has yet to be effectively implemented in many of the countries that signed on, including Colombia.

Constant Conflict and Child Soldiers in Colombia

In Colombia, more than two generations of children have grown up with violent conflict as part of their everyday lives. High rates of childhood recruitment have been due in large part to Colombia’s forty-year history of violent internal conflict and persistent poverty.

Colombia’s civil war is the lengthiest armed conflict in the western hemisphere. What began forty-two years ago as a war waged by Marxist revolutionaries against an exclusive political system has devolved into a bloody struggle over resources; military, paramilitary, guerillas, domestic elites, and multinational actors vie for control of this resource-rich country. In the struggle, all groups have committed serious human rights violations; the vast majority of the war casualties are unarmed civilians, and the escalating violence and fear for one’s life have prompted massive internal and cross border displacement. (Theidon, 2009, p. 6)

The main three paramilitary groups in Colombia have been the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), and the Auto-Defensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC). FARC was originally a rural guerrilla movement based on Marxist ideology; the ELN was an outgrowth of unrest on university campuses in 1964 that mixed Cuban revolutionary theory with extreme liberation theology; and the AUC originated out of a U.S.-supported counterinsurgency plan in the late 1960s as auxiliary forces of the Colombian government. All paramilitary groups have obtained financial backing through illegal activities such as kidnapping, extortion, drug trafficking, and drug trade protection, in addition to paramilitary use to protect the interests of regional elites and suppress social protests (Theidon, 2009). All of the armed groups have committed human rights violations against children and utilized child soldiers to further their own political interests.

The international protocols have had a minimal impact on underage recruitment, in part because their scope is narrowly focused on factors such as age and lacks mechanisms of enforcement. According to a 2009 United Nations High commissioner for Refugees report, between 8,000 (according to government figures) and 11,000 (non-government sources) children were still participating in armed conflict in 2008. Poverty, the presence of violent conflict, sexual exploitation and abuse, separation from family, and lack of access to education and economic alternatives have been major determining factors in girls’ decisions to join armed groups. Girl child soldiers have been recruited through abduction or coercion, have “voluntarily” joined armed forces, or been “gang pressed” into serving as warriors and sexual and domestic slaves.

Children were both forcibly and voluntarily recruited and used by the two armed opposition groups, the FARC and the ELN. They were used as combatants, to lay mines and explosives and to carry out other military tasks. Girls were subjected to sexual abuse, including rape and forced abortion. Some children reportedly remained with paramilitary groups which had failed to demobilize fully. Government forces used captured and surrendered child soldiers to gather intelligence on opposition forces… . The army-backed AUC was responsible for widespread human rights abuses and child recruitment before 2003. (Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, 2008)

Although there are no solid numbers that indicate the extent to which girls are abducted, it is geographically widespread. Some statistics indicated that girls have been kidnapped and forced into wartime service in at least 20 countries (Mazurana & McKay, 2001). Many girls who were abducted reported losing their sense of time, the sequence of events, and even their own identity. The abducting group often denied girls their identity, refused to permit them to use their real names or places of origin, which splintered girls from their sense of belonging to their parents, family, and homes. Girls who were gang pressed were “physically coerced into serving” (Mazurana & McKay, 2001, p. 32) and picked up at places such as schools, discotheques, and markets. Dietrich Ortega (2009) found that female combatants were also exposed to higher rates of torture and gender-based violence within armed groups and by opposing groups than males. According to Leibig (2005), “a broad range of human rights offenses are perpetrated against girl child soldiers, but sexual abuse is a dominant complaint in the studies which address the experiences of girl child soldiers. Sexual abuse is integrated into the military culture of armed forces or guerilla groups” (p. 1). All of these experiences made it more difficult for child soldiers to reintegrate into society and were more prevalent among girls due their higher rate of abduction (Brett, 2002).

The degree to which girl soldiers voluntarily joined armed groups has also been contested due to the paucity of options. Yvonne E. Keairns (2003), a researcher at the Quaker United Nations Office, led an in-depth interview-based study of 22 former girl child soldiers from Angola, Colombia, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka, and concluded that the reasons that girls became soldiers in Colombia depended on both personal circumstances and local environment. In Colombia, personal circumstances and local environment were often determined by extreme poverty, especially in rural areas, and lack of familial stability. UNICEF statistics for 2008 revealed that over 790,000 children were orphaned in 2008 from various causes, such as violence, poverty, and AIDS. The rates of child labor in Colombia between 1999 and 2008 were 6% for males, 4% for females, and rates of child marriage from 2000 to 2008 were 19% in urban areas and 38% in rural areas (UNICEF, 2010). According to one study on child-soldier recruitment done by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers (2007), “some enlist as a means of survival in war-torn regions after family, social and economic structures collapse or after seeing family members tortured or killed by government forces or armed groups. Others join up because of poverty and lack of work or educational opportunities. Many girls have reported enlisting to escape domestic servitude, violence and sexual abuse.”

A multi country study that profiled domestic violence (Kishor & Johnson, 2004) surveyed 11,536 women between the ages of 15 and 49 in Colombia. It revealed that 44% had experienced spousal violence and 41% had experienced physical violence. This statistic, while failing to include girls under the age of 15 or women 50 and older, still exposed an extremely high rate of violence against women in Colombia, and the acts of violence were most likely underreported due to the culture of silence surrounding domestic violence. Many of the women and girls who joined armed groups were most likely unaware of these statistics, and may have joined despite the dangers because they viewed it as a way to improve their social status. Dietrich Ortega (2009) found that while the participation of women in armed groups rarely provided upward social mobility, it sometimes enabled personal development and achievement through association with armed groups, by improving decision-making, self-perception, and self-esteem.

For some girls, joining a paramilitary group is one of the few ways they see out of a life of poverty and violence. Through a related study on girl child soldiers done by the Quaker United Nations Office, Rachel Brett (2002) found that girls volunteer for many of the same reasons boys do, but factors of domestic exploitation or abuse, the ability to protect themselves, and the desire to prove their own equality with boys were stronger factors among girls recruited than boys. Identification with an armed group sometimes replaced family bonds and could break cultural socialization in ways that increased gender equality, but many female combatants found that the egalitarian ideals of many armed groups did not play out in real life. There were often gendered divisions of labor in the camps that expected girls/women to cook and clean and sometimes provide sexual services for the men, although this was by no means true of all women’s experiences. Luisa Maria Dietrich Ortega (2009) elaborated on how female ex-combatants faced a double stigma that often led to the rejection and marginalization of women to the point where the very womanhood of female ex-combatants was questioned, despite supposedly equal workloads within paramilitary groups (p. 166). Leibig (2005) discerned that the patriarchal attitudes in which girls were raised in Uganda contributed to the double stigmatization of women and girls, and this holds true for the stigmatization of women and girls in Colombia as well. This stigmatization was magnified through the identity of women as female combatants, which was associated with sexual impurity and/or promiscuousness. When Kimberly Theidon (2009) conducted ethnographic interviews with Colombian ex-combatants about the role of masculinity, weapons, and violence in disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs, she inquired about the role of women guerrillas, to which one male informant replied:

In the group, a woman—well, she’s practically not a woman. She’s not a woman because she’s just one more combatant. I mean, the women do the same work—it’s not as though it’s individualized like the women are more delicate so they can’t do this or that. Right? No—everyone’s equal. So women lose their femininity and … well it’s like in the society in general—not just out there. Men are really machista with women, always exploiting them sexually. Part of it’s the man’s fault, part of it’s the woman’s because the women se relajan [“get relaxed,” as in loosening up their morals] out there (in the group). (2009, pp. 27-28)

This label had the potential to affect their future marriage prospects, access to resources and social networks to obtain shelter, land, property, food, labor exchange, family and child support, and sustainable livelihoods (Dietrich Ortega, 2009, p. 167).

Joining paramilitary groups does not provide an escape from violence, but provides some female combatants with a sense of control over their lives. Not all girl soldiers are raped or sexually abused. Many female soldiers chose to have one or more partners for emotional reasons or to increase their access to clothes, money, transportation, and protection. In Colombia, some armed groups explicitly forbid sexually intimate relationships between men and women without the consent of the woman, approval of the commander to enter into a relationship, and some required contraception shots and abortions (Keairns, 2003). “In all the armed groups there were power differentials between the men and the young girls and many of the girls agreed to a sexually intimate relationship when they recognized it brought with it benefits such as more food, better living conditions, opportunities to ride rather than walk long distances and other privileges. None of the girls talked about receiving information to protect against sexually transmitted diseases” (Keairns, 2003, p. 3). If girls/women chose or were forced to have sexual relations, they could contract a sexually transmitted infection (STI) or become pregnant and either have a child or have an abortion, but often they were not given the choice. The female child soldiers could engage in adult sexual relations but were rarely permitted to make choices concerning their own bodies or futures, an example of how their liminality was embodied in their reproductive capacity. According to UNICEF (2008), 78% percent of women in union between the ages of 15 to 49 in Colombia used contraception, but it is doubtful that this number included female combatants in paramilitary groups between the ages of 11 to 18 who were forced to take contraceptives. Many female child soldiers who became pregnant were forced to have an abortion or give birth using unsterile and risky equipment and procedures, and if their infant survived, they often had to abandon their child en route. These abuses did not seem to be reflected in UNICEF’s 2008 report on Colombia, which recorded that over 90% of women had a skilled attendant and/or gave birth in an institution, reflecting only women who had the ability to access proper medical care, a right most child soldiers did not have.

From in-depth ethnographic interviews with six female former child soldiers from Colombia, Keairns (2003) gathered information on a typical day in their lives as combatants. They woke up around 5:00 am to organize and pack their belongings, then had coffee and exercise, and breakfast at 6:00 am. From 7:00 am to noon they had rigorous physical training such as sit-ups, running in streams, navigating tunnels, walking on the high bar, and learning how to train other combatants. Lunch occurred around noon, and then an hour of rest. At 2:00 pm they had jogging and additional exercise. From 3:00 to 5:30 pm they had group sessions on inter-group relations that focused on how others had treated them and how they treated others, with emphasis placed on who treated them badly. They had supper around 6:00 pm. From 7:00 to 9:00 pm they were assigned to guard duty, patrolling, or cooking. While on patrol, they walked around and watched over the area surrounding the camp, brought in food, collaborated with civilians, and recharged radio batteries. Guard duty involved watching the campsite. Flag down occurred around 9:00 pm—a time when they paraded in front of the commanders and were permitted coffee if it was cold. From 9:00 pm to 3:00 am they walked in patrols, moved camp, or partied and drank after battles (2003, p. 7). This rigorous schedule was no different for adult soldiers than for child soldiers, but the amount of training that each girl received varied.

Some of the girls received more training than others. Training on the high bar was life threatening because if you fell you would be seriously injured or even killed. They were forced to run for hours, navigate through tunnels, run in streams and perform rigorous physical exercises. The time established for being given a weapon and the training in the use of the weapon also varied. A pistol might be received after one week and an AK-47 after three months. Learning how to clean and take apart the weapon was part of training. The girls were also taught to provide training for others. The girls also were taught the politics and philosophy of the movement and used this information to collaborate with the people. This information was also lived out in the group sessions held about relationships and the way the participants in the movement treated each other. (Keairns, 2003, p. 12)

This rigorous schedule exemplified a typical day in the life of combatants, set by the commanders, and child combatants were expected to keep up. The study indicated that the child combatants were not treated differently from the adult combatants. They fulfilled adult duties and obligations, including intelligence gathering, warfare, and killing demanded by their commanders.

The Omission of Female Child Soldiers Internationally

The absence of programs targeting female child soldiers reflects the limits of the broader discourse that often fails to recognize women’s participation in armed conflict or omits women from the picture entirely. This omission is alarming due to the fact that, as Dietrich Ortega (2009) pointed out, “Women comprise between 10 and 30 percent of armed opposition groups, in nonfighting roles and as active combatants and commanders, yet female ex-combatants have often been excluded and marginalized in post-hostilities settings, and particularly in DDR programs” (p. 160). Disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs are intended to help former combatants transition from military life back into society, but for many of the child soldiers, part of their childhood and most of their youth has been under the command of paramilitary groups. This makes it much more difficult for them to return to “normal” life, to a childhood they may have never had. Many female combatants opt not to participate in DDR programs because “the relatively flexible gender roles and broadened spaces for engagement open to women during their participation in armed groups is rarely translated into postconflict gains, especially because the passage to civilian life tends to be framed as a ‘return to normalcy,’ meaning a return of women ex-combatants to the domestic and reproductive spheres” (Dietrich Ortega, 2009, p. 165). DDR programs must also consider the use of the term “gender” in their analysis. Often gender is just a replacement for “woman” that does not question the normative association of masculinity with violence (Theidon, 2009) that further perpetuates the double stigma that both child and adult female ex-combatants face.

When international laws and programs do attempt to incorporate women into international processes, they often utilize the “add gender and stir” method, or as Theidon (2009) remarked “adding gender” is policy-speak for “adding women” (p. 4) and fails to question the role of men and militarized masculinity in the perpetuation of violence and conflict. For girl child soldiers, this has a multitude of implications. “For children the categories of ex-combatant and victim overlap much more than they do for adults. All of the children associated with armed groups are victims, not only of the human rights abuses they suffer while members of those groups, such as rape, forced marriage, and torture, but of being recruited in the first place” (Duthie & Specht, 2009, p. 205). Even the word “child” often contains gendered implications that must be globally contested. International reports and initiatives that focus on child soldiers or children in reality often use the world “child” to represent males under the age of 18. Females under the age of 18 remain underrepresented or invisible to the public eye. “In many cases, girl soldiers experience these other roles in addition to serving in armed combat. International laws which prohibit the use of child soldiers do not address these experiences. Additionally, many programs designed to prevent the recruitment of child soldiers and aid in their rehabilitation offer insufficient aid to girls” (Leibig, 2005, p. 1). The lack of recognition of the specific challenges that girls face as “children” is another example of their liminality in the international sphere.

Child soldiers, and female child soldiers in particular, remain on the outskirts of Colombian legislation despite carrying out adult combatant responsibilities in paramilitary groups. According to the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers (2009), the 2005 Justice and Peace Law in Colombia provided the legal framework for demobilization of paramilitary groups, but focused on demobilizing the AUC, resulting in the continued existence of groups not involved in AUC demobilization and mergence of AUC and existing groups with criminal organizations. Colletta, Kostner, and Widerhofer (2001), emphasized how “an authentic, nontransferable, and non-corruptible identification system is of paramount importance to reduce the risk of political manipulation and resource abuse [in DDR programs]” (p. 9). Colombia’s laws and regulations on the involvement of children in armed conflict remained contradictory and were rarely enforced, while “internal armed conflict continued to have a devastating impact on civilians. They were victims of extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearance, death threats, anti-personnel mines, indiscriminate attacks and forcible displacement in large numbers. Children formed a high proportion of the victims, in part because fighting forces at times operated in and near schools and other places where children were likely to gather” (Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, 2004), which permitted higher rates of child recruitment.

In Roger Duthie and Irma Specht’s (2009) research on former child soldiers and the process of reintegration, they concluded that transitional justice has the potential to reinforce the reintegration of children by fostering trust but may also hinder progress by fostering stigmatization and fear (p. 218). They reported that the participation of girls in reintegration processes was not clearly documented. “Girls participate in formal DDR processes in far fewer numbers than boys, and thus frequently do not benefit from reintegration support… . Girls also face greater social barriers and exclusion, as their association with armed groups may break with cultural stereotypes for girls’ behavior, or they may be seen to have ‘lost value through involvement in sexual activity” (p. 195-6). In interviews with girl ex-combatants, they discovered that some of them were afraid to reveal their past involvement with armed groups because of their fear of repercussions. “They did not want to be registered and photographed (a precondition at the DDR camps), as they feared they might later be prosecuted in a criminal court for their involvement in the war” (p. 213). They emphasized that child-specific reintegration must include rehabilitation of the entire community to be sustainable, as both the children and the communities could be considered victims.

Female child soldiers face many of the same types of oppression as adult female combatants. In Colombia, they are frequently disempowered through exploitative gender relations. They find that the reality of daily life contradicts promises of egalitarian opportunities. They are denied their own maternity by being forced to have contraceptive injections, birth control, and abortion. If they do have children, they are often forced to abandon them. They are more vulnerable to sexual violence and abuse because of their sex. Despite these shared issues of oppression, female child soldiers often find themselves outside the lines of international definitions and mechanisms of justice. International discourse on child soldiers fails to recognize the specific rights violations and gender-based abuses of female child soldiers due to its narrow focus on the universality of the experience of child soldiers and attempts to define minimum ages of recruitment and maximum ages of childhood. Some international discourse on demobilization and reintegration of female ex-combatants has attempted to incorporate the experience of girls, but is constrained by the blurry line of delineation between where childhood ends and adulthood begins and the lack of room in international discourse for the specificity of experiences. It is important that international discourse on prevention, demobilization, and reintegration consider the specific contexts and the larger structural causes that perpetuate the use of children as soldiers because international discourse influences how child soldiers are categorized and the agency that children, especially girls, have within those categorizations. Future international discourse and national programs concerning the prevention, demobilization, and reintegration of child soldiers should acknowledge the liminality of female child soldiers and expand laws and programs to incorporate local contexts, the experiences of all children affected by armed conflict, and specifically target stereotypes surrounding masculinity and femininity.

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