CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

ecognize that absolute obedience is the only means to ensure survival.
Sometimes they are compelled to participate in the killing of other children or
family members, because it is understood by these groups that there is “no way
back home” for children after they have committed such crimes. 167
There is also the conduct of these child soldiers themselves to consider. Many are
below the age of criminal responsibility recognised by most Western societies; they
have been severed from family or community values and have had little education or
moral upbringing. Alternatively, considering those trained in the Taliban madrasas of
Pakistan and Afghanistan, they may have had an education that we would recognise as
ideological brain-washing, instilling in them a morality that we find not only entirely
alien but profoundly evil. In either case, their ethic set becomes the distorted and often
barbarically cruel code of violence of their new ‘families’ with expectations (indeed,
demands) of atrocity, backed-up by fear of punishment for failure to comply. In many
cases this may be further fuelled by the use of alcohol and hard drugs. Michael Ignatieff
highlights the particular atrocities associated with adolescent irregulars:
In most traditional societies honour is associated with restraint and virility with
discipline ….The particular savagery of war in the 1990s taps into another view
of male identity – the wild sexuality of the adolescent male. Adolescents are
supplying armies with a different kind of soldier – one for whom a weapon is
not a thing to be respected or treated with ritual correctness but instead has an
explicit phallic dimension. To traverse a checkpoint in Bosnia where adolescent
boys in dark glasses and tight-fitting combat khakis wield AK-47s is to enter a
zone of toxic testosterone. War has always had its sexual dimension – a
soldier’s uniform is no guarantee of good conduct – but when a war is conducted
by adolescent irregulars, sexual savagery becomes one of its regular weapons. 168
Child soldiers are combatants and therefore under the simplest understanding of the jus
in bello tenets of discrimination and proportionality can expect to be dealt with as such.
Even when we accept that they are not in any real sense willing combatants, the law of
double effect places them firmly in harms way (as in many cases does the simple right
of self defence). Nevertheless, as we saw from the testimony of Trooper Boon, above
(see p307), and to which Major Jim Gray 169 also adds personal experience, killing
children, is abhorrent to most regular soldiers and will leave them psychologically
scarred; it is alien to their sense of honour: there is nothing heroic in shooting a child
however he – or she – is armed; their sense of self-worth is irreparably damaged by the
encounter. Moreover, as Michael Skerker 170 has argued, in asymmetric warfare the law
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