They Taught the Child How to Kill His Mother
In Liberia, during the civil war, warlords understood something terrible: a child who remembers home is dangerous to the group. So they erased home first. If you want loyalty, make return impossible.
‘‘ The first thing I saw when I was thrown in the filthy room, was blood everywhere on the floor. To my horror, I saw a woman, hanging from the ceiling, with a large hook suspending her from the chest. She was dead. They made me stay in the room for 3 hours, to show me what happened when I did not obey.’’
This is the narration of a 13 year old girl during the Liberian civil war.
The first lesson was not how to shoot. It was how to stop crying. Some boys were forced to watch their parents beaten.
Others were ordered to pull the trigger themselves.
This is the reality of child soldiers in Africa, not as statistics, but as lived terror.
Becoming a Child Soldier: The Moment Childhood Dies
Recruitment rarely begins with ideology. It begins with fear.
In Liberia, rebel factions like Charles Taylor’s forces raided villages at night. Boys were dragged away screaming. Girls followed, some carrying younger siblings, some still holding cooking pots.
In Nigeria, Boko Haram arrived differently. Sometimes with guns. Sometimes with sermons. Sometimes with promises of food. In places where the state had vanished, the armed group became the only authority left.
Once taken, the rules changed immediately.
Names were stripped. Clothes were burned. Hair was shaved.
And then came initiation.
Initiation: Killing as a Point of No Return
In Liberia, former child soldiers have described initiation rituals where boys were ordered to kill someone they knew; a neighbor, a village elder, sometimes a parent.
One survivor recalled being handed a gun and told:
“If you don’t do it, we will kill you and your family.”
This was not random cruelty. It was strategy.
A child who kills his own mother cannot go home.
A child who kills his father has no past left to return to.
From that moment, the armed group becomes the only family left.
Drugs: Turning Fear Into Obedience
Before battle, boys were given drugs.
In Liberia, it was a mixture of alcohol, cocaine, and gunpowder rubbed into cuts on the skin. In Nigeria, stimulants and pills were common; anything that numbed fear and sharpened aggression.
Children were taught that pain was weakness.
That mercy was betrayal.
That killing was survival.
A twelve-year-old high on drugs does not hesitate the way an adult does. That is precisely why they are used.
Girls: Sexual Slavery Disguised as “Marriage”
For girls, the gun is only part of the violence.
In Liberia, girls as young as ten were assigned to commanders as “wives.” Refusal meant brutal beating. Escape meant death. Pregnancy meant abandonment.
In Boko Haram-controlled areas of Nigeria, kidnapped girls were forced into marriages with fighters where they were raped repeatedly, beaten for resisting, punished for crying.
Some were forced to watch executions to “teach obedience.”
Others were traded between fighters like property.
When they became pregnant, they were no longer children, but not accepted as women either. They existed in between—used, then discarded.
This is sexual slavery. The word “wife” is a lie meant to soften it.
Violence Becomes Routine
After initiation, violence becomes daily life.
Children guard checkpoints.
They raid villages.
They burn homes that look like their own.
Boys who hesitate are beaten or killed as examples. Girls who resist are raped again. Fear becomes background noise.
A former Liberian child soldier once said:
“After a while, killing felt like nothing. That’s what scared me later.”
The War Ends. The Trauma Does Not.
When conflicts fade from the news, child soldiers are “demobilized.”
This word suggests relief. In reality, it is another shock.
The gun is taken away.
The drugs stop.
The commands end.
And suddenly, the memories arrive.
Nightmares of screaming parents.
Flashbacks triggered by loud sounds.
Rage with nowhere to go.
This is post-traumatic stress disorder, untreated and unnamed.
Many former child soldiers cannot sleep without reliving what they did, or what was done to them.
Going Home: Rejected by the Living
Reintegration is often the cruelest phase.
Communities remember what the children were forced to do. They see killers, not victims.
In Liberia, former child soldiers were chased away from villages. In Nigeria, girls returning from Boko Haram captivity were rejected as “terrorists” or “damaged.”
Families fear them.
Neighbors avoid them.
Employers refuse them.
Without school, without skills, without support, many drift back toward violence, not because they want to, but because it is the only life they know.
Justice That Never Comes
International law exists on paper, but for child soldiers it rarely exists on the battlefield. Treaties ban their recruitment, conventions declare their protection, courts label the practice a war crime, yet in conflict after conflict, children are still taken, armed, raped, drugged, and discarded. The problem is not that the law is unclear; it is that it is weakly enforced, easily ignored, and politically inconvenient. Warlords sign peace agreements and are absorbed into governments. Militias are rebranded as “security forces.” Accountability is postponed in the name of stability, and justice is traded for silence. International outrage flares briefly, then fades, while conflicts drag on and children continue to be recruited with near-total impunity. For a child in a war zone, international law offers no shield, no rescue, no consequences for those who violate it; only distant promises written in languages they will never read.
The child lives with guilt forever.
The adult who ordered it walks free.
Conclusion for Understanding
Child soldiers are not monsters.
They are children trapped inside impossible choices, shaped by fear, drugs, violence, and coercion. When you see a former child soldier struggling to function, you are seeing the aftermath of crimes committed against them.
This is not African barbarism.
It is what happens when war is allowed to eat childhood.
These things are done to children, not by them.
And until the world stops treating child soldiers as footnotes instead of emergencies, the cycle will continue; quietly, brutally, and out of sight.
