War-driven child abuse.

I read an article, recently, regarding child-soldiers. I know this is nothing new, by far, but it always stuns me. Children are remarkably resilient and can adapt to much more than an adult. Why this is, I am not certain, but in a sick, off-hand sense I beleive I could begin to understand. I do not beleive in using children for our resistance movement, and even when some volunteered, I turned them away. A child should not know the horrors of combat, in any sense, but there is a vast difference between seeing combat from afar, in the security of a shelter, and seeing them as they occur, to you and to your brothers-in-arms, forcing you to respond in kind.

This article centered around China Keitetsi, an Ugandan runaway at the age of eight, who survived as a soldier for several years before fleeing and applying for refugee status in South Africa. During that time she was abused, assaulted, and otherwise abused, on many occasions. A quote struck something within me: "The most difficult things to live with today are the ones I did on my own, because after being abused you carried this rage in you, and you wanted to give it on to someone because it was killing you inside. So what I did was torture the captured enemy, really put my whole rage on them without thinking ... and I wanted to prove to the boys that I was not just a special ration."

Her book has not been released in America yet, but I would like to read it, one day: Child Soldier: Fighting for My Life