Princeton professor Peter W. Singer visited AU yesterday to sign copies of his new book, "Children at War," which looks at the international problem of forced military conscription facing children of all ages and both genders.
More than 3,000 children are active in warfare worldwide, along with 500,000 children in armies but not fighting in hot wars, Singer said. Sixty percent of non-state armed forces in the world use child soldiers.
The book "isn't the most cheerful," but the problem is bigger than most people think, Singer said.
Thirty percent of these groups also use girls in warfare, who are especially vulnerable to sexual abuses. Many groups justify the use of girls by claiming to "help women's liberation," Singer said. "We've let them get away with it."
There are 250 million homeless children and 25 million child refugees, according to Singer. These figures do not include orphans or "street kids and children in gangs." Many children are orphaned as a result of AIDS.
U.S. armed forces are facing child soldiers more often as battle transforms from traditional warfare into guerilla-style and non-state fighting. A 15-year-old sniper killed the first American soldier in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack, according to Singer.
"The context of war has changed: It's men, it's women, it's children," Singer said, adding that the causes are rarely political, but social, religious and economic.
The youngest known child soldier was a 5-year-old in Uganda, he said.
Requests for non-lethal weapons have not been significantly addressed because these weapons are not profitable for businesses. Sixty sets exist in the United States for use by the military, and six are currently available in Iraq.
A number of students in the Washington Semester foreign policy program studying human rights issues under professor Beverly Peters were present for Singer's presentation, which included a speech, and a slideshow of sobering facts, pictures and statistics, along with a brief overview of his book.
Singer conducted a question-and-answer session and signed books after the 5 p.m. speech in the campus store in Mary Graydon Center.
Singer is a Brookings Institution scholar and a senior fellow of Foreign Policy studies. He is also the director of the Project on U.S. Policy Toward the Islamic World for Brookings, a Washington think-tank.
