Child Soldiers - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1576874559 ISBN 13: 9781576874554

Publisher: powerHouse Books, 2008

Synopsis

Photographs by: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Lynsey Addario, Martin Adler, Richard Butler, Francesco Cito, Gary Calton, Chris de Bode, Donna De Cesare, Miquel Dewever Plana, Tiane Doan na Champassak, Colin Finlay, Riccardo Gangale, Cedric Gerbehaye, Jan Grarup, Tim A. Hetherington, Rhodri Jones, Bob Koenig, Roger Lemoyne, Zed Nelson, Peter Mantello, Heather McClintock, Olivier Pin Fat, Giacomo Pirozzi, Q. Sakamaki, Marcelo Salinas, Dominic Sansoni, Guy Tillim, Sven Torfinn, Ami Vitale, Vincent van de Wijngaard, Tomas van Houtryve, Kadir van Lohuizen, Alvaro Ybarra-Zavala, Francesco Zizola
Essay by: Jo Becker, Jimmi Briggs, Dick Durbin, Emmanuel Jal, Michael Wessells 

“I would like to give you a message. Please do your best to tell the world what is happening to us, the children, so that other children don’t have to pass through this violence.”
—A 15-year-old girl who escaped from the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda 

Up to half a million children have been engaged in more than 85 conflicts worldwide. As armed conflict proliferates, increasing numbers of children are exposed to the brutalities of war. Boys and girls around the world are recruited to be child soldiers by armed forces and militant groups, either forcibly or voluntarily. Some are tricked into service by manipulative recruiters, others join in order to escape poverty or discrimination, while still others are outright abducted at school, on the streets, and at home. Aside from participating in combat, many are used for sexual purposes, made to lay and clear land mines, or employed as spies, messengers, porters, or servants. Kids have become the ultimate weapons of twenty-first-century war. 

Child Soldiers focuses on countries with a history of child warfare, as captured by photographers and writers from across the globe. The book explores the children’s time as combatants, as well as their demobilization and rehabilitation. Included are Tim Hetherington’s photographs from Liberia; Roger Lemoyne and Cedric Gerbehaye’s work from the Congo; Ami Vitale’s series on child Maoist recruits in Nepal; and other work from Burma, Columbia, the Central African Republic, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and Palestine.

About this title

From the Author:

Children have been used as soldiers in armed conflict for hundreds of years. In the thirteenth century, thousands of children, many of them barely 12 years old, left their homes to march in the Children's Crusade. Sadly, the problem of child combatants is amply evident throughout the world today--and not just in Africa. Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Burma, Palestine, Afghanistan, Uganda, Sierra Leone, and the Congo are all represented in the images in this book.

The contributing photographers are talented visionaries whose work speaks for itself. They have ventured to the remote and dangerous places where child soldiers live in order to bring this story of injustice to the world. Through their images, they have become the messengers of a crime that could otherwise be easily ignored. They invite us to consider realms far removed from our own, ones that we could not bear to see our own children inhabit. These photos are drawn from recent and current conflicts. The children's names have been changed to protect them from reprisals and ostracization.

As Under-Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy stated in her address to the Security Counsel in February 2008, "No one who has looked into the eyes of a child soldier can be at peace unless we rid this world of this scourge. No one who has held the hand of a young girl who has suffered multiple rapes can ever forget their duty to work for the protection of the vulnerable."

While the phenomenon of the child soldier is not new, its contemporary incarnation is especially chilling. The story these images tell is one of children manipulated by war criminals and subjected to unspeakable violence and abuse. Their faces depict the reality of a childhood lost. Instead of the frivolity and joy--or even the defiance and rebellion--of childhood, we see the deadly seriousness of the machinery of death in the hands of teenagers. Who will see past the grim confidence, the bravado, and the swagger to their origination in terrifying abductions and coerced recruitments? Who will look beyond their rifles and remember them as children? Precisely because we think we value childhood more than our forebears in the thirteenth century did, the figure of the child dressed and outfitted

About the Author:

Leora Kahn is the founder of Proof: Media for Social Justice, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to create awareness of the issues faced by populations in post-conflict societies and to encourage social change through the use of photography and education. Kahn has served as the director of photography at Workman Publishing and Corbis, and is currently at work on global projects with Amnesty International, Participant Films, and the United Nations. She recently edited the Lucie Award winningDarfur: Twenty Years of War and Genocide in Sudan (powerHouse Books, 2007) in collaboration with Amnesty, and curated an accompanying exhibit that will tour the U.S. this year with the Holocaust Museum Houston. Kahn is currently working on an exhibition in Rwanda with Aegis Trust about Hutu rescuers during the genocide. 

Child Soldiers features the work of nine prominent photographers, who have covered the use of children in combat around the world. Contributing writers include Jo Becker, Children’s Rights Advocacy Director for Human Rights Watch, Jimmie Briggs, journalist and author of Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go to War (Basic Books, 2005), Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, Luis Moreno- Ocampo, International Criminal Court Prosecutor, Emmanuel Jal, a Sudanese musician and former child soldier, and Michael Wessels, a professor of psychology at Columbia University.

About this edition

• Publisher: powerHouse Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1576874559
• ISBN 13: 9781576874554
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 120
• Editor: Kahn Leora