pbi said:
I think this sums it up very well. The child soldiers that we talk about are forced into service, treated like slaves, and generally have no say over their own affairs. They cannot voluntarily leave the service they are in.
The most common practice being to go into a village and kill the adults. The children then have the option of joining, or starving to death. Once in, militias use a number of tactics to keep their young fighters from leaving. In Sierra Leone and Liberia, they would get them addicted to drugs, and thus, as the only source of the children's drug supply, keep them from leaving. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, they would hold the families hostage, telling their young recruits that if they left, their families would die.
A 17 year old Canadian reservist is a completely different case. You cannot join without your parents' permission, you will not be required to serve (short of a general mobilization which has not happened in Canada since WWII), you cannot even be forced to attend training at your Res unit, and you can leave pretty well any time you feel like it. You will not go overseas until well after your 18th birthday, since it would take at least that long in the Res for you to reach a training level at which a right-minded CO would permit you to go overseas.
Very well put. The two cases aren't even remotely comparable. The problem that I see is that the legal age of majority and the point at which each person becomes mature enough to carry out military duties aren't necessarily the same. Most research shows that humans don't fully mature psychologically and socially until into their early 20s, so from a psychologist's perspective, they would still be children, although they're legally adults. So, at what point does a person become an adult? Legally, it's the age of 18, 19 or 21, depending on the situation. So technically, someone who joins the reserves at 17 (like I did) is a child soldier. However, the Canadian Army I believe provides enough structure and training for younger recruits to be able to adapt to military life and understand the implications of their choice before being required to deploy. And as an added safety net, they have to have parental consent. Their parents certainly understand what the Army does, and if they consent to letting their child join, they should (in theory) be effectively telling the Army, "My son / daughter is mature enough to perform their duties." I personally feel that there should be parental consent required until somewhere in the neighbourhood of 21 - simply because everybody develops at a different rate, and the parents are normally more in tune with their children's level of maturity than anybody else. But as far as the problem of child soldiers is concerned, and the movement to demobilise them, Canada's 17 year-old reservists don't even show up on the radar, as far as I'm concerned. I'd rather see more concentrated efforts on demobilising the 10 year-olds in Sierra Leone. Let's take care of the big problems first, and then worry about splitting hairs over the age of majority.
When I read over the dialogue with the teacher and fellow students, I don't think that it's ignorance, so much as oppertunism and happenstance. Simply put, it's easier to target 17 year-olds joining the reserves here than it is to do something about getting Kalashnikovs out of the hands of those seven years younger in Liberia (oppertunism). And you happened to be a 17 year-old reservist who was there when the video was shown (happenstance). Had you not been there, or over 18, I doubt that the question would have even been raised, but since you were, they looked over and saw someone who wasn't a legal adult yet, but who was in the Army. So if they continue to dog you over it, ask them what they're doing to help demobilise the tens of thousands of pre-adolescant children who are fighting in 21 of the world's ongoing conflicts right now. And if the answer equals less effort than they're expending to hassle you, then their priorities are out of line. And if they want to pursue it, send them to me - I've done my homework, and I'll sort them out.