I am both an anthropologist and a practitioner of humanitarian child protection, currently researching the way humanitarian child protection addresses the recruitment and use of children by armed forces and armed groups. I spent nearly twenty years in the field before returning to university to ‘think my profession’ from a critical point of view. This position puts me right in the middle of the tension between academic know-it-alls and humanitarian do-gooders. It also allows me, I hope, to have a different, more nuanced, and informed insight regarding humanitarian action.
From my position as a practitioner/researcher, I have deployed the approach used in the field of anthropology of human rights practice to research this topic in two different ways. First, I explored documents produced by humanitarian child protection actors operating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1996 and 2012. My goal was to analyse the ways child soldiers were portrayed and how this portrayal had influenced the design and implementation of humanitarian programmes aiming to protect them. This research revealed the way in which assumptions about morality can end up consecrating ‘the child’ as uniquely and universally vulnerable, thereby triggering a humanitarian imperative to save the children.
Programmes designed solely on the idea of victimhood are ineffective in supporting child soldiers’ return to civilian life.
Additional layers are invested in the category of ‘child soldier,’ which connects innocence with barbarism to create something that is morally intolerable. This transforms potentially violent children into victims to protect, and directs our attention to their suffering instead of their responsibility. Such portrayals, even when created for good reasons, are often at odds with local understandings of the phenomenon. They contradict the high level of agency and decision-making capacity that these children have demonstrated. As a result, the programmes designed solely on the idea of victimhood are, are least in part, ineffective in supporting these children’s return to civilian life.
