Samuel’s nightmares and secrets are echoed throughout the world, as an estimated 250,000 children and adolescents are exploited as soldiers. According to a study by the Society for Research in Child Development, Inc., about half of those children are in Africa. During a civil war in Uganda that lasted nearly two decades, 25,000 children (under age 18) were abducted by the rebel forces of the LRA and forced to take part in combat and other aspects of conflict (Go to “The war” section of this website for a timeline and summary of the war).

Despite the trauma they have been through, child soldiers must reintegrate and strive to be productive members of society once they return to the homes they were once forced to leave. How does a society cope when children who have been repeatedly traumatized return?

Traditional western approaches to childhood and trauma may not be the answer. Some believe these current methodsdonotalwaysprovehelpfulinthe reintegration and survival of the children.

In many studies done by western psychologists, former child soldiers were interviewed and diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, which was originally diagnosed in United States war veterans.

Studies that seek to find the presence of PTSD tend to ask former child soldiers to remember specific traumatic experiences and report the findings in the form of statistics. For instance, an article in the Lancet in 2004 reports that 77 percent of their subjects saw someone killed and 39 percent killed someone themselves.

These statistics accumulate and lead to more statistics that tell researchers the prevalence of PTSD in a given sample of former child soldiers.

But some question the methods of gathering the data necessary to diagnose PTSD. Malia Robinson is a children’s rights advocate and UNICEF consultant based in Lincoln, Neb. She is currently working with UNICEF to write an operational field book on how to implement the Paris Principles –the set of principles that guide all aspects of child soldier reintegration.

In an interview, Robinson said asking children to recount their traumatic experiences for research purposes can leave the children with secondary trauma and “borders on racism.”