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How Child Soldiers Fare in Peace
May/June 2009
by Emily Anthes '05
For
nearly two decades, a guerrilla war has simmered in northern Uganda. The rebel
Lord’s Resistance Army, unpopular and undermanned, filled out its ranks by
forcibly recruiting young males. Between 1995 and 2004, at least 60,000 Ugandan
youth were abducted by the LRA. About 80 percent of them eventually returned
home, and most of these former child soldiers suffered both economically and
socially. But recent Yale research has also uncovered one surprisingly positive
psychological consequence. In a forthcoming study in the Review of Economics
and Statistics, political scientist Christopher Blattman and psychologist Jeannie Annan report
that witnessing war violence may have led the abducted youths to become more
politically engaged.
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War violence may make victims more politically engaged.
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The findings
are part of the first phase of the Survey of War-Affected Youth, a continuing
study of the social, economic, psychological, and other effects of war violence
in Uganda. Blattman and Annan studied 741 northern Ugandan males between the
ages of 14 and 30; 462 of them were former abductees of the LRA. The
researchers discovered that boys who had been abducted were more politically
involved, in a positive way, after returning home. "The formerly abducted youth
were a quarter to a third more likely to vote than their non-abducted peers,"
Blattman says. "Even more surprisingly, they were more than twice as likely to
be community leaders.”
When
the researchers further teased apart the data, they determined that the biggest
predictor of increased political participation among the abducted youth was
violence. Each act of violence an abductee witnessed increased his probability
of voting by 4.2 percent and his likelihood of being a community leader by 2.3
percent.
The
most likely explanation, Blattman says, harks back to an "almost old-fashioned
theory of voting. Some people vote, and are more likely to participate as
leaders, because they just inherently value it more." The lesson, he says, is
that trauma can sometimes create personal growth. "We went in with a hypothesis
based on the conventional wisdom, which is that children are fragile and war
violence cannot help but be destructive," Blattman says. "Some people do come
out damaged, but it’s not everyone. Some people are actually empowered.”  |
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