Dominic Ongwen is the first LRA commander to be found guilty of war crimes committed in Northern Uganda.
Isaac Kasamani/AFP via Getty Images
Ongwen’s case ends the blanket amnesty that African courts have always granted ex-child abductees over war crimes
Forced laborers lived in prison cells at one palm oil plantation in Indonesia.
Kiki Cahyadi/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Global estimates of modern-day slavery by the United Nations reveal improving methods for calculating the data.
The use of child soldiers often prolong wars.
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In many conflict areas, children are especially susceptible to the effects of war. And using them as soldiers prolongs the conflict.
Dominic Ongwen enters the court room of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, on December 6, 2016.
Photo by Peter Dejong/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
Former fighters described Ongwen as a model fighter and an effective commander – but testimony in his trial detailed the former child soldier’s alleged personal role in the rape of underage women.
‘Night commuter’ girls in Gulu, norhern Uganda in 2006. The girls walk into the city after dark to evade capture by the Lords Resistance Army.
EPA/Kim Ludbrook
Their mothers were forcibly married or raped during Uganda’s vicious civil war. Now these children are ‘non people’.
Former child soldiers need more than mainstream education and vocational training.
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The skills that former child soldiers gain in wartime can be useful as they reintegrate into society.
Tom Evans/MOD.
In the UK, it’s possible to join the army as a soldier at the age of 16, with parental permission. Is it right?
Women and children, reportedly the family of Islamic State fighters, at the Roj refugee camp in Hasakah, Syria in late February.
Murtaja Lateef/EPA
With more cases of women such as Shamima Begum expected, the UK is under legal obligations to protect the rights of any children involved.
Many have been displaced by violence in the Central African Republic.
EPA/Stringer
The volatile conditions in the Central African Republic make the administration of justice difficult.
Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir at the 2015 AU Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa.
EPA/Kim Ludbrook
Given the range of support for President Omar al-Bashir it isn’t surprising that he’s managed to resist pressure to step down.
The opportunity of getting an education is key to reintegration.
UNMISS/Flickr
For the thousands of children who have left armed groups, education is crucial to their reintegration.
There is a fundamental difference between Islamic State’s use of child soldiers and the practice elsewhere.
Al Arabiya/YouTube
Islamic State systematically militarised the education systems of captured Iraqi and Syrian territory to turn the region’s children into ideological timebombs.
Thousands of schools have been targeted and destroyed as part of the Syrian conflict.
Abed Kontar/EPA
Schools and students are often targeted during times of armed conflict. Abducted children can be recruited as soldiers and schools are ideal locations for military headquarters.
Child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
EPA/Nicolas Postal
Whether as soldiers, suicide bombers or human shields, children are an increasingly common sight on the battlefield.
Children used as pawns in conflict.
Yahya Arhab/EPA
Child victims are used to justify the cause, while young soldiers further it.
EPA
Even ‘madmen’ have their motives for fighting.
Iraqi security forces detain a boy after removing a suicide vest from him in Kirkuk, Iraq.
REUTERS/Ako Rasheed
A young boy is strapped with explosives and sent to detonate himself and those around him at a school. An expert on terrorism explains how and why children become embroiled in militant conflicts.
A young Chibok schoolgirl rescued two years after being abducted by Boko Haram in Nigeria.
EAP/Nigerian Military
Abduction, sexual violence, early marriage: a few of the choices facing adolescent girls who ought instead to be in school.
Safiya Hussien, the mother of missing 15-year-old schoolgirl Yusra Hussien, urges her daughter to come home.
Ben Birchall/PA
On the morning of September 24 2014, 15-year-old Yusra Hussien left for school near her home in Easton, Bristol. She then disappeared. News reports surfaced a few days later that Yusra and a 17-year-old…
A former child soldier following his rescue from the LRA.
Inmediahk
The government of the Central African Republic claims to be in talks with one of the world’s most enigmatic African guerrilla leaders, Joseph Kony. But Kony has entered talks before with no intention of…