UGANDA: Ugandan Child Mothers Forced to Give Birth in Captivity

More and more people are becoming aware of the plight of child soldiers through the books (often memoirs) and films (often documentaries) that have hit the market in the past few years. Particularly in Africa, boys are recruited to fight in civil conflicts, so young they can barely carry the guns they are issued. But while boys are taken as soldiers in these wars, girls are often affected too, taken as wives and forced to live in sexual slavery and bear children from the moment they are able.

In a feature reminiscent of some the stories told in the film Invisible Children, Canadian journalist Darcy Wintonyk recently wrote about her time in Uganda, where she profiled a number of young women and generally found the situation to be horrifyingly bad, if not intolerable, for the girls and women in the midst of war.

In the Uganda Wintonyk encountered, girls are kidnapped from their villages and used as pawns in the rebel Lord's Resistance Army's battles against the Ugandan Army. The LRA, denounced as a terrorist organization in the United States, is largely responsible for the last 20-plus years of conflict in northern Uganda, and while reports about human rights violations in the nation have improved since the 1980s, the LRA continues to possess a stronghold and terrorize the country's youngest civilians. Prepubescent girls are abducted and held until their first period, at which time soldiers begin raping them until they inevitably conceive. It isn't uncommon for girls as young as 16 and 17 to already have two children. A number of them — mothers and children — die during childbirth.

Eventually, the child mothers are let go, but their nightmare doesn't even begin to end. Many young women face being ostracized when they return home, shunned for allowing themselves to be kidnapped and blamed for what happened to them while in captivity. Often, they're likely to fall into a cycle of poverty because of their outcast status. Few have had any opportunity to attend school or learn basic skills beyond what was demanded by their captors. And obvious though sometimes overlooked, these young women are also often forced into the role of a single mother. If they do find new partners, their children from rebel fathers are often rejected by the new husbands. The level of trauma caused by a variety of factors seems simply unbearable: utter heartbreak, isolation, poverty, a lack of trust, and health issues including HIV/AIDS are only a few of the ways these women continue to suffer long after they've been "set free."

Child marriage is always an issue, from fundamentalist sects stateside to child trafficking in Afghanistan, but it's a particular concern when used as a weapon of war. Remind Congress that child marriage is a multi-dimensional issue and urge them to fight against this practice. Children are not weapons of war, and girls deserve far better than starting life as sexual slaves in a destructive rebel army. In a world where civil conflicts often present dilemmas in gray ethical areas, this is a black and white issue.