Selective Outrage: The Dangers of Children's DDR in Eastern DRC

This article offers a critique of the dominant approach to children’s disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Drawing on narratives of young people who were formerly associated with armed groups, the article highlights some of the mistaken assumptions of the discourse and practice of children’s DDR, and shows how far removed they are from young people’s actual experience. I argue that the global outrage against the “child recruitment” phenomenon is dangerously selective, and that it obscures the entrenched structural violence, which deeply and negatively affects the lives of young people in eastern DRC today. Since the mid-1990s, the use and recruitment of children by armed groups is an issue that has dominated international discourse on children’s experience of violent conflict. From the 1996 report by Graça Machel on the impact of conflict on children,1 to the 1998 adoption of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Rome Statute) codifying the use and recruitment of children under the age of 15 years as a war crime, to the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict (OPAC), adopted in 2000, global attention has mobilized forcefully behind the “child soldier” phenomenon Readmore