Brainwashing and radicalization don’t explain why young people join violent causes

The push to end the recruitment of under-18s for military action has spawned academic studies, human rights reports, advocacy campaigns and measures adopted by the United Nations, including an Optional Protocol added to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that raised the minimum age of involvement in combat from 15 to 18. And yet, these initiatives have rarely paid serious attention to the reasons why the young might engage in military action. The underlying assumption, as usual, is that this is generally the result of some kind of coercion.

While horrific cases of kidnapping and intimidation undeniably continue to occur, detailed investigation of specific settings and even accounts from former underage soldiers reveal a more complex reality. Around the world, young people join military groups or engage in less organized political violence with diverse motives; they act out of self-defense, a sense of justice and revenge, or support for “community” — construed at local, national or transnational level.

Double standards
This unwillingness to seriously consider why children might engage in armed hostilities is a relatively recent phenomenon. It is also liable to come into play more particularly when the minors concerned fight for causes we deem objectionable.

A century ago, the estimated 250,000 boys who volunteered to fight for the British Army were hailed by newspaper editors and political leaders as heroes and patriots, not dupes or truants. The role of black South African schoolchildren in the struggle against Apartheid was scarcely pathologized or belittled.

The fact is that in a great many societies, teenagers under the age of 18 are still considered capable of reasoned choice about enlistment and involvement in political violence. But elsewhere, the assumption of incapacity offers former combatants deemed “children” a shield from the punishment meted out to their “adult” comrades and seniors.

Arguing instead that a 15 or 16-year-old is able to make a reasoned choice about engagement in hostilities risks exposing that young person to the full force of the law. On the other hand, using loose, inadequate concepts such as brainwashing and radicalization to explain young people’s engagement in political violence carries its own risks. It severely limits our ability to understand why young people are mobilized in support of a group such as Islamic State, and hinders intelligent debate about the wider changes needed to prevent them doing so. Moreover our efforts to reintegrate them once they come back are likely to prove desperately inadequate.

— Read more in Jason Hart, “The Politics of ‘Child Soldiers’,” Brown Journal of World Affairs 13, no. 1 (Fall-Winter 2006); Matthew Francis, “If you could really ‘brainwash’ young Muslims, ISIS would have a lot more British recruits,” The Conversation (30 June 2014); and Yvan Guichaoua, Understanding Collective Political Violence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

Jason Hart is Senior Lecturer in International Development at University of Bath. This story is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons-Attribution/No derivatives).