**8. Reflexions from this experience**

#### **8.1 Who are the Ivoirian children soldiers? 8.1.1 They are boys and girls also**

Most of them were boys (60.3%). Girls made up 39.7%. The children revealed the presence of girls among the child soldiers. The girls were used as cooks (20%), fighters (5.22%), dish and clothes washers (3.19%), security guards (2.32%) and porters (2.03%).

The number of girls used for sexual purposes was not specified. It is difficult to establish a ratio between the numbers of girls out of a total size of children present with the armed groups. In some countries, girls represent up to 40% of the child soldiers, like, for example, within the *Tigres de Liberation de l'Eeclam in Shri Lanka.* Those children are also brought to carry a number of functions as we have seen (Huyghebaert, 2009; Ayissi& Maia, 2004). Girls play different roles on the same day*;* they are fighters, cooks, messengers, spies, nurses, sexual slaves, even *"*captive wives*"*, as it was the case of a young girl we met at *Ké-bouébo.* 

War in Côte d'Ivoire and Management of Child's Post Traumatic Stress Disorders 175

the adults, while if their engagement is "voluntary", it comes from a desperate strategy for survival. To boot, when the war gets stuck and decimates whole families, a number of children become orphans, with no perspective of subsistence than joining the armed groups where to bear a weapon will give them the feeling of existing and to be protected. If it is true that those children are the real victims, Jézéquel (2006), cites researchers like Paul Richards, who, while denouncing the violence on children during the war, shows that children are the real actors capable of displaying their own tactics in a field of constraints imposed by war

The war attacks children and destroys them as Bertrand (1997) puts it; those who survive will carry almost irreversible marks. Even if this argument carries a rather violent character,

The war generates psychic wounds with which children are doomed to live with because they are part of their history. Those "invisible wounds" are visible, identifiable, through their own expressions in children's behavior and through their relation to others and to the

The encounter with those child soldiers was followed by a direct contact with an important psychic pain. This psychic pain is different from psychic suffering. Citing Ferenczi, Bertrand (1997)recalls that this pain may have extremely serious effects; destroyers of the individual. The risk may be the sudden decomposition under the form of a delirium or traumatic cleavage, but also as depression, somatizations, and disabling chronic pains with no detectable lesions. The idea of the existence of this pain in the children's psyche could explain the various clinical charts that we mentioned. Anguish and pain are limits to experiences, at the border of our being; limit of both the possibility of existence and of the

With those children, this brutal and raw pain, assimilated with difficulty because the trauma could not possibly be comprehended by their young minds, and therefore still carried (even after a period of four years) of its emotional impact, was palpable at the beginning of our fieldwork. Is it not an important obstacle to the possibility of being fully human for those children? For Tomkiewicz (1997), psychic disturbance could be the must link between

Around 56% of the children had seen a man killed under their own eyes. Dapic & Coll (2002) have studied this parameter with primary school children (Grade 5) victims of the Bosnia-Herzegovina war, in a Sarajevo district. 90.7% of them had seen war wounded and

Among our sample, before the "show" of execution of a person, some were said to be abreactive (8.41%), scared (25.51%), and shattered (9.27%); other emotions had been

The issue of social support in the course of events was also brought forward. Most of the time, the children had accompanied someone they knew into the war (36.52%) and 26.38% said that they had followed a parent. Others have certainly experienced solitude, but few talked about it. On this subject, Tomkiewicz (1997) explains that solitude may be considered as an aggression, because it engenders or increases suffering. It pervades children when they have lost their families, their bearings, their friends and their dearest around them;

dynamics.

outside world.

**8.2 Ravaged lives in a ravaged region 8.2.1 Pain or psychic suffering?** 

it is however the sad reality.

possibility of subjectivities.

74.3% had seen a dying man.

traumatic stress and its psychological consequences.

described as joy (4.93%), pity (2.32%), revolt (1.45%). 3.78% said to have been traumatized.

In some countries, according to Ayissi & Maia (2004), women fighters are also used as suicide bombers and in delicate tasks like the security guards of warlords or in spy missions and infiltrations of enemy troops because of their efficiency and fidelity to "their" men. The same authors argue that, even if boys are not saved from these troubles, it is girls and teenagers who pay a heavy cost in rape and sexual abuse. Those abuses are followed by serious physical injuries, sometimes painful and disabling, as a result of unplanned pregnancies followed by high-risk abortions. This corroborates the data on the sexual violence that we were talking about.

Be they victims of the barbarism of fate, those young girls and all the children in general, remain profoundly traumatized both physically and psychologically through the hardships that they endured in their early age.

Most children that we saw were aged between 5 and 15 years (58.2%). In countries like Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone or Liberia, child soldiers were enrolled between 7 to 18 years of age?(Baingana&Bannon, 2004). Though Huyghebaert( 2009), citing an ILO publication (2006) concerning the child soldiers' enrollment age, places the age of teenagers at15 or more at the time of their enrolment, the young boy enrolment at 7 to 8 years tends to become more and more frequent.

The children that were the object of our study found themselves in a situation of war at an age when education was an important element of life, at a period of great psychological vulnerability when a human being is growing, where the child is socializing and where he develops psychologically. In that part of the country, sending children to school is difficult on the one hand because of lack of classrooms, and on the other hand because of the general poverty levels of the populations. The conflict has played a role in this context, leading thus to mass removals from schools (60.50%). One of the NGO addressed this problem by introducing literacy classes and a strategy of school resumption by providing school equipment and by helping families in sending back children to school, either in the village or in the nearby town. Children who returned to school had good results. That situation in *Guiglo* is different from what is seen in general as underlined by Tomkiewiez (1997) who cites extreme difficulties in having the Ugandan civil war children back to school.

#### **8.1.2 Did they take or were they given arms?**

Some of those children from *Ké-bouébo* were recruited, or enrolled forcibly. Only 17.68% handled or manipulated weapons. The use of non-combatant children mirrors our case like in many other countries as evidenced by Mouzayan (2003), for whom those children were enrolled for dangerous and alienating activities (fights, chores, spying, messengers, and sexual slaves). Whatever children are involved directly or indirectly in they are in danger (Anwo, 2009). Many reasons motivated those children of *Moyen-Cavally*. They put it bluntly that revenge was the N° 1 motive (13.91%) though as Honwana (2006), argues, in some conflicts, a variety of reasons, including coercion, poverty, or sheer violence turns young men into assassins before they are able to understand the complexities of morality. As seen on the field, all the children were not enrolled by force, or by constraint. In fact, some became "willing" members of a gang or an armed force to protect their family or themselves, changing thus their status: from children who must be protected by parents, they become those on who lies the survival of the family. For others whose family members became victims of the conflicts a desire for revenge (Huyghebaert, 2009) motivated them to take up arms as we found it. For Ayissi& Maia (2004), children are above all vulnerable physically, mentally and emotionally, and therefore more docile and more malleable than the adults, while if their engagement is "voluntary", it comes from a desperate strategy for survival. To boot, when the war gets stuck and decimates whole families, a number of children become orphans, with no perspective of subsistence than joining the armed groups where to bear a weapon will give them the feeling of existing and to be protected. If it is true that those children are the real victims, Jézéquel (2006), cites researchers like Paul Richards, who, while denouncing the violence on children during the war, shows that children are the real actors capable of displaying their own tactics in a field of constraints imposed by war dynamics.
