Child Recruitment to Illegal Armed Groups in Colombia: Peacebuilding and Development Challenges

Abstract

Over 12,000 children have disengaged from illegal armed groups in Colombia since 2003, and more will disengage when the conflict ends. The drivers behind child recruitment are complex. Recent literature highlights the need for two areas of peacebuilding and development work to address child recruitment in conflict-affected areas of Colombia: stronger state presence, and development initiatives tackling factors contributing to child recruitment, such as poverty and education. This article aims to answer the following questions: What factors have driven child recruitment in Colombia? How do development issues such as poverty, education, and domestic violence manifest themselves and interact with child recruitment, and how could efforts to resolve them coincide with increased state presence in areas where recruitment frequently occurs? The article uses interviews with ex-combatants to examine factors that have driven child recruitment in Colombia to highlight development and peacebuilding issues that the state should prioritise, and suggests possible solutions.

Keywords::

• Colombia
• child soldiers
• conflict
• peacebuilding
• development
• state-building

Notes

¹ These estimates are uncertain. The 12,000 children mentioned disengaged and went through at least one institutional process for their names to be registered — there are likely other children who disengage and go home, but there is not enough information about them to estimate their numbers. In addition, official numbers of disengaged and demobilised people can have political uses and their reporting may be biased.

² The term ‘BACRIM’ comes from the Spanish bandas criminals meaning ‘criminal groups’. Its use began during President Alvaro Uribe's administration, and refers to groups that splintered off from the paramilitaries who demobilised between 2003 and 2006. BACRIM are not officially part of the Colombian conflict, although reparations laws have recently been applied to their victims. They have a significant affect on levels of violence in some regions. BACRIM will be included as an IAG in this article, unless otherwise indicated.

³ The interviews were conducted under Agreement No. 856 of 2011 between Fundacion Ideas para la Paz and the Colombian Reintegration Agency (ACR), for the project 'Prevention of Recruitment and Use of Boys, Girls, Young People, and Adolescents' executed by those entities. The interviews were semi-structured and their objectives were to: understand family situation before recruitment; elucidate factors behind recruitment; clarify participants' IAG experiences; and gain feedback about interviewees' perceptions of their reintegration. The data was used internally in the ACR and FIP until it was made available to the author, who thanks both entities for making the interviews available.

⁴ As these people joined the IAGs as minors, they are considered victims of forced recruitment in accordance with most literature on the topic, although many say they made a decision to join the IAG.

⁵ They were recruited in 17 Colombian departments, with a concentration in Caquetá (four FARC recruits), Boyacá (five FARC recruits, one paramilitary), Casanaré (two FARC, two paramilitary), and Meta (three FARC, two paramilitary). When they joined, they were between eight and 17 years old, and when they demobilised they were between 13 and 30.

⁶ While response bias may be an issue in questions about what types of crime the respondents committed, the author considers it low with respect to answers about respondents' living situation before recruitment. Therefore, steps were not taken to mitigate response bias.

⁷ Qualitative and quantitative work has been conducted on the collective demobilisation of the AUC between 2003 and 2006. However, rather than the child soldiers being incorporated into institutionalised reintegration processes, they were sent home. One of the main lessons learned here is that the children leaving IAGs in collective demobilisations must be included in institutionalised DDR processes to prevent their recidivism in other criminal groups, as anecdotal evidence indicates occurred with many juvenile ex-paramilitary members. Given that the children who demobilised collectively were sent home, and only a few demobilised individually and went through institutional reintegration process, there is little reliable information about what happened to them, so other lessons learned are less conclusive.

⁸ Violence affecting children in Colombia is widespread in the home and public contexts. Phenomena like child trafficking and abandonment interact with child recruitment, and broad strategies to address all violence against children should take these different manifestations into account. However, discussions of domestic violence and child recruitment in the broader context of strategies to prevent all violence against children in Colombia are outside the scope of this article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cristal Downing

CRISTAL DOWNING has an MA in Latin American and Caribbean studies from New York University and an MSc in political science from the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. Her research and practice focus on social policy, conflict, and development in the Andean region.