CHILDREN & SOCIETY VOLUME 26, (2012) pp.

280–292
DOI:10.1111/j.1099-0860.2010.00347.x

Child Soldiers and Iconography: Portrayals

and (Mis)Representations
Myriam Denov
McGill University

Over the past decade, child soldiers have inundated the popular media. Images of boys armed
with AK47s appear ubiquitous, providing a cautionary tale of innocent childhood gone awry.
While these representations turn commonly held assumptions of a protected and innocuous
childhood on its head, what they conceal is as provocative as what they reveal. Popular news
media tells us little about the children behind the guns or the complexity of their wartime and
post-war experiences. Attempting to move beyond the narrow depictions, this paper explores
the realities of a cohort of child soldiers in Sierra Leone and their experiences of armed con-
flict. Drawing upon in-depth interviews conducted over a two-year period, children’s experi-
ences defy the limiting portrayals offered by media discourse. While these children are
frequently constructed through a framework of extremes (as either extreme victims, extreme
perpetrators or extreme heroes), in reality, the lives of these children fall within the grey,
ambiguous and paradoxical zones of each.  2010 The Author(s). Children & Society  2010
National Children’s Bureau and Blackwell Publishing Limited.

Keywords: child soldiers, international childhoods, representations, Sierra Leone.

Introduction: the contemporary reality of child soldiers

Violence and armed conflict are commonplace in the everyday lives of many of the world’s
children. In countries around the globe, children have been first-hand victims and witnesses
of war, and the atrocities that invariably accompany armed aggression. In addition, children
continue to be drawn into conflict as active participants. A child soldier is defined as:

Any person below 18 years of age who is or who has been recruited or used by an armed force or
armed group in any capacity, including but not limited to children, boys and girls, used as fighters,
cooks, porters, messengers, spies or for sexual purposes. It does not only refer to a child who is tak-
ing or has taken a direct part in hostilities (Paris Principles, 2007, p. 7).

Between April 2004 and October 2007, children were associated with armed groups and
forces in 19 countries or territories, representing hundreds of thousands of children (Coalition
to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, 2008).

Over the past decade, child soldiers have inundated the popular western media. Whether
adorning the pages of magazines or newspapers, or flashing briefly before us in news reports,
images of boys armed with AK47s appear ubiquitous, providing a cautionary tale of innocent
childhood gone awry (Macmillan, 2009; Rosen, 2005). While these representations turn com-
monly held assumptions of a protected and innocuous childhood on its head, what they con-
ceal is as provocative as what they reveal. Popular news media tells us little about the
children behind the guns or the complexity of their wartime and post-war experiences. In

 2010 The Author(s)

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 Child Soldiers and Iconography 281

the shadows of powerful photographs and accompanying figurative language lie profound
silences and empty spaces.

Attempting to move beyond the narrow depictions, this paper explores the realities of a
cohort of child soldiers in Sierra Leone and their experiences of armed conflict. While these
children are frequently constructed within a framework of extremes (as either extreme vic-
tims, extreme perpetrators or extreme heroes), in reality, the lives of these children fall
within the grey, ambiguous and paradoxical zones of each. The first section of the paper
explores the ways in which child soldiers have frequently been depicted by the print news
media in the time leading up to the commencement of the research study. I argue that these
verbal representations1 tend to be reductive, and misrepresentative of their subjects by
assigning them the categorical identities as ‘dangerous and disorderly’, as the ‘hapless
victim’, or the ‘hero’. I also highlight the overall absence of girl soldiers in discussions and
representations of armed conflict. Importantly, these depictions persist despite available
empirical evidence challenging such portrayals. With the aim of providing a more nuanced
view, the second and third sections of the paper provide the background to the research, as
well as a glimpse into the lived realities of a cohort of Sierra Leonean child soldiers. The
third section highlights the multifaceted world that girls and boys contended with — whereby
the realities of victimisation, participation and resistance were experienced and carried out
by children in a shifting and dialectical fashion. Also discussed are the ways in which former
child soldiers in Sierra Leone are rebuilding their post-war lives in the absence of violence.
The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of the media portrayals.

1. (Mis)Understanding militarised children: portrayals and representations

The last decade has seen increased scholarly attention to the topic of child soldiers (Betan-
court and Khan, 2008; Denov, 2010; Honwana, 2006; Maclure and Denov, 2006; Rosen,
2005; Wessells, 2006). Alongside growing academic research, the western news media and
even Hollywood, through films such as Blood Diamond, have also shown an increased inter-
est in the issue. However, the representations of child soldiers presented in the media tend to
be oversimplified and sensationalised. As Booker (2007) notes:

The weakness of Blood Diamond is that it does not give the viewers a realistic picture of the plight of
child soldiers…Female child soldiers are not mentioned at all. Furthermore, any brainwashing, men-
tal trauma, and physical abuse that child soldiers experience is not eliminated with a hug… (p. 354).

It has been argued that media producers configure the awareness and experience of each of
us (Schissel, 1997). Moreover, the media has been considered the consummate ideological
tool, shaping and reflecting particular worldviews:

Media images help shape our view of the world and our deepest values: what we consider good
or bad…moral or evil…who has power and who is powerless, who is allowed to exercise force and
violence and who is not (Kellner, 1995, p. 5).

Within this in mind, it is of interest to explore the common verbal depictions and representa-
tions of child soldiers in the print news media during the time leading up to the commence-
ment of this research in 2003. During this period (early 1990s to mid-2000), media
representations appeared to turn on the categorical themes of child soldiers as ‘dangerous
and disorderly’, ‘the hapless victim’ and ‘the hero’.

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Dangerous and disorderly

Rosen (2005) and Skinner (1999) note that child soldiers have tended to be stigmatised in the
popular media as ‘bandits’, ‘vermin’, ‘monsters’ and ‘barbarians’ — often fully aware of their
actions. In newspaper reports, child soldiers have been described as ‘chillingly efficient
killing machines’, who hold little remorse for their victims: ‘Drug Crazed Child Soldiers Kill
Like Unfeeling Robots’ (The Montreal Gazette, 1999). Particularly apparent when examining
discussions of Africa, news media reports and discourses have suggested that not only is the
continent falling prey to a ‘new barbarism’ but also that a myriad of interrelated circum-
stances have created a dangerous new class of young armed thugs: ‘Ugandan Child Soldiers
have been Warped by War’ (Whig Standard, 1997); ‘Liberian Boy Soldiers Leave a Swathe of
Ruin’ (The Independent, 1993).

Significantly, the violent actions of child soldiers are assumed to continue in the war’s after-
math. Perceived to be lost in a cycle of unrelenting violence and iniquity, children who have
participated in armed conflict have generally been assumed to be permanently damaged:
‘fluent in the language of violence, but ignorant to the rudiments of living in a civil soci-
ety…it’s often too late to salvage their lives’ (Newsweek, 1995). The Times reported in 2006,
‘When they do return to civilian life, they are walking ghosts — damaged, uneducated pari-
ahs’. Sensational media portrayals of child soldiers as dangerous and disorderly have also
influenced the language of policy-makers. The French foreign minister who was a keynote
speaker at a conference on child soldiers in 2007 warned that child soldiers ‘are a time bomb
that threatens stability and growth’ (BBC, 2007).

By portraying child soldiers as largely threatening, and uncivilised, the bulk of international
news reporting, and much of academic and policy-oriented discourse, has tended to ‘patho-
logise’ children in armed conflict. The images of child soldiers have been used to convey the
horror of childhood perverted from its ‘natural’ course of innocence, fragility and purity.
Such depictions also act as fodder for those who seek to present warfare in the developing
world as inexplicable, brutal and disconnected from the ‘civilised’ world order (Aning and
McIntyre, 2004). Highly racialised and imbued with stereotypes, depictions of child soldiers
as ‘dangerous’ and ‘disorderly’ work to underscore the perceived moral superiority of the
North as compared to the ‘savage’ South (Macmillan, 2009). Such representations also
cement linkages of race, perversity and barbarism, dehumanise child soldiers and their socie-
ties, and ultimately present a site where colonial themes are played out.

The hapless victim

In stark contrast to the construction of child soldiers as dangerous is the portrayal of child
soldiers as ‘victims’ (Rosen, 2005; Shepler, 2005). Within this construction, children associ-
ated with fighting forces are frequently depicted as the pawns of deceitful yet powerful war-
lords, as well as broader undemocratic regimes and social forces. Such children have been
referred to in the print media as ‘permanently scarred’ (The Ottawa Citizen, 1998), and ‘lost
young souls’ (The Los Angeles Times, 1999). Such depictions draw from some of our most
romanticised contemporary western conceptions of childhood and its association with inno-
cence and vulnerability. Children are cast as dependent, helpless, victimised and incapable of
rational decision-making.

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Several authors have noted that representations of child soldiers as quintessential victims
have sometimes been strategically propagated by some non-governmental organisations
(NGOs) in order to capture world attention (Rosen, 2005). Acting as visual indices of vulnera-
bility and need that transcend culture and politics, children’s innocent faces, particularly
those offset by a menacing AK47, demand responses. While such portrayals may help to gar-
ner international attention and advocacy for child soldiers, they nonetheless have important
implications. Burman (1994, p. 246) has named the imagery of children used in Third World
emergencies, as ‘the iconography of emergencies’, or ‘disaster pornography’ — terms which
describe the gruesome fascination with depicting and commercially benefiting from people’s
suffering and degradation. Burman warns that while the victimising imagery of children in
Third World disasters may evoke sympathy, sympathy is a double-edged tool as ‘its evoca-
tion can threaten to be patronising and render recipients as ‘‘other’’’. Children in such con-
texts become signifiers of distress, are dehumanised, as are their families and their cultures.
They are rendered as passive objects of a western gaze which ‘seeks to confirm its
own agency and omnipotence to ward off its own insecurities’ (Burman, 1994, p. 238). The
‘victim’ portrayal ultimately disempowers, decontextualises and eradicates any potential
agency or active decision-making.

The hero
Heroic representations of young soldiers have long existed. For example, during the Ameri-
can Civil War, hundreds of boys who served as drummer boys in the Union and Confederate
armies became associated with valour and heroism and were featured in newspapers and
books as heroic adventurers (Marten, 2004). Moreover, in many contemporary contexts
around the world, children’s participation in war may bring unique social and cultural
rewards of heroism through participation in a liberation struggle. Nonetheless, it is only quite
recently that western media discourses have linked the contemporary conceptualisation of
child soldiers with heroism, often assigning celebrity status and even stardom to former child
soldiers, particularly those living in the west. These youth have been portrayed as brave sur-
vivors of extreme violence who have overcome great adversity and ultimately, despite their
participation in violence, have been redeemed. An example of this construction is the news
media’s early portrayal of former child soldier and author Ishmael Beah, whose memoir on
his life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone gained him international attention. While Beah’s
memoir has not been regarded by reviewers as a simple heroic tale (Boyd, 2007), Beah’s jour-
ney in and out of armed violence was, however, documented by some journalists as a heroic
transformation from violence to redemption. As these newspapers reported: ‘Once a Drugged
Child Soldier, Beah Reclaims His Soul’ (The San Francisco Chronicle, 2007); ‘From Child
Soldier to Poster Boy’ (The Independent, 2007). Symbolising this transformation, Beah was
featured in Playboy magazine donning an Armani jacket and holding schoolbooks. Signifying
his past, an AK-47 is seen on the floor in the background, jutting out of a camouflage bag.
Luscombe (2007) wrote in Time Magazine that western society currently holds ‘a cultural
sweet spot for the African child soldier’ and that ‘the kid-at-arms has become a pop-cultural
trope of late. He’s in novels, movies, magazines and on TV, flaunting his Uzi like a giant
foam hand at a baseball game’.

The three depictions of child soldiers hold important elements in common. In each portrayal,
child soldiers are exoticised, decontextualised and essentialised. The complexity of their war-
time and post war lives is lost. Moreover, the dichotomous discourses surrounding (male)
child soldiers as dangerous or as victims represent the paradoxical ‘common-sense’ western

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ideas about children more generally: that on the one hand, to be a child is to be passive, and
innocent; while on the other, they are to be feared and dreaded, and their ‘deviant’ actions
must be explained by reference to their inherent duplicity, their taintedness.

Invisible girls, emblematic victims

When exploring representations of child soldiers and the seemingly ever-present images of
boys carrying guns, one would assume that girls have no presence in contemporary armed
groups. Scholarly literature shows similar patterns of gender (in)visibility. Until relatively
recently, much of the scholarly and policy literature have portrayed child soldiery as a
uniquely male phenomenon. Girls have long been used militarily, although they have been
largely overlooked. Indeed, officials, governments, national and international bodies fre-
quently cover up, overlook, or refuse to recognise girls’ presence, needs and rights during
and following armed conflict (McKay and Mazurana, 2004).

Despite their relative invisibility, between 1990 and 2003, girls were associated with fighting
forces in 55 countries and were active participants in conflict in 38 countries around
the globe (McKay and Mazurana, 2004). Importantly, when girls within armed groups are
discussed, whether within the realms of academia, policy or the media, there has been a
tendency for them to be portrayed predominantly as silent victims particularly as ‘wives’, in
tangential supporting roles and as victims of sexual slavery (Coulter, 2008; Denov, 2008,
2010; Denov and Gervais, 2007). Although highlighting girls’ victimisation is critical to
advancing our understanding of girls’ experiences of war, a danger is that girls become
personified as voiceless victims, often devoid of agency.

The persistence of reductive portrayals: a note on empirical evidence

Importantly, reductive depictions of child soldiers persist despite a growing literature point-
ing to the contrary. Empirical studies conducted in a variety of contexts have underscored
the complexity of experiences associated with child soldiery. Rosen (2005) notes that Jewish
child soldiers during World War II played a major role in partisan resistance against the Ger-
mans. Emphasising their agency, political ideology and capacity for conscious deliberation,
Rosen notes that ‘they took up arms as individuals, but they also fought as Jews, Zionists,
socialists and communists…in the end, these child soldiers made dignified and honorable
choices, and their lives serve as a reminder of the remarkable capability of children and
youth to shape their own destinies’ (pp. 55–56).

The works of Honwana (2006), Vigh (2006) and Utas (2005, 2008) have provided nuanced
portraits of the daily lives and realities of child soldiers including the ways in which they
carefully and deliberately navigate the terrain of war, as well as highlighting their capacity
for reflexivity, power and resilience.

Empirical evidence has also challenged the portrayals of girls associated with fighting forces
as primarily victims and sex slaves. In her study of former female child soldiers in Ethiopia,
Veale (2003) highlights that none of the women regarded themselves as having been power-
less or having been victimised. The women felt they were changed by their experience as
fighters, and overwhelmingly saw this as a positive change. Similarly, West (2004) conducted
interviews with adult women in Mozambique who served as children in FRELIMO’s
female detachment. These women viewed their participation in combat as both empowering,

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liberating, and as releasing them from colonial rules and from predominant patriarchal struc-
tures of dominance in Mozambican society. West highlights that these girls acted as central
players in the historical drama that defined their times.

Research has also challenged the assumption that former child soldiers are destined to a
post-war life of deviance. Annan and others (2007) reveal that violent behaviour rarely per-
sisted among former child soldiers in Northern Uganda. Moreover, these youth took up active
leadership roles in their communities upon their return. Similarly, Boothby’s (2006) longitu-
dinal study of former child soldiers in Mozambique demonstrated that most respondents
became productive, capable and caring adults who actively engaged in the collective affairs
of their communities.

With the goal of further contributing to the above literature and providing a more nuanced
account, in the following section I draw upon the experiences of a sample of Sierra Leonean
child soldiers.

2. Child soldiers in Sierra Leone: background to the research

Sierra Leone was integrated into the world system in a way that marginalised its traditional
social systems and left its economy colonised by international enterprises and a kleptocratic
governing elite. With widespread government corruption, institutional collapse, a lack of
educational and employment opportunities, and with more than half the population under
18 years, disillusion and anger among youth was volatile and infectious. Within this context,
Foday Sankoh, backed by Liberian warlord Charles Taylor, formed the rebel Revolutionary
United Front (RUF). Sankoh recruited largely uneducated and unemployed male youth who
were linked to the informal underground economy to join a ‘movement’ against the govern-
ment. When Sankoh’s message of political revolution failed to attract popular support, the
RUF’s broad aim of ‘emancipation’ was sidelined by the goals of wealth, power and control
of the country’s diamond mines. The RUF invaded Sierra Leone from Liberia in 1991 and
embarked on a decade-long campaign of terror characterised by indiscriminate violence
against civilians.

Thousands of children were recruited into the conflict by force and non-force and were
involved in a range of wartime activities as porters, bodyguards, domestic servants, combat-
ants, commanders and ‘wives’. Although children were associated with many armed groups
during the conflict, this paper focuses on children associated with the RUF.

This paper draws from a larger qualitative research project which has examined the life his-
tories of boys’ and girls’ involvement in Sierra Leone’s civil war, the implications of their
war-time experiences and their adjustment to the current post-conflict situation. A key aim
of the fieldwork was to gain not only a ‘thick description’ of children’s experiences during
the armed conflict but also their reflections and interpretations of these experiences, and
their psychosocial effects.

In-depth interviews were conducted in 2003 and 2004 with 40 girls and 36 boys formerly
associated with the RUF who were living in the northern, southern and eastern Provinces,
and the Western area of Sierra Leone. The respondents, all under the age of 18 years before
the end of the conflict, were identified and invited to participate in the study with the assis-
tance of Sierra Leonean research partners. Participants were between the ages of 14 and 21

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286 Myriam Denov

at the time of the interviews. All had been abducted by the RUF and had remained with them
for a period ranging from a few months to eight years. The majority of participants were
interviewed twice — first by a Sierra Leonean researcher in the child’s native language (Krio,
Mende, Temne or Limba) and a second time, several months later, by the author with the
assistance of an interpreter. All interviews were audio-taped with permission, translated and
transcribed.

Analysis of the translated interview transcripts was a phenomenological process that

involved careful reading and annotation of the collated information so as to ascertain the
meaning and significance which the children attributed to their experiences as child soldiers.
After a first round of descriptive analysis, through the use of NVivo qualitative analysis soft-
ware, clusters of verbatim text were re-grouped according to thematic indices. Eventually,
broad patterns of experiences and perspectives were identified and thematically organised.

As with all self-report data, particularly in the light of the violent events that these young
people experienced and participated in, the interviews were invariably affected by their
memory of events, as well as their willingness to divulge personal information. The potential
fear of stigmatisation and recrimination may have prevented some participants from openly
disclosing some of their experiences and it may have incited others into altering or exagger-
ating aspects of their stories. While the potential flaws of self-disclosure must therefore be
taken into account when considering participants’ stories, where possible, the research team
sought the validation of respondents’ accounts through community and family members and
local authorities, which often provided vital corroboration.

The experiences of boys and girls in this study cannot be generalised to the experiences of
all RUF child soldiers, or those within other fighting factions in Sierra Leone. Moreover, the
data are limited to those who survived the conflict, were willing to share their stories and
were ‘reintegrated’ in society to varying degrees.

3. Beyond categorisation: wartime and post-war realities

While all participants in this study were exposed to similar circumstances, children’s
responses to those situations were neither straightforward nor uniform. This section high-
lights the ways in which children’s experiences defy the categorical representations high-
lighted earlier. Instead, embodying greater ambiguity and complexity, children’s wartime
experiences turned simultaneously around the shifting realities of victimisation, participation
and resistance. Moreover, in the post-war context, child soldiers are continuing to challenge
assumptions that they are destined to a life of crime and deviance.

During their wartime captivity, all the study respondents reported suffering devastating
forms of abuse. The violence and victimisation experienced by participants ranged along a
continuum from verbal abuse to outrageous acts of cruelty:

The senior commander was horrible. He used to beat us with an iron cane. I was feeling so afraid…I
thought I was in the circle of death at any moment. (Boy)

Children were also witnesses to brutal forms of violence against men, women and other
children, both combatants and civilians, which were clearly intended as public displays of
horror:

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My commander captured a girl with her [baby] sister and her mother. He shot the mother and the
little baby dead. He left the adolescent girl alive but told her to remove her dress and he raped
her…We all had to watch. (Boy)

In some ways, the RUF was indiscriminate in its brutality. This is important to note, as the
victimisation experiences of men and boys are often minimised. In others ways, however, the
violence had significant gendered dimensions, rendering the experiences of girls unique to
those of the boys. In particular, sexual violence was a daily occurrence for most girls in this
study, wreaking physical and emotional havoc:

Girls were dying of rape all around me. Every young girl was terrified of rape…He left me bleed-
ing…Other officers also came around and had sex with me. Even the young boys were attempting it.
(Girl)

In addition to ongoing brutality and violence, children lacked access to adequate food and
nutrition, health care and lived in contexts of dire poverty. Forcibly separated from their
families and communities, the security and survival of traditional communities, cultures and
values were severely jeopardised:

There was never enough to eat…we had no medicines to take care of our wounds…I constantly
missed my family and longed to be with them and to live the way we used to. (Girl)

Children’s experiences as victims of violence are highly disturbing and reveal the constraints
that ensured their subservience. Yet focusing solely on situations of victimisation obscures the
layers of complexity that surrounded children’s experiences in the RUF. It is equally important
to trace the ways in which children became engaged as active participants and combatants.

As time wore on, girls and boys who were victimised by their commanders reported eventu-
ally became their unwitting soldiers and allies. The ‘enemy’ was thus transformed from the
individuals who captured and coerced them, into those who fought against these same indi-
viduals. However, the transition from ‘victim’ to ‘perpetrator’ was a gradual process:

I was afraid of the different types of guns because I knew they were meant to kill…They started
eroding the fears from me gradually. (Boy)

What appeared to facilitate the transition between victimisation and perpetration were the
RUF’s strategic efforts at desensitisation to violence. Kelman (1995) has observed that when
individuals perpetrate acts of violence, over time and with gradual exposure, they tend to
see themselves as performing a routine, even a professional job. Many respondents came to
view participation in violence as a normative act:

Killing was just part of the normal activities of the RUF…Overcoming the enemy was part of our
job. (Girl)

In describing the process of violent desensitisation, Bandura (1999) argues that individuals
may not initially recognise the changes they are undergoing. At first, they perform milder
aggressive acts they can tolerate with some discomfort. Later, however, boys and girls
revealed that they slowly began to perpetuate the very culture of violence that had been ini-
tially terrifying:

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Our only motive to exist was killing. That is the only thing that we thought about…I burned houses,
captured people…I was responsible for tying people and killing. (Girl)

Over time, for some young people, acts that were initially intolerable became acceptable and
even synonymous with play and excitement:

I enjoyed firing guns without killing people. I would let off several rounds…we were just having
fun. (Girl)

What is clear, however, is that the gradual evolution from ‘victim’ to ‘perpetrator’ was not
linear — nor did any participant experience a full transformation from victim to hardened
perpetrator. Instead, children’s experiences reveal that they continually drifted between com-
mitting acts of violence and simultaneously being victims of violence by others. The children’s
plight was complex: as they perpetrated violence, they remained victims of coercion, terror,
violence and deception. This hazy line between victimisation and perpetration is clearly illus-
trated by this girl:

[The] Colonel gave me a gun and instructed me to fire a shot. I told him I didn’t want to hold a gun.
He threatened me to do whatever he commanded otherwise he was going to kill me. I…fired my
very first shot in the air nervously. (Girl)

The paradox of this situation evoked much shame and confusion. Nonetheless, most children
appeared to have maintained a degree of sensitivity to situations over which they had little
control:

We would go into the bush to as if [to go to the toilet], but once there, we would cry. We would
wipe our eyes dry before we came back. (Boy)

It was within this context that, despite being bound by severely constraining authority struc-
tures, children revealed their independence of action through unique modes of resistance.
Three forms of resistance will be discussed, including girls’ resistance to sexual violence,
refusal to comply with RUF orders and forms of escape.

Girls engaged in forms of resistance to protect themselves from sexual violence. For exam-
ple, one girl would pretend that she was menstruating which thwarted any potential sexual
victimisation:

[To avoid being raped] I would fix a pad as if I was observing menstruation. (Girl)

Other girls reported using violent resistance to retaliate against perpetrators of sexual
assault:

I stabbed one guy to death — he was always harassing me for sex…I told him that if he tried, I
would stab him… As he attempted to rape me, I stabbed him twice…He later died [from the stab-
bing]. (Girl)

Alongside resistance to sexual violence, it became apparent that at times, boys and girls also
resisted RUF authority, command structure and participation in violence:

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I [was told] to attack a woman, but [instead of attacking her] I helped the woman escape. My col-
league reported me…I was tied and beaten…They used electric cables and sometimes military belts.
(Boy)

Resistance among both girls and boys also came in the form of mobilising themselves to
plan an escape. Demonstrating their capacity to organise and to act both individually and
collectively, some girls and boys attempted to flee their captors, fully aware of the conse-
quences of violence or death if discovered.

In contrast to the formulaic verbal imagery of child soldiers that have been commonly
depicted in the print news media, children’s lives existed in a hazy realm where they suffered
horrible abuses, were engaged in brutal acts of violence and nonetheless, heroically resisted
the violence that surrounded them. To be a child soldier in the RUF meant that the realities
of victimisation, participation and resistance were experienced in an irregular and dialogical
fashion. Bringing forward these complex sets of realities forces a more intricate picture of
these children who sometimes actively sought power, resisted authority, planned, mobilised,
experienced profound violence, perpetrated severe violence, and whose resilience and inge-
nuity become apparent. Participants’ self-perceptions mirrored this more complex picture:

I see myself as a warrior because I was a brave fighter… I am a hero because I managed to survive
so many times in combat … I’m a victim because I have two children [born of rape] and I’m finding
difficult to take care of them … but I’m a survivor because I’m able to withstand all the challenges.
(Girl)

In the post-war context, there is mounting evidence that former child soldiers are challen-
ging existing assumptions and forging new opportunities for themselves. Rather than en-
gaging in violence, or being passive and helpless, they are increasingly engaging in political
activism. Sierra Leone’s new motorbike taxi-riders provide a telling example of young people
who are finding alternative means to contribute to their own reintegration, creating new
niches in the job market and organising politically. In Sierra Leone, motorbike taxis are
increasingly replacing car taxis. Although largely unknown to Sierra Leone prior to the war,
the phenomenon of motorbike taxis has emerged as one of the most visible post-conflict
changes. Significantly, ex-combatants make up most of the motorbike riders (Peters, 2007).
Moreover, riders have organised themselves into powerful unions, working to support fellow
riders. Importantly, while there have been ongoing tensions and confrontations between bike
riders and police, these youth are responding with organised dissent and trade unions rather
than with guns. The Bike Rider Associations are

fighting a ‘war’ for its young members, but not any more through force of arms, but through the
classic instruments of trade unionism. Job interests, strikes and the laws of contract have become
the weapon of choice, not forced recruitment and summary executions. (Peters, 2007, p. 19)

Challenging prevailing stereotypes of a ‘lost generation’, Sierra Leone’s motorbike taxi riders
highlight that former child soldiers are actively navigating the post-war terrain and rebuild-
ing their lives in the absence of violence.

While the accounts of children’s lives and their experiences during the heart of their captiv-
ity are highly disturbing, their stories and perspectives reveal a spirit of volition and a
capacity for independence of action that counters deterministic depictions of children as

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Children & Society  2010 National Children’s Bureau and Blackwell Publishing Limited
290 Myriam Denov

either categorical victims, hardened perpetrators or unilateral heroes. Similarly, the example
of former child soldiers-turned bike riders similarly challenges post-war representations of
children as destined for continued violence. Given these realities, it is important to explore
the power and implications of the iconography that has tended to frame western media
portrayals of the child soldier phenomenon.

4. The power of iconography

Schissel (1997) suggests that the media constructs slanted or fictional accounts of real-life
incidents by decontextualising and simplifying the news. He argues that ‘the resulting binary
depictions are presented as unambiguous accounts of good and evil, offering us, at best, sup-
posedly what we want to hear and, at worst, all we are capable of understanding’ (p. 19).
Similarly, highlighting the power of iconography and media culture, Kellner (1995) suggests
that western media depictions are neither impartial nor insignificant to the ongoing con-
struction and entrenchment of western thought, values and identity. He notes that media cul-
ture ‘provide[s] materials out of which we forge our very identities, our sense of selfhood;
our notion of what it means to be male or female; our sense of class, of ethnicity and race,
of nationality, of sexuality, of ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’’ (p. 5).

In keeping with Schissel’s and Kellner’s analyses, the verbal depictions and representations
of child soldiers can be said to reflect and simultaneously reproduce enduring western ideo-
logies and values surrounding standards and boundaries of constructed ‘childhood’, as well as
traditional gender relations of female passivity and invisibility. Moreover, the representations
both display and concurrently replicate hierarchies based on race, class and ethnicity, essen-
tialise culture, and emphasise paternalistic power relations between the global North and
South. Representations fuel the demonisation of African youth, and simultaneously create a
dichotomy between those children deemed ‘worthy’ of protection and rehabilitation and
those not. They may also work to drive and ⁄ or legitimate local, national and international
policy responses (or lack thereof) in relation to children, war and insecurity.

Schissel (1997) argues that as we live in a media and consumer society, there is a risk of
passively accepting what we see and read without always questioning the content or moral
message. This has important implications not only for western thought, values and identity but
also for child soldiers and their communities in the potentially long road to reintegration.
Former child soldiers are faced with the need to be reintegrated into norms and institutions
from which they had been isolated, often for years. Post-war, some of these young people
may face profound social rejection and marginalisation from family and community as a
result of their wartime actions and affiliations. This may be particularly apparent for girls
who, as combatants, may not only have transgressed acceptable gender roles, but also as vic-
tims of sexual violence, these girls are evidence of violated community norms, including the
importance of maintaining virginity until marriage. Given the broad and international reach
of the western media, public consumption and acceptance of media portrayals and discourse
of child soldiers as ‘dangerous’ and ‘disorderly’ may potentially exacerbate the social rejec-
tion and stigmatisation of these children, creating ongoing fear and uncertainty among indi-
viduals, families, communities and ultimately, prevent long-term reintegration and
reconciliation. Similarly, portrayals of victimhood fail to account for post-conflict agency
and the ability of former child soldiers, as evidenced by the motorbike taxi riders, to actively
overcome their violent past. A unilateral on heroism and the post-war romanticisation of
their actions may prevent accountability and the genuine acknowledgement of wrongdoing

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 Child Soldiers and Iconography 291

among the young. Also, the failure to recognise the complexity of wartime experiences and
the simultaneous realities of victimisation, participation and resistance may lead to the crea-
tion of post-war reintegration programming that corresponds to dichotomous portrayals and
fails to meet the intricate needs of former child soldiers.

Ongoing advocacy is essential to promoting more accurate representations of child soldiers

and subsequent appropriate responses. Researchers must make efforts to have the results of
their empirical work on child soldiers available in public forums outside academia, encourag-
ing broader community awareness and sensitisation. At the same time, individuals and insti-
tutions, whether in the context of government, NGOs, practitioners and policy must actively
and publicly challenge the narrow media portrayals and highlight the long-term implications
of such imagery for war-affected children, their families and communities.

Note
1 Here, my intention is to emphasise the language, words and discourses used to describe
child soldiers.
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Correspondence to: Dr Myriam Denov, McGill University, School of Social Work, Wilson Hall, 3506 University,
Montreal, QC H3A 2A7 Canada, Tel.: 514 398 7060; Fax: 514 398 4760. E-mail: myriam.denov@mcgill.ca

Accepted for publication 30 September 2010

 2010 The Author(s) CHILDREN & SOCIETY Vol. 26, 280–292 (2012)
Children & Society  2010 National Children’s Bureau and Blackwell Publishing Limited