Child Soldiers Argumentative Essay

Imagine if you were forced to kill others for whole years of your life, seeing the people bleed out each and every time as they struggle to hold onto life.This is what child soldiers are put through almost every day. In some parts of the world, such as Sierra Leone. There is tremendous disputes over child soldiers. Everyday hundreds if not thousands of child soldiers are drugged, abused, and brainwashed to kill others in the battlefields of Sierra Leone and countries alike. Now after all this, these children are being captured by governments across the world and are being prosecuted for their crimes
When you think about people doing violent crimes, you automatically assume they’re guilty. What if they were sold and forced into doing crimes? They would be still be guilty right? In the article ‘Amnesty says Mali Continues to Jail Former Child Soldiers’ it mentions that commanders committed the crimes by forcing/recruiting the children to fight. This shows that really child soldiers did not have a choice to fight and that they were forced into it.
While it may be very true that most average children know their actions, what if those children were not in a ‘normal’ state of mind? Child soldiers were drugged, beat, threatened, and tricked into feeling and thinking nothing except kill, kill, kill. Not only that with all this is emotional and physical abuse, if a child is emotionally and physically abused they tend not to feel anymore, and if they cause a crime then it shouldn’t be their fault, it should be the people who turned them into that, the people who manipulated them with drugs and violence into thinking that's okay. If the UN can give amnesty to the children who have been deprived of their childhood, and jail the people who caused it. That will show the commander what happens to children who they force to fight what