Britain remains one of just 20 countries in the world which still recruits children from the age of 16 into the armed services.
Most accept it as simply the ‘way things are’, but I would think many have never really considered what it means to enlist 16 and 17 year olds and if the needs of the military really justify this position.
It is correct that children do not take part in armed conflict until they are 18 but we need to note that 16 year old recruits are overwhelmingly enlisted into combat roles, so as soon as they turn 18 they can be sent to the frontline.
The time has come to heed the advice of Child Soldiers International, the Children’s Rights Alliance for England, Unicef, the United Nations, the Joint Committee on Human Rights and the defence committee and raise the lowest age of recruitment from 16 to 18.
There is no similar underage recruitment in other dangerous public service vocations, such as the fire or police service.
Young people under 18 are legally restricted from watching violent war films and playing video games – yet they can be trained to go to war.
The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child has asked the government to: ‘reconsider its active policy of recruitment of children into the armed forces and ensure that it does not occur in a manner which specifically targets ethnic minorities and children of low-income families’.
Our country has also been criticised by the Joint Committee on Human Rights, with them urging in 2009: ‘the UK adopt a plan of action for implementing the Optional Protocol, including these recommendations, fully in the UK, together with a clear timetable for doing so.’
Despite these recommendations, no British government has yet carried out a feasibility study of an all-adult military. I wanted to know if the ministry of defence had an open mind on this – but it would appear not. From the debate it is clear they remain convinced that we should have children in the armed forces.
This commitment to duty is often made at 16, with no obligation to proactively reconfirm their enlistment once adulthood is reached and they can be deployed.
Teenagers are significantly less mature emotionally, psychologically and socially. And young people from deprived backgrounds, who I understand form the majority of underage recruits, are particularly vulnerable.
It can be no coincidence that recruits who sign up as minors suffer higher rates of alcoholism, self-harming and suicides than those who enlist as adults.
There are also issues of long-term social mobility and employability to consider. I had no doubt the minister would deploy the well worn argument that the defence department uses about giving young people employment and training opportunities, young people who may otherwise be unemployed and that they get training.
Others may argue that the armed forces provide for young people who may come from difficult home circumstances, from a background of suffering abuse or simply because they have been thrown out onto the streets.
I accept neither and when it come to the qualifications available to minors in the army data shows they do not include GCSEs, A or AS levels, BTECs, HNDs or HNCs and, while the minister disagreed, many leave with no transferrable skills at all.
Perhaps that is the reason we have a higher than average proportion of former military people who find themselves unemployed, homeless and even in prison.
As I argued during the bill committee nearly three years ago, the armed forces mustn’t be seen as some kind of escape route from abuse or even unemployment.
As a nation we need to develop the support and services young people need rather than holding up the Services as an easy option so early in life.
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Alex Cunningham is MP for Stockton North. He tweets @ACunninghamMP
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Back in the days when New Labour was led by Tony Blair and the other lot was led by Michael Howard, deeply disillusioned former Cabinet Ministers from both sides implored me not to write, even in jest, that our most unaccomplished 16-year-olds should be conscripted directly into the Israeli Defence Force, on the grounds that, “if the wrong person reads that, then it will happen.” They were not joking.
But Sir Nick Harvey now proposes to end the practice of recruiting boy soldiers, which for some reason we assume the right to carry on having, just as we assume the right to retain weapons of mass destruction and even to acquire more of them, in both cases wondering why we are not taken seriously on the matter.
Colonel Tim Collins is scornful (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2326807/Last-boy-soldiers-Bid-end-centuries-tradition-banning-Army-recruiting-18s.html), including in the following terms: “It is true that our European allies have ceased to recruit under-18s, but they don’t have armies – they have aggressive camping organisations that have no expeditionary
capability.” That will come as news in Francophone Africa, among other places.
But the French, among other “European allies”, not to say the Canadians, were right all along about Iraq. It is no surprise that Colonel Collins cannot forgive them for that. His reputation
depends on a disastrous war which turned out to have been based on an entirely false prospectus and which has made the country in question even worse off than it was before. It is beyond me why anyone would pay him the slightest heed on any subject.
Especially since he is on record as wanting to abolish the Royal Air Force (http://www.theweek.co.uk/defence/45626/it%E2%80%99s-time-abolish-raf), pursuant to the openly stated aim of his Henry Jackson Society to create a single EU defence “capability” under overall American command, but under the day-to-day control either of Germany or of France, depending on which happened to be in favour at the Court of Commentary at the time of writing. We have already flogged off Search and Rescue to a private company based in Texas.
Within that, it would seem that Britain’s only role will be to provide boys as cannon fodder. How long before our most unaccomplished 16-year-olds are conscripted directly into the Israeli Defence Force? Or ought I not to write that, lest the wrong person read it and it happen?