Child Soldiers: Victims and Aggressors

About the Book

Children have been used since the Stone Age to fight wild beasts and hunt for food for the survival of themselves and their clans. People in positions of power have realized that they can be used as child soldiers to become either spies or assassins. It was the case for the Spartan children who fought wars throughout 550 B.C. and those child soldiers were called different names according to the countries where they were recruited. For the past thirty years, the number of children who are used in national and transnational armed conflicts have increased. In this context, the author travels through different centuries by stopping in multiples countries, such as Haiti, to analyze the international conventions in relation to the issue of child recruitment in countries with internal conflicts to update the confusion that exists on the criminal responsibility of child soldiers who are considered victims and aggressors.

About the Author

Alfred Reynolds was born in Port-au-Prince where he worked as a reporter for Radio Plus, a now defunct radio station where he had his own program called Soley Leve (Sunrise) every Saturday morning to review the different hot topics of the week. In September 1989, he almost got killed after being stopped by a vigilante group for being a member of a religious community. In May 1993, he left his native country to go to exile.

Alfred is a former Adjunct Criminal Law Professor at the Community College of Vermont in Saint Albans. He is also a former member of the Georgia Army National Guard and the U.S. Army Reserve. He is the founder of the Haitian-American Institute for Justice and Law, a “think tank” and a human rights organization, which has its headquarters in the city of Lawrenceville, Georgia (USA), where he is currently working as its Executive Director.