![]() The post-World War II Geneva Conventions consisted of four treaties and three protocols, setting the standards of international law for armed conflict. It’s critical to understand the relevant international laws, force countries to sign these protocols through continuous isolation and scrutiny until they comply, and then hold them accountable for violating the protocols they signed. Many of the signatories simply ignore their obligations. The international community must take action beyond just signing protocols at the UN. Therefore, those superpowers have a responsibility to help end this practice of child exploitation. The use of child soldiers not only spans the globe, it also happens in many locations where the world’s superpowers have deployed their own military forces. These countries are Afghanistan, Colombia, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Mali, Myanmar, Nigeria, the Philippines, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The UN has identified 14 countries where children have been widely used as soldiers. This is a global problem that is getting worse and it must be addressed. The UN further reported that a majority of these children were actually under the age of 15 and that 40 percent of them were girls. In 2017, the advocacy group Child Soldiers International estimated that more than 100,000 children were forced to become soldiers in state and non-state military organizations in at least 18 armed conflicts worldwide.
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