Child Soldiers

Emmanuel Jal was born in war-torn Sudan in the early 1980s. He was taken from his family’s home in 1987 when he was six or seven years old and was sent to fight for the rebel army in Sudan's bloody civil war. For nearly five years, he was a "child warrior," thrown into battle carrying an AK-47 that was taller than he. By the time Emmanuel was 13, he was a veteran of two civil wars and had seen hundreds of his fellow child soldiers forced to commit unspeakable acts on the killing fields of Southern Sudan.

Nearly half a million children have been engaged in more than 85 conflicts worldwide. As armed conflict proliferates, an increasing number of children are exposed to the brutalities of war. Boys and girls around the world are recruited to be child soldiers by armed forces and militant groups, both forcibly and voluntarily. Some are tricked into service by manipulative recruiters; others join in order to escape poverty or discrimination; while still others are abducted from school, the streets, or home. Aside from participating in combat, many are used for sex, ordered to plant and clear land mines, or used as spies, messengers, porters, or servants. Kids have become the ultimate weapons of 21st -century war.

The "Child Soldiers: Forced to be Cruel" exhibit is based on the book "Child Soldiers," by Leora Kahn. It features 40 photographs by talented and devoted photographers of child soldiers from around the world, who have been manipulated by war criminals and subjected to unspeakable violence. Their faces depict the reality of a lost childhood. Instead of the frivolity, joy, defiance or rebellion of childhood, we see a deadly seriousness on the face of a gun-toting teenager. Who will see past the grim confidence, the bravado and the swagger, to the terrifying abductions and coerced recruitments? Who will look beyond the rifles and remember these soldiers as children?

This is an internationally-traveled exhibition that has been shown at the Capitoline Museum in Rome, Italy, the Bonn Kunstmusem in Bonn, Germany, and the United Nations in New York City. It will also be traveling to South Africa, Canada, Spain and Bosnia.