Reintegrating child soldiers in Uganda

UGANDA is a tale of two countries. The south is relatively prosperous, where most children are able to attend primary school. The north, on the other hand, is a totally different land.
In the Acholi region, more than one million people were forced to flee their homes due to the conflict between government forces and Joseph Kony’s rebel Lords’ Resistance Army (LRA).
Children are among the main victims of the brutal and bloody 20-year civil war.
In fact, Northern Uganda has been particularly blighted by the scandalous practice of abducting children from their homes and communities and forcing them to become members of the LRA.
Conservative estimates from UNICEF suggest 25,000 children were abducted, based on the numbers who escaped and registered in reception centres.
The real figure could be at least double this, when the number of children who were killed and unaccounted for is taken into account. Estimates suggest 66,000 young people, including those over 18, were abducted.
According to a Human Rights Watch report, children were abducted from their homes, schools and off the streets.
“They are frequently beaten and forced to carry out raids, burn houses, beat and kill civilians and abduct other children. They must carry heavy loads over long distances and work long hours fetching water, firewood, gathering food and performing domestic duties.
“Many are given weapons training and some are forced to fight against government forces. Children are forced to beat or trample to death other abducted children who attempt to escape and are repeatedly told they will be killed if they try to run away.
“Girls are used as domestic servants for commanders and their households. At age 14 or 15, many are forced into sexual slavery as ‘wives’ of LRA commanders and subjected to rape, unwanted pregnancies and the risk of sexually transmitted diseases,” the report stated.
Children are also recruited as soldiers by the Ugandan government. Boys as young as 12 are lured into joining the Local Defence Units (LDU) with promises of money.
Against this backdrop, working on a project to understand the post-conflict reintegration of young women that had been abducted by the LRA in Northern Uganda could be regarded as a daunting and difficult task.
However, Kilmurry psychologist Dr Fiona Shanahan (27) has relished the challenge of completing extensive research on how these women reintegrated into society.
Her appetite for working abroad was whetted when she spent about six weeks as a UCC psychology student, volunteering in a hospital in Ghana in July 2005 with her sister, Claire, who was the president of St Vincent de Paul in the University of Limerick (UL) at the time.
They set up a summer camp programme for children and their trip was in response to a need identified by Mark Manti, a Ghanaian who works in UL, while his brother was the mission hospital manager.
While Dr Shanahan was there, she also completed research on Ghanian cultural patterns, looking at how people related to the spiritual world.
Having completed her psychology degree in 2006, her lecturer, Angela Veale, who completed a lot of humanitarian work with street children in Ethiopia and Rwanda after the genocide, asked her if she would be interested in undertaking a research project looking at child soldiers in Northern Uganda.
The project focused on understanding how the child soldiers reintegrated into society, the methods they used to achieve this, with the most worthwhile tools fed back into the programme to benefit participants.
Support for income generation, setting up businesses and activities with communities were some of the highlighted issues.
The majority of young people were between 14 and 18. One of Fiona’s participants was just 10, however, with many 12 or 13. In large-scale surveys of thousands of people, a lot of abductees were 14, 15 and 16.
Dr Shanahan believes young people are targeted because it would be harder from them to escape and it would be easier to disorientate them. About half of the young abducted women were in forced marriages to other abductees or older commanders. There was a policy of having children in LRA as a way of strengthening and maintaining a fighting force, while in other fighting forces, sexual activity between members is prohibited.
Some of the participants in her research had children and her work focused on how they deal with their children when they came back. Mothers would usually be 17 or 18.
The vast majority of women escaped or were captured or rescued by the Ugandan army during the war, with 30 women with babies released on a once-off basis.
She learned that Government forces would hold an abductee for a few days and they would then be taken to reception centres run by a Ugandan or international organisation with UN or EU funding, where they would spend between six weeks and three months before going home to their families.
Escapees reported to a local leader, were taken to a reception centre before going home or went directly home.
Dr Shanahan worked in a community reintegration programme with five different NGOs, spending a lot of time in Gulu, Kitgum and Pader in Acholi Land in Northern Uganda.
“A major factor with reintegration was that people were living in camps for people who were displaced. In Gulu, 97% of the population were living in IDP camps with poor sanitation and limited services.
“When I first went to Uganda, people were still quite disconnected from their land or home place. Two years later, people were trying to go home or set up place where they lived originally.
“Reintegration involves going from an armed group to a whole different, difficult situation. Living in the IDP camps is tough because there aren’t any educational or training work opportunities, particularly for young mothers who are much less likely to go back to school than other abducted women,” Dr Shanahan said.
In addition to UCC, she worked with five partner agencies, the University of Colombia and Yomie and they also engaged with young mothers.
Her 2007 study engaged with 50 participants, including Acholi leaders, spiritual healers, local leaders and parents.
The analysis demonstrated how families and communities make meaning of reintegration, experience challenges and actively respond to the reintegration of abducted young women and their children born or conceived in the LRA.
Participants articulated anxiety and tensions concerning what they perceived as their inability to protect girls and young women and provide the necessary resources to facilitate reintegration.
In some cases, family members and formerly abducted women accepted conditions they did not feel were appropriate, such as residential care or framing their experiences within religious narratives in order to access needed services.
Her 2009 study engaged with 29 formerly abducted young women, 24 of their never-abducted peers and 26 members of their families and communities in six Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps in Northern Uganda.
Some of her research was conducted during group activities but a lot of her work was just spending time with them, getting to know them and dovetailing her research into what they wanted and were interested in.
She worked in a small restaurant with one of the girls for two weeks and she went to IDP camps early in the morning, staying all day.
A lot of art – drama, songs and stories – were used to empower women who had different levels of literacy, while most of the decisions in the programme were made by participants.
A photography project on how they were dealing with changes in their lives proved very powerful and informative. One group came up specific situations, acted them out and took pictures of them.
“Some of the young women I knew were told by other people to forget what happened. Some reception staff burned their clothes. Some women were happy with that; others were not.
“Some women wanted to talk about what happened in LRA, which I facilitated without asking questions and linked them with a traditional healer or counsellor,” she said.
Dr Shanahan believes some of the problems with post-conflict programmes is the tendency to come in and try to change everything. This runs the risk of disempowering a person because people are doing things to make life changes without any formal programme. Her core message is understanding how people are doing things for themselves, recognising that and unlocking resources.
Her research looked at how people make these changes themselves – adaptive actions that restore a sense of safety, giving them hope and making them feel competent can be done with simple actions.
“Sometimes we think about child soldiers in a very passive way. I was looking at how these young people were resilient. It can be difficult to access what they need but there are small things – cultural, relationships and family to make this happen.
“All over the world, about 10% of people after a natural disaster are in severe psychological distress, requiring specialised support.
“Surveys in Northern Uganda in 2008 found 85% of young abducted women were managing well, compared to their peers who were not abducted and were in displacement camps. For the 15% that were not, there were links with inter-partner violence when they came home.
“However, these findings are relative to those who were already displaced because all young women in Uganda have problems with accessing jobs, training and childcare.
“The abduction was not the defining event for some young women. It could have been losing a parent,” she said.
In 2011, Dr Shanahan returned to Uganda with the UN, working for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, providing technical support focusing on gender and transitional justice after the conflict and looking at a range of measures to support victims and deal with the perpetrators.
She also worked with their Ministry for Gender on gender-based violence and with the Law Reform Commission on legislative development on witness protection, peace building projects and human rights.
Her thesis findings have implications for the participation of formerly abducted women in transitional justice processes within Uganda, in particular, reparations measures, truth-telling processes, traditional justice mechanisms and as witnesses in international crimes investigations and trials.
Following her return to Ireland, Dr Shanahan spent a few months in a peace and reconciliation centre in Northern Ireland.
Considering her penchant for travel, her parents, Pat and Annette; sister, Claire and brother, Rory, who plays hurling with Sixmilebridge, are wondering where her next posting might take her.

Dr Fiona Shanahan will speak about building resilience in young people next Tuesday at 8pm as part of the Lenten Talks Series in Sixmilebridge, organised by the Meaning to Life Group.