By Jim Lobe IPS-Inter Press Service
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42354
WASHINGTON, May 13 (IPS) - Pressed by the demands of
the "global war on terrorism", the United States is
violating an international protocol that forbids the
recruitment of children under the age of 18 for
military service, according to a new report released
Tuesday by a major civil rights group that charged that
recruitment practices target children as young as 11
years old.
The 46-page report, "Soldiers of Misfortune", which was
prepared by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
for submission to the U.N. Committee on the Rights of
the Child, also found that the U.S. military
disproportionately targets poor and minority public
school students.
Military recruiters, according to the report, use
"exaggerated promises of financial rewards for
enlistment, [which] undermines the voluntariness of
their enlistment." In some cases documented by the
report, recruiters used coercion, deception, and even
sexual abuse in order to gain recruits. Perpetrators of
such practices are only very rarely punished, the
report found.
"The United States military's procedures for recruiting
students plainly violate internationally accepted
standards and fail to protect youth from abusive and
aggressive recruitment tactics," said Jennifer Turner
of the ACLU Human Rights Project.
The increased aggressiveness of military recruiters is
due in major part, according to the report, to the
increased pressure to meet enlistment quotas caused by
ongoing U.S. military operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan to which nearly 200,000 soldiers and
marines are currently deployed.
The pressure created by current military commitments
has not only translated into enhanced recruitment
efforts among children under 18. The armed forces have
also lowered their standards for minimum-intelligence
tests, made it easier to enlist individuals with
criminal records, and increased re-enlistment bonuses
for soldiers who might otherwise be tempted to leave
the service.
The report, which also detailed Washington's failure to
protect foreign child soldiers being held by U.S.
forces at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and
elsewhere around the world as part of its submission to
the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, assesses
Washington's compliance with the Optional Protocol on
the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict.
The Protocol, which is attached to the Convention on
the Rights of the Child, is designed to protect the
rights of children under 18 who may be recruited by the
military and deployed to war.
Among other provisions, the Protocol sets an absolute
minimum age for recruitment of 16 and requires that all
recruitment activities directed at children under 18 be
carried out with the consent of the child's parents or
guardian, that any such recruitment be genuinely
volunteer, and the military fully inform the child of
the duties involved in military service and require
reliable proof of age before enlistment.
While the United States is one of only two countries --
the other being Somalia -- to have never ratified the
Convention on the Rights of the Child, the U.S. Senate
ratified the Protocol in 2002, making it binding under
U.S., as well as international, law. Unlike most other
industrialised countries that set their minimum
recruitment age at 18, the Senate decided on 17 as the
absolute minimum for the United States.
According to the ACLU report, however, the U.S. armed
services "regularly target children under 17 for
military recruitment, heavily recruiting on high school
campuses, in school lunchrooms, and in classes."
The army's own Recruiting Programme Handbook, for
example, instructs its more than 10,600 recruiters to
approach high school students as early as possible, and
explicitly before their senior year, which, for most
students, starts at age 17. "Remember, first to
contact, first to contract...that doesn't just mean
seniors or grads...," according to an excerpt quoted in
the report. "If you wait until they're seniors, it's
probably too late."
Once recruiters are inside their assigned high schools,
the Army's Recruiting Command instructs them to
"effectively penetrate the school market" and "(b)e so
helpful and so much a part of the school scene that you
are in constant demand", with the goal of "school
ownership that can only lead to a greater number of
Army enlistments." That includes volunteering to serve
as coaches for high school sports teams, involvement
with the local Boy Scouts, attending as many all school
functions and assemblies, and even "eating lunch in the
school cafeteria several times each month".
The report documents a number of specific cases, mostly
in New York and California -- the two most populous
states with the largest number of minority high school
students -- in which recruiters clearly followed these
instructions. In a survey of nearly 1,000 children,
aged 14 to 17, enrolled in New York City high schools,
the ACLU New York affiliate found that more than one
five respondents -- equally distributed among the
different grades -- reported the use of class time by
military recruiters, and 35 percent said military
recruiters had access to multiple locations in their
schools where they could meet students.
The report also noted that the Pentagon's central
recruitment database systematically collected
information on 16-year-olds and, in some cases even 15-
year-olds, including their name, home address and
telephones, email addresses, grade point averages,
height and weight information, and racial and ethnic
data obtained from a variety of public and private
sources. The explicit purpose of the database is to
assist the military in its "direct marketing recruiting
efforts". As the result of a 2006 ACLU lawsuit, the
Pentagon agreed to stop collecting data about students
younger than 16.
But recruitment efforts even dip below 15-year-olds,
according to the report, which found that the
Pentagon's Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC),
which operate at more than 3,000 junior high schools,
middle schools, and high schools across the country,
target children as young as 14 for recruitment. The
report cited recent studies that found that enrollment
in some JROTC programmes was involuntary.
JROTC "cadets", of whom there were nearly 300,000 in
2005, receive military uniforms and conduct military
drills and marches, handle real and wooden rifles, and
learn military history, according to the report, which
noted that the programme is explicitly designed to
"enhance recruiting efforts". African American and
Latin students make up 54 percent of JROTC programmes.
JROTC also oversees the Middle School Cadet Corps
(MSCC), in which children ages 11 to 14 can
participate, according to the report. Florida, Texas,
and Chicago schools offer military-run after-school
MSCC programmes in which children take part in drills
with wooden rifles and military chants, learn first-
aid, civics, military history and, in some cases, wear
uniforms to school for inspection once a week.
The Army also uses an online video game, called
"America's Army", to attract potential recruits as
young as 13, train them to use weapons, and engage in
virtual combat and other military missions. Launched in
2002, the video game had attracted 7.5 million
registered users by September 2006.
"Military recruitment tools aimed at youth under 18,
including Pentagon-produced video games, military
training, corps, and databases of students' personal
information, have no place in America's schools," said
Turner.
No comments:
Post a Comment