Victims or Perpetrators: Child Soldiering in Selected Post-Modern Plays

Abstract

Undoubtedly war is the source of all evils, no matter how justified  nor how necessary it is. Yet the traditional warfare between two or more armies with adult soldiers is no longer the status quo. New kinds of wars emerged in the last few decades that changed the face of military conflicts and required younger, untrained, and reckless individuals who are brainwashed and rendered ready for dangerous and indescribable tasks and operations.

         Hence began the recruiting of children as a new weapon in these wars, where they are either kidnapped, threatened, or intimidated to join the armed forces. Sometimes economic crises play a great role in facilitating this kind of recruitment exploiting poor families who are willing to give their children away to be killing machines in a very early age and expose them to all sorts of traumas that can scar them forever. The growing phenomenon of child soldiers has become alarming lately and required intervention to stop it or at least to lessen its traumatic impact.

         Theatre, as usual, carries out its social mission and treats the subject of child soldering as a very crucial matter, depicting the dilemma of these victimized children, who are often seen as criminals, and using drama itself as a means of healing them and helping them to overcome their PTSD. Many plays were written about children who have originally been victims of brutal civil and intrastate wars, and one way of their victimization is throwing them in the middle of battle, untrained and uncounted for.

         Plays like Stoning Mary by Debbie Tucker Green; Midwinter by Zinnie Harris, and Child Soldier by  J. Thalia Cunningham and Mahmood Karimi-Hakak and so many others, tackle the subject of child soldiering, showing the ugly face of war that keeps creating new weapons of destruction by turning innocent children into ruthless monsters.