How children explain and evaluate their personal experiences influences their decision to join one or another armed group. Adults have different explanations. Leaders and devotees of armed opposition groups, like Liberia's NPFL, the Afghan Mujahedin, El Salvador's FMLN, and the Sri Lankan LTTE often claim they could not prevent zealous children from joining voluntarily in support of 'the cause'. In Iran, young men flocked to the recruitment centres, fired by the picture of Iraqis as unbelievers without divine protection. How communities 'value' the reasons for conflict is often central to children's own perceptions.
Children see a violent response to structural or political problems as the 'only' choice.
Ironically, some young people feel more secure inside an armed opposition movement than outside, with other orphans, street children, refugees and displaced civilians. But war is a false environment, replacing freedom of thought and opinion with ideology, around a final purpose which is to create chaos and ruin, despite the superficial emphasis on comradeship, order and discipline. War is a moral lie. Children can also pick up 'mixed messages'. The Henry Dunant Institute Study suggests that the only military-strategic rationale for using children as soldiers, rather than adults is that they are expendable and exploitable.