Others serve as porters or cooks, guards, messengers, or spies. Child soldiers also may be raped or given to military commanders as sexual slaves. Robbed of their childhood and education, and often left psychologically scarred or physically disabled, the future for those who survive is desperately bleak. To address this problem, many organizations are working together to establish national and international measures that would prohibit the use if warfare of children and young people under the age of 18. Many of these organizations are associated with the International Campaign to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers and, in the United States, the U.S. Campaign to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers .
Children serve armies in supporting roles, as cooks, porters, messengers and spies.
Increasingly, however, adults are deliberately conscripting children as soldiers. The report goes on to detail the many traumatic consequences of this practice, and offers a number of proposals for combatting the recruitment of children as soldiers. Reports on the practice of individual countries with respect to the recruitment and use of children as soldiers is available for Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe at the website of the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers . Additional information is available at the Children and Armed Conflict Unit of the University of Essex. Additional information on the use of child soldiers and related developments is available from the on-line Children of War Newsletter , also produced by Swedish Save the Children.