The IRC is assisting children who manage to escape from the LRA, providing immediate health and psychosocial care, reunifying them with their families and providing follow-up care once they have returned to their homes or communities. The IRC also provides water and sanitation services for displaced Ugandans and manages a comprehensive aid program for some 24,000 Sudanese refugees residing in Northern Uganda. The LRA has been ruthless in their attacks against the civilian population, burning villages to the ground, stealing food crops and household possessions, laying landmines in school yards and farms, ambushing vehicles, killing, maiming and abducting people, especially children, and raping women and girls. The children, as young as seven years old, are forced to endure tremendous hardship, psychological trauma, and sexual abuse. Children are often forced to kill their own family members or destroy their own homes and villages.
Younger children are preferred because they are more easily intimidated and indoctrinated.
Girls are given to rebel commanders as wives. Living conditions are extremely harsh and many children have died of dehydration or hunger. Against this backdrop of civil war, internal displacement and underdevelopment in northern Uganda lies the additional strain of almost 200,000 refugees from Sudan, fleeing the fighting in their own country. The refugees live in crowded camps, dependent on the limited assistance provided by international organizations. The civil war in southern Sudan has been raging since the 1980s.