Lost in Doctrine: Particular Social Group, Child Soldiers and the Failure of U.S. Asylum Law to Protect Exploited Children

Exploited and persecuted, child soldiers live lives dominated by violence, fear, and death. Very few will find security within their own nations or abroad. Subjected to exclusionary bars or rigid interpretations of the particular social group ground for asylum, U.S. asylum law frequently functions to exclude those lucky few children who are able to escape their persecutors. Scholars writing on child soldiers and asylum law focus, almost exclusively, on the exclusionary bars and question of whether children are persecutors or victims of atrocities. These concerns are critical because how courts view child soldiers determines whether they will grant or deny asylum or withholding of deportation, however, child soldiers face further challenges to gaining admission to the U.S. This Note argues that courts must recognize children as targets of persecution by groups that systematically exploit them as child soldiers. Recognizing children as belonging to contextually-defined, particular social groups for the purposes of past persecution opens the door to grants of humanitarian asylum thereby providing another avenue of protection for children who have suffered lifealtering persecution and exploitation. I. THE PROFILE OF A CHILD SOLDIER 655 II. ASYLUM LAW OVERVIEW 659 A. Origins and Definitions 659 B. A Maelstrom of Precedent: Particular Social Group Case Law 662 C. Limited and Mixed: Child Soldiers in Asylum Law 665 III. AN INCOMPLETE DISCUSSION: SCHOLARSHIP ON CHILD SOLDIERS 670 IV. MOVING THE LAW FORWARD 672 A. Increasing Protection: The Benefits of Humanitarian Asylum 672 B. Recognizing the Truth and Filling the Gap: Particular Social Group for Past Persecution 672 C. Necessarily Conservative: How the Proposed Particular Social Group Addresses Courts’ Policy Concerns 675 V. LOST NO LONGER: LOOKING TO THE FUTURE 677 [T]he rebels fired rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), machine guns, AK-47s, G3s, all the weapons they had, directly into the clearing. But we knew we had no choice, we had to make it across the clearing because, as young boys, the risk of staying in town was greater for us than trying to escape. Young boys were immediately recruited, and the initials RUF were carved wherever pleased the rebels, with a hot bayonet. This not only meant that you were scarred for life but that you could never escape from them, because escaping with the carving of the rebels’ initials was asking for death . . . . 1 ∗ J.D., magna cum laude, Florida State University College of Law; MSc 2007 with merit in Social Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science; A.B. 2006, magna cum laude with high honors in Anthropology, Davidson College. I want to thank Professors Coonan and Adelson for their careful attention to and comments on this Note during its development, as well as for giving me the opportunity to be part of such an inspirational class. I would also like to thank my family and friends for their ever-present support and encouragement. Lastly, I would like to thank Nate Hill, Jon Harris Maurer, and the rest of Florida State University Law Review for their hard work and feedback. 1. ISHMAEL BEAH, A LONG WAY GONE: MEMOIRS OF A BOY SOLDIER 24 (2007). 654 FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 38:653 States should not contribute to the traumatization of the child by washing their hands of them though the process of exclusion from refugee status. 2 Ishmael Beah, the young boy running in the clearing in Sierra Leone, escaped the rebels that day. Yet, within the same year, the Sierra Leonean army forced Beah to join their forces. 3 On that day Beah became one of the estimated 300,000 child soldiers involved in combat worldwide. 4 For two years Beah was exploited and abused, though his story ends well. When Beah was fifteen UNICEF workers found and rescued him, beginning the long rehabilitation process. 5 Fleeing continued strife in Sierra Leone, Beah made his way to New York where he ultimately became an advocate for child soldiers, drawing much needed attention to this global crisis through his memoir, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. 6 Brought into the public consciousness by Beah’s memoir, child soldiers are once again in the foreground of the public landscape. The case of Omar Kadhr, a young man who was only fifteen years old when U.S. forces captured and detained him in Afghanistan, has brought the child soldier debate to an intersection with the so-called war on terror. 7 In 2003 Khadr “allegedly threw a grenade that killed a U.S. Special Forces medic”; his subsequent detention at the age of fifteen made him the youngest person the U.S. has or is currently detaining at Guantanamo. 8 The U.N. officially stated that Khadr should not be prosecuted because his family, active in al-Qaeda, indoctrinated the young man into their belief system. 9 As of February 2010 and over the protests of organizations such as Human Rights Watch and multiple amicus briefs, reports indicate the Obama Administration will proceed with a military tribunal trial of Khadr in July 2010. 10 Should the tribunal proceed, it will set negative 2. Geoff Gilbert, Current Issues in the Application of the Exclusion Clauses, in REFUGEE PROTECTION IN INTERNATIONAL LAW 425, 473 (Erika Feller et al. eds., 2003), available at http://www.unhcr.org/419dba514.html. 3. See BEAH, supra note 1, at 101-13. 4. UNICEF, Factsheet: Child Soldiers, www.unicef.org/emerg/files/childsoldiers.pdf (last visited July 2, 2011). 5. See BEAH, supra note 1, at 127-78. 6. Id. at 209-17. 7. See Peter Finn, Former Boy Soldier, Youngest Guantanamo Detainee, Heads Toward Military Tribunal, WASH. POST, Feb. 10, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/09/AR2010020904020.html. 8. Id.; see also Human Rights Watch, US: Improve Treatment of Children in Armed Conflict (June 6, 2008), http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2008/06/06/us-improve-treatment-childrenarmed-conflict (noting that there are other child soldiers detained at Guantanamo). 9. Finn, supra note 7. 10. Id.; see also Human Rights Watch, supra note 8; Brief for Nat’l Inst. Of Military Justice as Amicus Curiae Supporting Petitioner, Khadr v. Gates, No. 07-11J6 (D.C. Cir.