The situation is also critical for girl soldiers across Asia. In South and Southeast Asia, girls joined armed groups often to flee a life of domestic servitude, forced marriage, and other forms of gender-based abuse. In Sri Lanka, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) separatist insurgency has had, some 43 percent or 21,500 of the 51,000 child soldiers involved in the conflict are girls, according to Forgotten Casualties of War: Girls in Armed Conflict. Over the last decade in the Philippines, girls are often used to recruit as soldiers in the various guerrilla insurgencies have been active for decades in the country. As well girls have been forced into marriages with combatants in the conflicts in Afghanistan. The Maoist People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forcibly recruited some 2,000–4,000 children between 1996 and 2004 via abducting them from schools and subjecting them to political indoctrination, arms training, and then deployed in combat zones or used in other support roles; a number of which were girl who in many cases reported sexual abuse according to the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers.
Guerrilla and paramilitary groups in Central and Latin America have used child soldiers, including girls, primarily from peasant and indigenous groups by force or coercion since the 1960s. In the 1980s and 1990s in Peru the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrilla group had a rate of girls in the ranks, some forcibly recruited; and the various guerrilla and revolutionary groups in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua included girl soldiers. As many of these conflicts end girls child soldiers have been lured into youth gangs, many of which have sought to escape poverty, conflict, and/or reprisals by state security forces and paramilitaries. Such as in Colombia, were approximately 14,000 child soldiers recruited by paramilitary and armed opposition groups, such as FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, or National Liberation Army) which had up to 50 percent of all recruits being women and girls. In 2001 a United Nations official condemned the use of more than 2,500 girl soldiers, primarily in the FARC, and their rape and sexual abuse by commanders, many of which were often forced to use contraceptives and have abortions (Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers).
Part 2