[X] My Assistant

[RunnerPaul]

Where is the corporate gain in providing these weapons to rival street gangs?

Live-fire field test data from an active combat zone so that R&D can make tweaks to next year's model? A large recruiting pool for not only the backroom legbreakers that are kept on the security payroll, but also for any "deniable assets" the corp may need to contract out?

And the arguments that the population would evaporate rapidly if the children were prolific killers are only vaild if the Barrens are considered to be a closed ecosystem, with the birthrate being the only source of new population. It's not. You also have to account for the fact that there is immigration from outside areas. While no one chooses to go live in the Barrens, for some people, life and circumstance make that choice for them. The Barrens is the dumping grounds for society, and as long as the success rate for living a good corporate wageslave life is less than 100%, society is always going to have people to dump.

[hyzmarca]

Recoil modifiers are sufficient to simulate the barrel rise which is unavoidable in automatic fire. Just because it doesn't knock people on their asses doesn't mean that it doesn't fowl aim. No one learns to fire a fully automatic weapon by holding down the trigger and spraying. Short controlled bursts are the norm for both adults and children.

SR doesn't impose extra recoil modifiers based on the size of the character firing, so it's good.

[Synner667]

And the arguments that the population would evaporate rapidly if the children were prolific killers are only vaild if the Barrens are considered to be a closed ecosystem, with the birthrate being the only source of new population. It's not. You also have to account for the fact that there is immigration from outside areas. While no one chooses to go live in the Barrens, for some people, life and circumstance make that choice for them. The Barrens is the dumping grounds for society, and as long as the success rate for living a good corporate wageslave life is less than 100%, society is always going to have people to dump.

Even worse, areas like the barrens "move around" - rich places get poor and suddenly there's no jobs for the people...
...It's the sort of bargaining tool that Corps like Dell use nowadays to keep getting kickbacks and preferential treatment from Cities [keep giving us a subsidy or we move, and those people are out of work and you lose the taxes]...
...Or the sort of thing that hits a city when their main business goes away - factory closes, coal no longer in vogue, etc.


There's a mention in one of the William Gibson books about a town that was laid out, but the developers didn't finish, so it's acres of building foundations and a few walls...
...And a few mentions in SR material about the changing fortunes of cities.

[Synner667]

RunnerPaul : "Un-numbered Hardcovers -- 1st & 2nd" ??

Care to explain how they're unnumbered ??

[RunnerPaul]

RunnerPaul : "Un-numbered Hardcovers -- 1st & 2nd" ??

Care to explain how they're unnumbered ??

The Explanation:
When FASA did hardcover first printings for First Edition and Second Edition, as far as I know, they were still full print runs, not small limited runs of just 1000 books each. As such, they did not go to the trouble to number them, put foil stamped leatherette covers on them or give them any other special treatment. Of course, since both First and Second Edition Shadowrun went into mutiple softcover printings of the core rulebook after that, the hardcovers are still rare in comparison, and a noteworthy prestige item.

Now an unnumbered Third or Fourth Edition limited print run hardcover, that'd be a true rarity. I seem to remember hearing someone had a few, but I don't recall who.

[Spike]

Money talks, and given a retail price of the cheapest assault rifle is 750 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) , and that the street value from a fixer is likely to be more than that, anyone who is living in the barrens is unlikely to have the funds available. If they did, they would no longer be gangers, they would be wannabe runners who are in the barrens out of choice.

See, This part doesn't ring true to me. Sure, that's how the rules present it, but... yeah.

Here is why: The guy selling you the guns? He didn't buy them for 750 bucks. If at all possible, he didn't buy them at all. Retail prices are for legitimate buyers and sellers, and illegitimate sellers have many problems to overcome. Shadowrun tends to present this in wonky ways, but we aren't necessarily limited to presentation to discuss reality.

A guy running illegal guns for profit into the barrens is going to minimize his costs. That means he's probably going to try and jack a shipment somewhere else. Cost to him? A few thousand dollars to pay for a runner team to steal hundreds of thousands in guns. Failing that, he'll buy them from someone ELSE who stole them, probably a corporate employee with a side gig. That guy certainly didn't pay for them, he doesn't care about the actual value of the guns per unit, just is the payoff worth the risk. The LAST resort is to buy under the table from the legitimate owners of the guns who want to unload excess stock and don't want it to be known. They will at best sell for cost, which may be as much as half the value of the guns. More than that and the guy won't bother, the cost out of pocket is too high for an illegal transaction he can get from another supplier.

Now, he has a problem of a sort. He's got a bunch of stuff he ain't supposed to have. He wants to get rid of it, and he wants to make a decent profit. Aside from that he's pretty good. He'd LIKE to sell the guns for many times their value, really he would.

But: the vast majority of his potential buyers can't afford to spend 2k for a gun. Even if they COULD afford that, there are other people selling them guns, and if his prices are vastly inflated he can't sell anything at all, leaving him holding a stock of shit he really doesn't want to keep. And since THOSE buyers didn't pay anything close to full price for the guns EITHER? Yeah, the cost of black market guns should actually be LOWER than legitimate sources, not higher. The reason availability works the way it does in Shadowrun is a metagame control on players, and a sloppy one at that, not a real world reflection of urban violence or even a particularly good portrayal of an even remotely dystopian view of the future...

[Spike]

And the arguments that the population would evaporate rapidly if the children were prolific killers are only vaild if the Barrens are considered to be a closed ecosystem, with the birthrate being the only source of new population. It's not. You also have to account for the fact that there is immigration from outside areas. While no one chooses to go live in the Barrens, for some people, life and circumstance make that choice for them. The Barrens is the dumping grounds for society, and as long as the success rate for living a good corporate wageslave life is less than 100%, society is always going to have people to dump.

Actually I think there is a bigger factor that got ignored. Hyzmarca's numbers were built from the extremely flawed premise that those who were killed must have themselves killed someone as well. At worst, if every memeber of a given generation killed someone (and this assumes 100% rather than a statistical 'everyone' in the 80% and up catagory, AND assumes that all kills were necessarily solo kills, rather than allowing for group kills) every generation is merely halved. Given that orc 'litters' tend to range from 4 and up, orcs, at least, can keep a population GROWTH when taken in isolation. Given that an orc mother could have several litters this sort of lethality is almost required to keep the population from outstripping the available resources.

That is to say: IF Two orcs produce 8 children in their lifetime. The orc children that raise to adulthood do so by killing their brethen. If every surviving orc child killed one other orc child, then those two Orcs still can produce 4 surviving children. Reasonably, every orc is a killer and their population is still at risk of doubling every 12 years or so. Note also that by age 14 orcs are no longer children in any meaningful way, not even within orc culture. At worst they are young adults. Their shorter lifespan, at least in the novels I read and from common sense are also reflected in the fact that they have abbreviated childhoods. They live faster, if you will...

Editted to add::: 'If' for clarity.

[Sir_Psycho]

I am however almost positive that there are no functioning trains in the Barrens. Or are you talking about a train that runs from great Seattle towards the "entrance" of the Barrens?

I was talking more about Touristville, which is a crappy place, but it still has infrastructure. Maybe there's a station further in, but not by much.

I always imagine the barrens in it's worst places to be a bit like S.T.A.L.K.E.R's abandoned urban zones, but more populated with squatters huddling everywhere, dying where they sit.

[WearzManySkins]

Actually I think there is a bigger factor that got ignored. Hyzmarca's numbers were built from the extremely flawed premise that those who were killed must have themselves killed someone as well. At worst, if every memeber of a given generation killed someone (and this assumes 100% rather than a statistical 'everyone' in the 80% and up catagory, AND assumes that all kills were necessarily solo kills, rather than allowing for group kills) every generation is merely halved. Given that orc 'litters' tend to range from 4 and up, orcs, at least, can keep a population GROWTH when taken in isolation. Given that an orc mother could have several litters this sort of lethality is almost required to keep the population from outstripping the available resources.

That is to say: IF Two orcs produce 8 children in their lifetime. The orc children that raise to adulthood do so by killing their brethen. If every surviving orc child killed one other orc child, then those two Orcs still can produce 4 surviving children. Reasonably, every orc is a killer and their population is still at risk of doubling every 12 years or so. Note also that by age 14 orcs are no longer children in any meaningful way, not even within orc culture. At worst they are young adults. Their shorter lifespan, at least in the novels I read and from common sense are also reflected in the fact that they have abbreviated childhoods. They live faster, if you will...

Editted to add::: 'If' for clarity.

Actually the number you should be looking at is 62 breeding females in the life time of one of the original URGed ork female this is on the premise that only one female of each birthing set of 4 survives to breeding age, the males are not counted in this number, males are not important ie one male can impregnate many generations. But if you like double the number to reflect one surviving male ork of each birth set. Do the math from that point, the world would be carpeted in orks. Besides the fact that by those numbers and birth rate, female orks have better food digestion/processing than most bioware and cyberware enhancements. Another brain fart by the devs and freelancers, one of many. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

WMS

[CanRay]

RE: Gun Prices...

Also bear in mind that the guns that Shadowrunners are buying are top-of-the-line, in good condition pieces. 'Runners know good hardware, and, if they don't, they get caught/dead very quickly.

For a knock-off, or badly abused weapon, prices go down real fast.

Also, who is trading MONEY? CredSticks may be the norm for people moving in and out of society all the time, but hard cash is more difficult to come by (Unless you're deal with UCAS Dollars, but, please, who does THAT?).

Say you got a gang of kids doing a few Smash-And-Grabs at a couple of stores. Get one old and large enough to operate a stolen van. Takes it to a fixer, loaded with... Oh... Toasters loaded with Memory Space (YAY! Matrix 2.0, everything has memory space!). For every twenty toasters, he passes over a bad Afganistan knockoff of an AK-97 he picked up as a bonus on a deal with some Drug Smugglers, and a lot of ammo and banana magazines for the truck.

Then gets a Courier to drive the van to a drop-point for Da Foist Bank A Tony, who then offers a deal, a free toaster with every 100 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) deposited in a chequing account! Said Fixer gets rid of some hot hardware he never wanted in the first place, makes good with one of the Organized Crime groups (Better than cash in some ways!), and said OC group is able to increase profit with their black bank account, and Hackers are able to build a Memory Farm using a series of RAID Toasters.

The van is then retrofitted for smuggling, and is used to courier Bliss to the Cascade Orks, and California Hots BTLs back.

Hense, the Shadow Economy of trade is born.

[Snow_Fox]

By bringing in kids you get them early inculcated to the society, them ilitary becomes their world and they are firecly loyal to it. That goes back to Sparta. But I do wonder with orks and trolls who mature in 10-14 years. Notas emotionally mature as elves or humans, who mature in 17-20 years wouldn't bringing orks into the military/police be the equivelant of child soldiers?

[hyzmarca]

Actually I think there is a bigger factor that got ignored. Hyzmarca's numbers were built from the extremely flawed premise that those who were killed must have themselves killed someone as well. At worst, if every memeber of a given generation killed someone (and this assumes 100% rather than a statistical 'everyone' in the 80% and up catagory, AND assumes that all kills were necessarily solo kills, rather than allowing for group kills) every generation is merely halved. Given that orc 'litters' tend to range from 4 and up, orcs, at least, can keep a population GROWTH when taken in isolation. Given that an orc mother could have several litters this sort of lethality is almost required to keep the population from outstripping the available resources.

It is also extremely flawed to assume that none of the dead have killed and that each killer kills only one person. And I also took into account the possibility that someone might kill a fraction of a person.

[Critias]

Actually child with guns, just like most people with guns but without any military training, usually don't kill to many other people. I've read a paper explaining that killing isn't that easy, even with guns and even for uneducated people. Most of the time, they'll shoot above their target rather than directly at them.

That's partially because quite a few untrained citizens of third-world crapholes around the world thing the range-adjustable sights on a rifle are a "power meter" like for a laser gun, rather than grasping that it adjusts the angle of the sights (and as such, the angle of your point of aim to compensate for range).

The knob on the rear sight of an AK has a slide to take it from 100 to (a very optimistic) 1000 meters. You slide the knob up and down to raise and lower the sight...and I know from several of my friends who've tried to help train Iraqis (and then looked into it, since, and heard the same complaint from some folks who tried to train various African soldiers as well) that that 100-1000 meters thing is seen by many untrained shooters as a power adjustment, not a range adjustment.

So they go into every fight all hopped up on khat or something, crank the little knob up to 1,000 meters because hell yeah they want to shoot really hard and they want the bullets to come out really fast, and then if/when they both to aim they're sighting in as if their target were ten or fifteen times farther away than it really is, plus they fire too fast because they're all hyped up on adrenaline even if nothing else, so pwing-pwing-pwing, they aim high to start with and they have all sorts of barrel raise from recoil, and most shots go high.

Not because they find it morally repugnant to kill, and as such are aiming high on purpose -- but because they're bad shots.

[imperialus]

That's pretty interesting Critias. I hadn't heard of that before.

Also might help explain some of the stories I've heard from my father out of Yemen. I guess the only times the various warring tribes ever manage to do serious damage to each other is when they're shooting at each other, literally from across the street.

That said though, shouldn't underestimate the damage an automatic weapon can cause. He told me a story once of a wedding where everyone was firing their guns in the air, some old boy had a stroke and dropped dead with his finger still pulling the trigger. I think the body count was somewhere around 6 or 7 dead plus a dozen or so wounded.

[hyzmarca]

The observation that many soldiers are reluctant to actually kill dates back to the American Civil War, when the weapons of many dead soldiers were found to contain multiple rounds indicating that the soldiers who wielded them reloaded multiple times without firing. The soldiers had training but they didn't have what it took to actually fire. In this case, the natural human tendency to avoid killing one's own kind was exacerbated by the fact that they were fighting there own brothers - some literally so. The fact that Western civilization acculturates people to avoid killing other people didn't help matters.

In various war-torn regions history of ethnic and tribal conflict help this problem greatly. There is often a very clear us vs them mentality and it is generally alright to kill them.

[Synner667]

The observation that many soldiers are reluctant to actually kill dates back to the American Civil War

I suspect that a soldier's reluctance to kill may date back further, by a few thousand years...
...As I'm sure there were wars before America (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

The best quote I remember about soldiers...
..."Soldiers do what ordinary men cannot or will not"

[hyzmarca]

I suspect that a soldier's reluctance to kill may date back further, by a few thousand years...
...As I'm sure there were wars before America (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Probably, but that is when it was first observed and studied.

[Synner667]

The Explanation:
When FASA did hardcover first printings for First Edition and Second Edition, as far as I know, they were still full print runs, not small limited runs of just 1000 books each. As such, they did not go to the trouble to number them, put foil stamped leatherette covers on them or give them any other special treatment. Of course, since both First and Second Edition Shadowrun went into mutiple softcover printings of the core rulebook after that, the hardcovers are still rare in comparison, and a noteworthy prestige item.

Now an unnumbered Third or Fourth Edition limited print run hardcover, that'd be a true rarity. I seem to remember hearing someone had a few, but I don't recall who.

Wow !!

I never knew that...
...Though I do remember one of the staff at a RPG shop talking about limited edition SR 2nd Ed Rulebooks

I would imagine they might have been produced for GenCon, or similar, for the Developers to use and show off the game

[Critias]

Yeah, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying the "power meter" range adjustment on an AK is the only reason anyone ever shoots high. I just thought (a) it was kind of a weird/funny story, and (b) in many cases there's more to a miss than someone being reluctant to take a life.

I heard about soldiers in WWI and WWII (not sure how true the stories were) that would, indeed, go out of their way to fire high. To their buddies it still looked like they were a-shootin' at some Krauts, but they didn't lose sleep over having directly taken a life. I'd heard the Civil War thing, too (with multiple balls loaded into a rifle), but it might've just come up here before (in any case, it's always a neat read, Hyz).

However, Hyzmarca is also correct in that much of that reluctance comes from upbringing. I'd, in fact, wager there is no ingrained automatic reflex against killing another member of the species. It's taught. You're raised to respect human life, you hear "thou shalt not kill" enough times, you see murderers on TV as bad guys enough times, you read enough about Batman and Superman never killing anyone no matter what -- and eventually it's gonna sink in that there's something just innately wrong with ever taking the life of another human being.

If you're raised, instead, to know that everything that's wrong with your life is the fault of those fucksticks in the next village, you'll have a whole different idea of what counts as a human life and what doesn't. If you're raised in abject poverty amidst a ridiculously high starvation rate you might not think a single life is worth much. If you're told over and over again that you're hungry because Warlord X (from that next village) stole your food, and you're only alive because Warlord Y fed you, that'll influence your thinking, too. If you're told your water is bad because the tribe next door ruins it, you'll likely not think too highly of the next tribe over. And if Warlord Y finally gives you a man's weapon, a mouthful of stimulants, calls you a brave warrior of your people, and finally lets you loose at the ripe old age of 10 at those Warlord X assholes from the village/tribe upriver a little bit...

...Well, I imagine if you aim high it's got more to do with poor marksmanship, by that point, than with not wanting to kill anyone because you believe every person is a precious individual snowflake and every life is a sacred thing worth preserving at any cost.

[Fuchs]

I think the multiple bullets in a civil war rifle were more the result of a misfire which the soldier did not notice in the heat of the battle, and kept "reloading".

[hyzmarca]

An ingrained distaste for killing one's own kind is a necessary prerequisite for any social species. Without it, society can't develop. Everyone would be like shark siblings eating each other in their mother's womb. Interaction between individuals would be so dangerous that it would be limited to procreation. Social animals can do some messed up crap, but they all tend to avoid killing within their own group.

This is limited by how one defines their own social group but in human beings this definition is very easily malleable as demonstrated by the phenomenon of capture bonding. The thing is that as soon as you talk to another person then it becomes substantially more difficult to kill that person, unless that person is a total jackass in which case it becomes substantially easier. In the case of various genocides in recent history, authoritarian command and peer pressure were required to overcome the natural reluctance to kill the friends and neighbors who are socialized with daily and even then it was rarely perfect.

And genocides are rarely perpetrated against fucks that you never interact with. Usually, they are against friends and neighbors that you've known since childhood and with whom you have a very good relationship. You might even be married to one of them. They're people who are are generally socialized to not kill. And then one day someone says that it is your duty to kill them.

Culture is a part of it, but it is much more than just culture. It's human nature, both to feel bad about killing people and to go out and kill people with your buddies.

It happens even in societies that have strong prohibitions against killing. Gangs of "happy slappers" sometimes beat people to death in Britain just for the hell of it. Every one of them individually believes that murder is wrong, but when you put them into a group they drive each other on.


And Superman and Batman are both morons. This was pretty well proven in the 90s when ultra-violent anti-heroes became popular. The Joker can only break out of Arkham and murder hundreds of people so many times before people start getting the idea that this code against killing might not be such a good thing after all.

[DocTaotsu]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDlodGEp_9o...feature=related
You'll notice in this video, however, that her pistol fails to cycle on two occasions which indicates that her she is "limp wristing", her grip is insufficiently firm to provide a reliable normal force to the recoil, causing the body of the pistol to travel back along with the slide. As a result, the slide only travels a short distance relative to the pistol when it must travel fully back to properly cycle. This is a problem for many adults, as well, and can be handled with training but I imagine that it is more of a problem with children.

The notes underneath video say that they put dud training rounds into her stack so she'd have to clear her weapon due to "malfunctions".
That's uhm... cool and insane at the same time. But hey, might as well train correctly from the beginning I guess.



As was pointed out in the Grossmanian Killer thread some months back, the military has done a great deal of research on this matter and most of our training is specifically geared towards overcoming the natural "Killing is bad!" reflex.

The group mind mentioned above is something that we're trained to obey. By living, eating, and training with your unit for years you instill a sense of unit cohesion. Essentially the guy to your left and right is more "real" than anyone else out there, especially the enemy who is trying to kill the fuck out of you, and even worse, that guy or gal you count as your family. The line I like quoting is from a guy who had recently returned from a combat tour. "I love my wife, I love my children. But they didn't got to the Desert with me." That speaks of a social dynamic that most of us will never fully understand. Ask a guy to murder a person because Uncle Sams so and most of them will flip you off, ask him to do it because his buddies need him to do it for THEM and he might very well do it without a second thought. Of course this is a behavior that has to be carefully managed, there are some terrible atrocities that have been committed because five guys got together and collectively decided it was a good idea to do something utterly insane. I can't remember the term but it's like collective reasoning or something, it's the act of splitting responsibility between a number of individuals so no one person has to bear the full responsibility of taking a course of action. Kind of like how firing squads have multiple shooters so that no single person is burdened with the knowledge that they ended another persons life.

[Fuchs]

Mob mind? Not that a mob has a mind, usually.

[DocTaotsu]

Actually I'd say, without evidence at the moment, that mobs really do have minds. A single idea can propagate rapidly through a group of people and cause some very dramatic shifts in behavior.

Off the top of my head I recall some mathematically research that was done on the dynamics of applause. All these people clapping their hands together actually synchronize on their own, shift and than resynchronize without anyone directing them. I've heard people in drumming circle exhibit similar behavior.

[Chrysalis]

Government armed forces which used children in armed conflicts

The number of governments that used children in armed conflict only marginally declined – down from 10 in the period 2001-2004 to nine in 2004-2007.
In Myanmar boys below the age of 18 continued to be forcibly recruited into the army in large numbers and were used in active combat as well as other roles. Children also took direct part in hostilities in government armed forces in Chad, the DRC, Somalia, Sudan/Southern Sudan and Uganda. In addition, there were reports that the Yemeni armed forces used children in fighting against a militia in early 2007. The Israeli defence forces used Palestinian children as human shields on several occasions. A number of under-18s were deployed to Iraq by the British armed forces between 2003 and 2005, although most were removed from the theatre of war within a week of their arrival.

At least 14 governments also recruited, and in some cases used in hostilities, children in auxiliary forces, civilian defence groups or in illegal militias and armed groups acting as proxies for official armed forces. These included Chad, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire, the DRC, India, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Peru, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Uganda and Zimbabwe. In Burundi, Colombia, the DRC, India, Indonesia, Israel, Nepal and Uganda children – often captured, surrendered or escaped from armed groups - were also used as spies, informants or messengers.

The recruitment and use of children by non-state armed groups

The vast majority of child soldiers are in the ranks of non-state armed groups. Dozens of armed groups in at least 24 countries have recruited under-18s and many have used them in hostilities.

Armed groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) in Colombia, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda are well known for having recruited and used children over many years. Others receive less international attention. In southern Thailand the separatist group National Revolution Front-Coordinate (BRN-C) recruits under-18s and uses them in various roles including propaganda and in support of military operations. In India, child recruitment by Maoist groups is reported to have increased since 2005 and there were persistent reports of child soldier use by groups in Jammu and Kashmir and northeastern states. In the Philippines and Myanmar children are associated with armed groups involved in protracted low-level conflicts with state forces.

In countries such as Central African Republic and Chad there are numerous irregular groups which are characterized by unclear, shifting alliances and activities that are often more criminal than political. In situations such as Kenya and Nigeria criminal groups involving children have been used for political purposes. In Afghanistan, Iraq, the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Pakistan, children were used by armed groups in suicide attacks.

-Child Soldiers Global Report 2008
http://www.childsoldiersglobalreport.org

---

“The army does recruit children.
Because we don’t have enough soldiers,
recruitment takes place twice a year and,
until the necessary strength is reached,
all those who come forward are enlisted,
whatever their age may be.�
A soldier, Burundi, May 2002.2

“I was detained on 18 March 2003… We
are in a very small room with 11 people…
We are allowed to use the bathroom only
three times a day at specific times. Once
a week we are allowed to take a 30-
minute recess. The prison guards force
us into shabeh position: they tie our
hands up and one leg and then we have
to face the wall.�
A 15-year-old boy, describing conditions
at Bet El detention centre in an Israeli
settlement outside Ramallah.7 Most
Palestinian children in the Occupied
Territories who are detained on suspicion
of involvement in armed attacks are held
in facilities for adults, treated as adults in
law, and denied the protection offered to
other young people under 18 years of age
in Israel and in Israeli settlements.

“I had to run away to a forest with my
friend to join the underground. I was 14
when I first held a gun in my hands. I
love to go to school but for the poverty
of my family I have to lift a gun. Now I am
earning enough money with the help of
the gun for myself and can send money
for my family also. “
Boy aged 16, Northeast India

Girls in South and Southeast Asia
reportedly joined up to escape domestic
servitude, forced marriages and other
forms of gender-based discrimination.
“I left home and joined the NPA because
I wanted to run away from my family’s
noise and I hated getting hurt.�
Sonia, Philippines.

-Child Soldiers Global Report 2004
http://www.child-soldiers.org/document/get?id=966


Recommended reading:
Returning Home - Children's perspectives on reintegration - A case study of children abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army in Teso, eastern Uganda - February 2008
http://www.child-soldiers.org/document/get?id=1299

Action for the Rights of Children (ARC): Critical Issues - Child Soldiers - September 2002
http://www.unhcr.org/protect/PROTECTION/3f83de714.pdf

Ancillary bibliographic references:
Bibliography on approaching armed groups - Child Soldiers Coalition - December 2006
http://www.child-soldiers.org/document/get?id=1167