The most disturbing aspect of this humanitarian crisis is the fact that this has been a war fought by children on children – minors, as young as eight, comprised an estimated 85% of the LRA’s soldiers. This is still true in today’s remaining LRA force.
 Since the LRA’s rebellion began in the 1980s, an estimated 66,000 children were abducted to work as child soldiers, porters, sex slaves, human shields, bait and/or to serve as “wives” of rebels. Abducted children were brutalized and forced to commit atrocities on civilians, fellow abductees and/or family members. This traumatized and implicated them in criminal acts, making them fearful to return to their communities. Those who attempted to escape were killed.
Girls also faced the added trauma of sexual slavery to senior LRA soldiers. Nearly 100% of formerly abducted girls and women contracted transmitted diseases. Many, who are now teen mothers, are parenting young children conceived by rape.
During the height of the conflict, streams of children, fearing abduction, left their villages every night to walk for hours to reach the relative safety of major towns, only to trek their way home or to school at first light. These 40,000 “night commuters” slept in schools, hospitals, or public areas to evade the snare of the LRA.
Displaced by war, the majority of the 1.6 million people displaced by the conflict still reside within the 105 internally displaced person (IDP) camps in Northern Uganda. One researcher wrote, “the emergency situation stretched over years or even decades, and inattention to schooling and economic activity risks losing a whole generation to poverty; while inattention to food and sanitation risks losing their lives.”
Today, 70% of IDP camp residents are children. 175,000 of these children are orphans. Approximately 1,200 Ugandan children are still being held by the LRA. In December of 2008, the LRA attacked several villages in the Haut-Uele Province, Democratic Republic of Congo, killing over 600 civilians, including children, as well as abducting several other Congolese children.
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