Browsing by Author "Orengo, Carita"

Children have participated in wars throughout history. Even today there are hundreds of thousands of child soldiers around the world despite international prohibitions. Whereas research of former child soldiers in their home countries indicates that participating in war negatively affects their social, emotional, psychological, and physical well-being, little is known about the challenges they face when forcibly migrating to the West. This vulnerable group has not only experienced the major transition from a military to a civilian environment but also that of entering a new culture. Due to the dearth of research on their lives in a new culture, it is necessary to learn more about this particular group in order to provide assistance which coincides better with their specific needs. The aim of this social psychological study was to learn how five former child soldiers from Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Somalia, and El Salvador, respectively, described their experiences of having been child soldiers and having lived in Finland or Sweden. Open ended interviews were conducted to gather these descriptions. Both their subjective and shared experiences were examined using Giorgi’s descriptive phenomenological method, which emphasizes the significance of human experiences and allows the researcher to remain open to the participants’ descriptions without imposing formal theories on them. The findings of this study suggest a temporal and thematic structure of the phenomenon of child soldiery, which includes their experiences of refuge in Finland/Sweden. The results also support previous research of former child soldiers and cross-cultural psychological research of refugees and immigrants in acculturation. Overall, the experience of child soldiery meant forced or voluntary separation from family, multiple losses, lack of control and other hardships. It also had a strong emotional aspect, both negative and positive. While all faced various struggles in the aftermath of war, some continued to behave according to the practices they had learned in the armed group while others behaved pro-socially, both when reintegrating to civil society and adapting to a new culture. For most participants the encounter with a new culture largely amplified the traumas they had experienced as child soldiers.