According to the United Nations, grave violations are currently taking place against children and youth in more than twenty war-affected countries. This ongoing problem is being highlighted this year during the UN International Year of Youth.

Forcing children into the killing fields is one of the most despicable of human rights violations, and it’s a problem that impacts all of us.   While there are things individuals can do to help stop the use of child combatants, the United Nations is expanding its efforts to protect war-affected children.

The UN’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict – Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy – works with the General Assembly, the Security Council, regional organizations and bilateral contacts to garner political will from the international community to effectively protect war-affected children.  In addition, UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations has incorporated children’s issues into its work.

Coomaraswamy’s “Zero under Eighteen” campaign aims to achieve by 2012 the universal ratification of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, which condemns the use of child combatants.

In June 2010, the UN Security Council expressed its readiness to impose asset freezing, arms embargoes and travel restrictions against persistent violators who recruit and abuse children in war.

In the United States, the Child Soldiers Accountability Act allows the U.S. government to prosecute persons in the United States who have knowingly recruited or used children as child soldiers, even if the children were recruited or served as soldiers outside the United States.

What do you think it will take for governments to get serious about ending the use of child soldiers?