When Young Girls are Forced to Go to War
THE FIRST TIME MARTHA WAS FORCED TO KILL, she was just 10 years old. The long steel machete in her hands dwarfed her slight 4-foot frame as she was ordered to decapitate a villager. Only the night before, men in dark uniforms had plucked her from her bed at home in northern Uganda, tied her with rope and dragged her into a forest. Behind her trailed the rat-tat-tat of bullets, piercing shrieks, the stench of burning flesh.
By the time she was 13, Martha’s captors, part of a Ugandan militia group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), had forced her to decapitate several other people, beat an infant to death on a tree and participate in attacks on numerous villages. She witnessed commanders punish defiant children by hacking off their limbs, piercing their lips with metal padlocks and making them sleep on dead bodies. Together with other abductees of the LRA, which a UNICEF study found had kidnapped more than 66,000 children between 1986 and 2005, Martha lived in the forest, surviving days without food and enduring daily beatings. She dreamed of escaping. Of finally returning home.
A little girl like Martha is
