Genuine social inclusion or superficial co-existence? Former girl soldiers in eastern Congo returning home

Abstract

The article focuses on the social dimension of child soldier reintegration. It draws on an empirical qualitative study on former girl soldiers in eastern Congo, and examines how former girl soldiers fare with regard to social acceptance and re-inclusion into their families and communities. The article presents empirical data revealing that the girls experience social exclusion, stigmatisation and non-acceptance both within their families and within the wider community. It may, therefore, be argued that there is a superficial (physical) co-existence rather than a genuine social inclusion of girls returning home from armed forces or groups. The article's discussion draws attention to the weighting of the different dimensions of reintegration (social, economic, psychological) and argues that the social dimension, although receiving less attention in programming, should be what comes first in order to fulfil former child soldiers' right to reintegration.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.