ED OU, CANADA
SOMALIA: CHILDREN IN ARMS
Internationally banned but still a mass phenomenon – not only in Africa: child soldiers. Children and adolescents are usually much easier to recruit than adults. They are often threatened with violence in order to make them join a military faction. In Somalia, the various militias have a total number of approx. 70,000 combatants. The number of children among these soldiers is growing. According to UNICEF, the militias sometimes even recruit 9-year-olds.
© Ed Ou/Getty Images
The affected children are usually recruited from poor families. The war has separated many of them from their parents and now they’re desperately looking for a substitute. Some may be looking for revenge because the enemy has killed their father, mother or siblings. Having a gun gives the boys power and social recognition they would otherwise never get. The mental and physical damage that they suffer will probably make them recruit and incite new young fighters themselves at some point in the future. To his distress, 23-year-old Canadian photographer Ed Ou found that this phenomenon can be seen among many young adults who were shaped by the civil war that began in 1991.
Curriculum Vitae: Ed Ou
© Ed Ou
Ed Ou is a culturally ambiguous Canadian photojournalist who has been bouncing around the Middle East, Africa, and the former Soviet Union.
His photography has so far taken him from dark eerie crypts in Madagascar, to radioactive lakes in Kazakhstan, refugee boats in the Gulf of Aden, to animatronic love doll factories in Tokyo.