(Al Jazeera) – “Pain at sunrise, regrets at sunset – dawn or dusk, life isn’t fair anymore.” These are lines from a poem written by Betty Ejang, a former child soldier with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Thanks to the infamous KONY 2012 campaign you probably now know that the LRA abducted more than 30,000 children from their Ugandan homes in a conflict that spanned two decades. You will have heard how these boys and girls – some as young as six – were beaten, raped and forced to loot and kill. A childhood interrupted, a childhood lost. But having worked with more than 40 female former child soldiers since 2011, I can tell you that is not the whole story. More than a quarter – approximately 8,000 – of these abductees were young girls like Betty. Contrary to the popularised image of the child soldier as a teenage boy gripping a Kalashnikov, female abductees also fought in the conflict, sometimes running into battle with their babies strapped to their backs.
