The way she was justified, is the way we should judge her.
It has been a month since Swedish teenager, Greta Thunberg, stole the show at the United Nations with her passion, her outrage, and her person. What everyone agreed upon at the time was that she made people uncomfortable – and, of course, that was the idea!
It was the fizzing emotions and the smirk of disgust behind American President, Donald Trump’s, back that drew the camera to her alone, but she was in New York with an entourage: a line-up of fifteen other teenagers, from across the globe, with only two things in common – their climate activism and their age.
Filing a civil suit against five ‘large polluters’, all selected for their greenhouse gas emissions and their ratification of the third optional protocol to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the rich irony of the moment seemed to completely pass the audience by.
This protocol merely allows suits to be registered directly by children – and so there was no obvious gravity behind the actions themselves. And it’s not appropriate to expect those teenagers – Thunberg as their de facto leader – to understand exactly why they were there, why they had been chosen, and propelled into so unnatural of circumstances, so quickly… child soldiers rarely do.
The phenomena of children in combat – the real ones, with real weapons – only make strategic sense when you see them on the ground. There is little doubt children were first used in armed conflicts only as a desperate plan-B, simply because there weren’t enough available adults. But battlefield lessons are often the most quickly learnt.
With less developed personalities, and more vulnerable to influence, child soldiers are easier to recruit, cheaper to maintain, easier to manipulate, think less independently, and lack a true sense of fear and consequence.
So they are also more likely to follow orders, less likely to complain, more willing to undertake dangerous missions, tend to show more loyalty, respond more instinctively to the promises of reward or punishment, are more susceptible to group dynamics and promises of grandeur, and seek the comforts of family (with the military becoming a surrogate).
Children bring something unique to the table, something that unfortunately makes them incredibly effective military assets, and incredibly useful to the adult soldiers still in their ranks – they present a dilemma for the enemy.
It’s hard enough to ever get comfortable with the idea of killing another adult, even in self-defence. What happens then when you look down the rifle scope and see a child instead? Sure, they are uniformed, armed, and combat hardened, but in their face, their stature, and their voice, they are still very much a child, with everything that entails.
In short, child soldiers are effective exactly because they don’t play by the same rules. Do you hold your ground and engage them? Do you run away or surrender? Either way you lose!
This is why Greta Thunberg’s appearance at the United Nations was so effective and so unsettling at the same time. Most people – ordinarily deep in the opposing trenches of this conflict – suddenly didn’t know how to fight back… or even if they should. Those who did, suffered predictable battle wounds – accused of punching down, and bullying a teenager.
Her enemies were clearly rattled, but her allies should have been also. During her address – her voice quivering with outrage – Thunberg was angry, shaken, but above all fearful. You could feel the overwhelming weight of her burden – the long term environmental effects of climate change were being locked-in around her, and soon it would be her generation to bear the cost.
She was right to be worried! But just because a war is justified, it doesn’t then follow that children are justified in fighting it. All over the world today there are parents in desperate situations – with real world hardship and suffering at their door – looking down at their terrified sons and daughters, and instead choosing to force a smile, to lighten the mood, to change the subject; anything to distract from what is actually happening.
They are not in denial and they are not lying to their families – they are simply choosing to have the fight alone, so that their children can continue to be children.
Climate change inaction is the problem here, but it is not Greta Thunberg’s problem. The adults in her life have let her down. By her own account, Thunberg’s parents were resistant when she first started pushing them to lower their family’s carbon footprint. Eventually, of course, she won them around to their long denied ‘responsibility’ – increasing their recycling efforts, becoming vegans, and giving up commercial air travel.
Having recruited new soldiers to the fight, this should have been an end to the teenager’s tour of duty. Instead she was promoted and rearmed by various foundations, non-profits, and institutions like the United Nations.
It was visible then, and it is obvious still, that this is all taking its toll on Thunberg. In post-conflict zones across the world the physical and emotional consequences of battle on child soldiers is there to be seen. Forced into situations beyond their years, they are soon plagued by health issues such as depression, anxiety, and insomnia; not to mention extreme forms of post-traumatic stress disorder and life-long psychological distress.
Valued specifically for their youth, and so only useful in the short term, child soldiers – by what they are – burn out fast. At which point they are discarded and replaced by someone younger – someone with everything that was earlier prized in them. Damaged and no longer useful, they are dumped out into the sudden emptiness of real life – lost, confused, and a danger to themselves and others.
Seated in the audience, listening to Greta Thunberg’s own words - “This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here”, “how dare you”, “You have stolen my dreams” – it was amazing that no one glanced around at the chamber they were in, stood up, took the microphone from her hands, and gently eased her off stage.
This was the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, charged with upholding the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, and specifically these words: "the child, by reason of his [her] physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care”.