Yes. That's a great question.
I think that Mr. Dallaire has many things. He was in South Sudan recently and came back with recommendations.
What I was trying to say is that it's a very sophisticated mechanism, a cycle, what Senator Dallaire called an assembly line in terms of how they handle the whole child soldier thing. It's a whole ecosystem. What I was trying to say is, don't let them get into it in the first place.
If they are seized and they are grabbed, as happened a lot during the war, that can be a very difficult thing, but if girls are going because their parents can no longer feed them, or whatever it is, and they are hanging around the soldiers, the soldiers will use them for sex. They'll use them for cooking. They won't usually put a gun in their hand and get them to do it, but it becomes this whole support mechanism for the army.
There are many reasons why all that happened, but one of the main ones we're talking about is that development failed them. Because of the war or people moving on, they were no longer able to be fed in their own houses, go to school, or find medicines. The army has all that stuff, so they end up going with the army.
I talked about young men as well, a real problem there. There are no jobs for them and no real training for them. In a lot of areas there are no high schools. It's very difficult for them, so they hang around in gangs, mobilize, and move around. If the army comes by, they join up. Again, it doesn't mean that they'll become aggressive combatants, but it does mean they might clean the guns, get the ammo, do the cooking, or whatever.
I'm trying to encourage people to look at development as a way of minimizing the recruitment of child soldiers. It's not just that people go out there, grab them, and pull them in. These kids gather all around the military and the military just incorporates them as a result.
Development would stop a lot of that, if we gave it opportunity.