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Scars and Stripes: Liberian Youth After the War
During the 14-year civil war that tore apart Liberia, children were taken from their homes and sent to fight in an adult war.
When the fighting ended in 2003 the Liberian government began trying to demobilize the youth, offering cash and counseling programs aimed at rehabilitating the young people and preparing them to return to their communities. Sometimes they were sent back to their villages. Other times they stayed with their commanders and fellow fighters. The “lucky ones” were sent to the U.S. to live with relatives, many of them ending up in the Clifton neighborhood in Staten Island — home to one of the largest Liberian populations in the country.
Rehabilitation programs in Liberia not only provide skills training for the youth to try to help them earn a living, but also reunite them with their families. Every day is a struggle as the wars in Guinea and the Ivory Coast rage on and the youth learn they can make more money by fighting as mercenaries in those wars than by turning in their guns to the government.
In Staten Island, the situation is similar: The youth are given a cash stipend, short term counseling and schooling. But in the end they are left to make their own way adjusting to life in America and oftentimes getting caught up in a life of poverty and crime.
Reporter Ruthie Ackerman and photographer Andre Lambertson will travel from Staten Island to Liberia over the course of several weeks to examine the process of reintegrating — and ultimately rehabilitating — the youth on both sides of the ocean.
Related Pulitzer Center Reporting:
This project is part of the Pulitzer Gateway Women, Children and Crisis, an interactive educational portal that helps tell the stories of adversity and crime faced by women and children across the world. Women, Children and Crisis also includes reporting from Pulitzer projects Run or Hide? Seeking Refuge in Tanzania, Ghana's Kayayo: Reaching for a Better Life, Nepal: Olga's Girls, Iraq: Death of a Nation?, and The Roots of Ethnic Conflict in Eastern DRC.
Join the conversation by sharing your story about women and/or children in conflict. Learn more about the Pulitzer Center's Global Gateway.
Ruthie Ackerman
Ruthie Ackerman is a reporter based in Brooklyn, NY. Over the last several years, she has lived and worked around the world, including Africa, Argentina and Russia....
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Andre Lambertson
Andre Lambertson is an award winning photojournalist based in New York. His work ranges from the study of juvenile violence in America to sexual slavery in Sierra Leone....
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Naje Lataillade
Naje Lataillade is a Brooklyn based filmmaker whose work has found him traveling to a wide range of countries on projects as diverse as a fiction feature in Monterrey, Mexico, an experimental film in Oslo, Norway, and a social documentary in Santiago, Cuba, among others....
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Cease Fire Liberia - Ruthie Ackerman's new blog project
Children in Armed Conflict--U.N. article about the recruitment of child soldiers.
Liberia Uneasy Peace, a profile of Charles Taylor from a News Hour report.
Child Soldier--By Lansana Gberie, ZNet, May 6, 2007.
Stolen Kids Turned into Terrifying Killers--CNN report on children in conflicts around the world.
Cote d'Ivore Recruiting Liberian Ex-Child Soldiers--afrolNews, March 31, 2007.
Liberia’s Child Soldiers Struggle to Rebuild Lives--CNN International, August 31, 2003.
Too Small to Be Fighting in Anyone’s War--IRIN, December,
2003.