recruitment age
The Armed Forces: time for change
24/01/2011The Friend
The present recruitment age of sixteen is too young to enter full time military training. If you are not old enough to vote, buy a pint in a pub, to ride a motorbike or even to buy fireworks are you not also too young to join the army?
Informed Choice? Armed forces recruitment practice in the United Kingdom
November 2007
An independent report by David Gee, published in 2007, highlighting the risks posed to young people through joining the military, how young people from disadvantaged communities are targeted, how information available to potential recruits is often misleading and how the terms of service are complicated, confusing and severely restricting. The research found that a large proportion join for negative reasons, including the lack of civilian career options.
Parliament urged to end UK’s recruitment of ‘child soldiers’
10/01/2011Ekklesia
Children and young people's rights groups are calling for a change in the law to end the recruitment of 16 and 17-year-olds into the UK armed forces.
UK Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights report on Children’s Rights
November 2009
In their report on Children's Rights, the UK Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights recommended that the 'UK adopt a plan of action for implementing the Optional Protocol, including these recommendations, fully in the UK, together with a clear timetable for doing so.' The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child recommendations under the Optional Protocol were that the UK 'reconsider its active policy of recruitment of children into the armed forces' and a number of other measures.
United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict
October 2008
The UK remains the only EU country to recruit 16 year olds into the military and one of very few EU countries to recruit 17 year olds. The UK has signed the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict yet there is evidence that the UK continues to target children from vulnerable groups and that safeguards to protect under-18s are not effective.
Britain’s child army
20/10/2010New Statesman
New Statesman
“Stricken by Iraq and low morale, the British army is on a desperate recruitment drive. Its new targets? Poorly educated teenagers and young schoolchildren.” This article looks at new recruitment techniques such as the Camoflage scheme, which includes a magazine and website designed for those as young as 13, MoD school presentation teams and various forms of ‘outreach’. “Our new model is about raising awareness, and that takes a ten-year span. It starts with a seven-year-old boy seeing a parachutist at an air show and thinking, 'That looks great.' From then the army is trying to build interest by drip, drip, drip."