Nonviolence: The powerful antidote to youth recruitment to gangs, terrorists, and the US Military

bYoung people protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. File is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Pax Ahimsa Gethen.

by Alice LoCicero

Terrorists, gangs, and the US military recruit youth and train them to be violent. Each time a young person is recruited to violence, one or more adults benefit, but the youth and their families pay the price.[1]

The US military, for example, recruits in high schools—typically high schools serving poor families. The myth perpetrated is that the youth have no other options—or that this is their best option.

However, even the distant benefits that may accrue after the youth have put themselves in harm’s way with one or more deployments to one of the current wars, the rosy picture presented by recruiters is often not fulfilled. About 21% of those discharged from the military in recent years did not receive honorable discharges[2], leaving them at risk of not getting all of the veterans’ benefits expected.[3]

Many communities and organizations work against youth being recruited to violence.[4] While these organizations hold a moral high ground in their respect and advocacy for youth, they lack the power and financial resources of the US military. That power and those resources enhance recruitment through formal advertising and informal infiltration of schools, video games, and community events– including family and sports events.[5]

Perhaps the most powerful antidote to recruitment to violence is not resisting recruitment, but instead welcoming recruitment to non-violence. This became clear to me recently during several days at the Standing Rock encampment.

Hearing young people speak about their experiences there, I reflected on the power of nonviolence in a variety of 20th and 21st century movements: The US civil rights and anti-war movements, the nonviolent civil disobedience by Gandhi and his followers, and now the nonviolent actions at Standing Rock.

To fully understand this alternative, one must realize that nonviolence is not simply the absence of violence, which might seem to be associated with weakness. Rather nonviolence is a positive approach, requiring strength, training, and discipline based on a positive philosophy of resistance to injustice and insistence on change.

What would it be like if non-Native communities in the US followed the lead of the Water Protectors at Standing Rock?

 What if there were groups recruiting youth to set things right with society through active non-violence? Surely there are youth all over this country who are well-aware of the injustices in their own communities. What if there were elders from those communities who were prepared to lead resistance groups?

Let’s start a discussion about this.

References

[1] LoCicero, A. (2010) The hidden economics of youth violence. The New Renaissance.

[2] http://www.scpr.org/news/2015/09/29/54696/minor-infractions-in-uniform-keep-thousands-of-vet/

[3] https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/1039945/dod-announces-new-outreach-efforts-to-veterans-regarding-discharges-and-militar (The Department of Defense has recently recognized that some of the veterans who received less than honorable discharges had behavioral infractions associated with PTSD, and has proactively reached out to those veterans and others to inform them of the possibility of review of status.)

[4] For example, the American Friends Service Committee and the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth.

[5] LoCicero, A. (2016) Resisting Recruitment, Unpublished presentation to the American Psychological Assocation.

In harm’s way: women in the military

We wrote in our last post about rape as a weapon of war—a weapon that is used all too often by servicemen against women serving in their own military. Today we focus more on the effects of military service on women.

Some facts:

Casualties

  • 104 U.S. servicewomen, 33 of them only 18 years old, have been killed in Iraq (as of December 2011). See their faces and learn about them here.
  • Thirty-six servicewomen have been killed in Afghanistan—along with hundreds if not thousands of Afghan women and children (as of August 24, 2012).

Mental illness

Homelessness

Limited access to benefits

Many servicemen and male veterans are also mistreated both while in the service and after discharge; we will consider some of those issues in a later post.

What does it reveal about a country when women are praised as patriots for volunteering for military service, sexually abused while in the service, and then become mentally ill and homeless following that service? What does it reveal about the current situation in our country when many working class women believe the only way they can get enough training and job experience to support themselves and a family is to put themselves in harm’s way?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

War costs money*

*and it’s OUR money.

During the past month, Engaging Peace has offered a number of perspectives on the financial aspects of war.  Some highlights:

  • The true costs of war are difficult to determine because of the intricacies of federal budgeting and accounting, as well as the use of deficit spending
  • Some of the financial impacts of war will occur in the future, due to veterans’ benefits and social costs to families of returning service people
  • Aside from the direct costs, war has a generalized negative effect on the economy, as seen in fewer jobs, increased debt, diversion of money from health care, education, environment, and other domestic needs
  • War tax resistance is a method that some have used to protest the funding of war by tax dollars

Despite the challenges of determining the accurate costs of war, totals for the Iraq war alone are estimated to be as high as $4-6 trillion.

To learn more specifics about the costs to the U.S., check out the Costs of War project.  For perspective from the U.K., watch a video on the economic impact of Britain’s involvement in U.S.-led wars.

You might wonder who is paying the taxes that support the war machine. It’s ordinary people like you and me–and not the most wealthy or the corporations that often profit from war efforts.

As an outgrowth of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a number of groups across the U.S. are calling attention to inequities in our tax structure–specifically the low tax rates paid by the 1%. For example, in Boston, a Tax Day march and rally on April 17 will be based on the message “Corporations and the 1%: Pay your taxes! Fund our communities!” Minneapolis, San Francisco, and other communities have also focused attention on these disparities.

The world economy is hurting. The pocketbooks and bank accounts of ordinary citizens are hurting. We feel it especially during tax season in the midst of what feels like a never-ending recession.

How to ease the pain and start the money flowing again?  The answer is clear:  Stop the wars.

Pat Daniel, Ph.D., Managing Editor of Engaging Peace