Adolescents and Youth and Armed Conflict

The situation for adolescents and youth has been and continuous to be a neglected and underfunded area, and there is limited data on adolescents. The perpetuation of cycles of poverty, rights abuses and armed conflict by a generation that has lost its innocence and a sense of what it means to be an integral and important part of a peaceful societyIn this context it needs to be noticed that in Kenya 33 per cent of all AIDS cases concern youth between 15–34 years of age, and that it is the people between 20–45 years that account for 75 per cent of all new HIV/AIDS infections. The changing nature of armed conflicts involves the deliberate targeting of civilians and children by different armed forces and armed groups, but also different types of violence being used in the context of an armed conflict such as insurgencies, extremism, terrorism. Keywords:adolescents; armed conflict; political violence