This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: When Americans hear of child soldiers, they may imagine tragic images of children wielding rifles on distant battlefields. But the conditions that help warlords recruit children into armed conflict abroad also help gang leaders draw young people into violent organizations in the U.S.
In cities across the country, gang violence continues to claim lives and fracture communities. A September 2025 FBI report recorded 69,273 incidents involving gang activity—most often assaults—between 2021 and 2024. Young people ages 13 to 16 were the most frequently reported offenders.
Policy responses to this crisis have largely focused on policing, prosecution and tougher penalties. Those responses cost federal, state and local governments billions of dollars annually. Far less attention is paid to why violence offers some young people a sense of purpose, belonging and identity in the first place.
Gang-involved youth in the U.S. are not child soldiers in a legal or conventional sense, and American gangs are not rebel or insurgent groups. Nonetheless, the ways some young Americans become embedded in violent organizations—and the difficulty of leaving them—overlap remarkably with the child soldier experience. As a former child soldier who is now a peace and conflict studies researcher, I have lived through organized violence and have since studied how violence shapes young people's relationships, identities and opportunities.
This work has led me to ask how decades of research on child soldier recruitment and reintegration might help young Americans caught in gang violence. Research on child recruitment—and my own peacebuilding work, including negotiating the release of abducted children in Mali, South Sudan and northern Nigeria—shows that children are not always forced into armed groups at gunpoint. Their pathways into such groups cannot be understood as the result of coercion alone.
Armed groups may reach children through peers, community networks, relatives or other social connections. In places marked by insecurity and limited opportunities, children may not make a single decision to enter violence. Rather, relationships and constrained choices can draw them closer until entry seems like a viable way to gain a perceived sense of security and control over their own lives.
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