e.TYPES OF TORTURE AND MISTREATMENTI. Armed ConflictsWar is a daily reality for million children. Fourteen million children have become refugees or internally displaced within their own country as a result of the conflicts for which they are not responsible. It is calculated that more than a third of the victims of the modern wars are young (Amnesty International, 2000).a) Torture and mutilation during warChildren are specially exposed to undergo abuses in situations of armed conflict. Many are tortured solely because they live in enemy territory, for their family’s political or religious ideas or for their ethnic origin. During the nine years of civil war in Sierra Leona, children have undergone abuses in a scale without precedents: thousands of them have been victims of homicide or mutilations, kidnapped and forced to fight, or raped and put under sexual slavery. To this we must add the fact that children who have lived an armed conflict usually are traumatized by the death and destruction they have witnessed. In some cases, perpetrators are paramilitary forces linked to government soldiers. In Colombia, 17-year-old Elena Morales Souto was dragged from her home on 20 July 1997 by a group of heavily armed men, who allegedly identified themselves as paramilitaries from Abrego and Ocaa. A short distance from her house, she was beaten and threatened with having her throat cut if she did not disclose the whereabouts of her husband, Hugo Umaa, and her father, Luis Morales Perez. The girl allegedly recognized one of her aggressors at the military barracks of the Santander Battalion on 23 July. Other members of her family, including nine children, were allegedly tortured physically and psychologically at their home by paramilitaries. Before withdrawing, the paramilitaries told the family that they would come back and kill them all, down to the smallest child, if they ever found Luis Morales Perez or Hugo Umaa there.b) Children as soldi...
