Last week I went shopping for my eight-year old cousin's upcoming birthday and as I perused the mall, I mulled over the gift possibilities. A couple of new Beanie Babies or maybe a new PlayStation game, or what about a new CD by one of those popular bubble gum bands?

I tossed around several ideas, yet not once did an M-16 assault rifle cross my mind. A third grader would never appreciate that half as much as let's say, the new 'N Sync album. Yet a sickeningly high number of children, some even younger than eight, in more than 50 countries across the globe, can be found in possession of every type of weapon from the M-16 to the machete. Where are they getting these weapons from, you ask? The answer: the children are being recruited, tricked and sold into armies to fight wars started to fulfill the goals and fuel the prejudices of adults. The wars sometimes leave children orphaned, forcing them to make the army their new family. "Often children become soldiers just to survive," said Italy's UN representative Paolo Fulci.

The statistics are frightening. The United Nations estimates the number of children in active combat positions at around 300,000. Olara A. Otunnu, the newly appointed UN Special Representative on Children and Armed Conflict, said, "In the last decade alone we have seen two million children killed, over one million orphaned, six million seriously injured or permanently disabled, 12 million made homeless and 10 million left with serious psychological trauma."

The majority of the children involved in conflicts are between 15 and 18 years of age (although active recruiting starts at 10 and sometimes younger) and girls as well as boys are forced to fight. In fact, in El Salvador, Ethiopia and Uganda, more than a third of child soldiers are girls.

The girls are often raped or kept as wives by military commanders. Sometimes they are forced to serve as sexual slaves for other army members. A report released by Amnesty International in January of this year documented some of the worst cases of battle-scarred children. The cases cited included kids being forced to kill one another after being given alcohol and mind-altering drugs. "They gave me pills that made me crazy. When the craziness got in my head, I beat people on their heads and hurt them until they bled," said a 13-year-old Liberian child.

The report goes on to speak of specific instances of massacres and mutilations-- children forced to watch as their parents were murdered; children forced to kill other children. It is hard to imagine what it would be like to fight in a war when you're just a kid. It's hard to put faces on the hundreds of thousands of children fighting in countries and wars that don't involve us. The best way to explain what the experience is like is to let the children tell you themselves:

"One boy tried to escape [from the rebels], but he was caught . . . His hands were tied, and then they made us, the other new captives, kill [him] with a stick. I felt sick. I knew this boy from before. We were from the same village. I refused to kill him and they told me they would shoot me. They pointed a gun at me, so I had to do it. The boy was asking me, 'Why are you doing this?' I said I had no choice. After we killed him, they made us smear his blood on our arms . . . They said we had to do this so we would not fear death and so we would not try to escape . . . I still dream about the boy from my village who I killed. I see him in my dreams, and he is talking to me and saying I killed him for nothing, and I am crying." -Susan, 16, Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda

"The army was a nightmare. We suffered greatly from the cruel treatment we received. We were constantly beaten, mostly for no reason at all, just to keep us in a state of terror. I still had a scar on my lip and sharp pains in my stomach from being brutally kicked by the older soldiers. The food was scarce, and they made us walk with heavy loads, much too heavy for our small and malnourished bodies. They forced us to learn how to fight the enemy, in a war that I didn't understand." -Emilio, 14, soldier in the Guatemalan army

"I was forcibly conscripted into the SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council) army when I was a student in March 1992. We were leaving school at the end of the day and the SLORC soldiers surrounded the school . . . There were 40 or 50 of us all leaving together, and we were all arrested. We were all 15, 16, 17 years old, and we were afraid of the soldiers. We were students; we looked like students, because we were all wearing our white shirts and our green longyis. Our teachers ran away in fear. Everything was in chaos . . . We were all terrified, but we could not even call out to them to let us go and that we were under 18, because we were so scared." -Zaw Gyi, soldier in the SLORC, the military regime in Burma

It's hard to put faces on the hundreds of thousands of children fighting in countries and wars that don't involve us.

There are 100,000 faces for each of the stories recounted above. But why is this happening now? The UNICEF reports children have been used as soldiers for the past 30 years. However, the widespread growth of this practice is due in part to the fact that warfare has undergone dramatic changes at the end of the 20th century. More than 90 percent of war casualties are now civilian; there seems to be no moral code and no rules.

The type and scope of warfare has also changed. The majority of wars are now fought within national boundaries. During these insurgencies, large populations come to be governed by minority groups who fought their way to power, spawning poverty, instability and greed. Adults are often unwillingly or unavailable for armed service, thus creating a need for the recruitment of children. The economy inevitably sours and social conditions deteriorate. Under these conditions, formal education is minimal or nonexistent. Children are left unoccupied and many choose to join the army rather than stand by idly. These countless civil wars and revolutions need a steady supply of arms and the global market willingly keeps up with this demand.

Never before has it been easier to gain access to weapons. The international weapons trade is at an all-time high due in part to the breakdown of nation-states. Weapons that were being stockpiled during the cold war are now for sale on the black market. Among the arms being traded and sold, there is a proliferation of light, cheap weapons-- all the easier for children to carry.

"We have seen two million children killed, over one million orphaned, six million seriously injured or permanently disabled, 12 million made homeless and 10 million left with serious psychological trauma." -Olara A. Otunnu

Why doesn't Dan Rather talk about this problem every night at 6:30? Perhaps it is because Americans are unaware of the role our government plays in providing arms, equipment and training to corrupt governments responsible for recruiting children into battle. The US also rejected a preliminary UN proposal that would have set the age for eligibility into armed service at 18. For those reasons, aside from the obvious humanitarian concerns, Americans have an obligation to care.

Fortunately, despite the initial hold-up caused by the US, steps have been taken within the last few months to end the practice of sending children to war. On January 21, governments around the world agreed to ban the use of child soldiers in an Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a 1989 treaty that set the age of possible army recruitment at 15. The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers says it will monitor governments to prevent violations of the treaty. However, the coalition did not specify how it will do this or what the potential consequences of non-compliance would be.

In so many places, in so many societies, violence and hatred dominate. Our global culture is destroying its own children. These children will grow up to start their own wars. The cycle of violence and war will remain unbroken. The psychological and emotional effects of being forced to murder other people, of watching your parents hacked with machetes, is incomprehensible. War took away their right as children to play, to get an education and to be oblivious to harsh reality for a time. Isn't it time for this vicious cycle to end?