Militarisation in everyday life
Caroline Humphries reports on the recent 'Militarisation in Everyday Life in the UK' event
Newcastle doesn’t have a lot of job opportunities. What incentive is there for a government to put in more job opportunities if the way they are going to recruit their army is out of kids with nowhere else to go? – Saskia Neibig, member of the Woodcraft Folk and instigator of their Military Out Of Schools campaign There is no evidence to show that military training results in improved life chances for young people with few qualifications, claims Victoria Basham, senior lecturer in politics at the University of Exeter. She made the claim at a one-day conference on Militarisation in Everyday Life in the UK held at Friends House in London on Saturday 19 October, which brought together academics, activists and NGO workers in the field.
Victoria challenged the recent trend whereby ‘childhood has come to be thought about as a site where military intervention can be a very positive force’. She said that although the armed forces are keen to highlight the benefits of military training – such as increased skills, discipline, and values such as loyalty and self-sacrifice – there is no publicly available research evidence to back up their claims.
Her concern is backed up by ForcesWatch, an NGO that raises ethical concerns over military recruitment practices. They state on their website: ‘There is no verifiable evidence that sixteen-year-old army recruits eventually leave having experienced training opportunities that serve them well when they later join the civilian jobs market (typically around the age of twenty-six), or that these recruits are better off in the army than staying on in education or some kind of civilian training before enlisting at age eighteen.’
The UK military is facing a recruitment crisis. According to official figures, the number of people joining the armed forces has gone down over the last two years and more people leave each year than join. The crisis is worst in the sixteen-to-seventeen-year-old age bracket. Speakers at Saturday’s conference claimed that this recruitment crisis, along with a perceived drop in public support for the armed forces, is driving a change in government policy. This has led to a marked increase in military visibility and engagement in everyday life.
David Gee, who works with ForcesWatch, said that the military targets the most vulnerable for recruitment. School engagement projects have been increased over the last few years in the most deprived areas where there are the fewest job opportunities.
Speakers at the conference emphasised that war takes the greatest toll on the most vulnerable recruits. The risk of fatality in Afghanistan for recruits who enlisted into the British army aged sixteen and completed training has been twice as high as it has for those enlisting at eighteen or above, according to a study published recently on behalf of human rights groups Child Soldiers International and ForcesWatch. Higher fatality rates are also correlated with higher rates of non-fatal physical injuries and mental health problems.
One veteran talked about how many young people, recruited into the armed forces from disadvantaged backgrounds such as care leavers, have pre-existing mental health problems, which are masked by the institutionalised life in the army and then exacerbated by trauma experienced in conflict.
David Gee said: ‘killing people is the most stressful thing a soldier ever does… it’s more stressful than being fired at from a distance… few come away from that unscathed.’
David Jackson, a veteran who provides support to people leaving the armed forces and who set up the organisation ‘Veteran to Veteran’, said: ‘Transition is not a solitary concept which you can put into some form of compartmentalisation… it is a very complex layering of areas of adjustment.’ He highlighted how a veteran’s transition into civilian life can be set back by traumatic events in the future, and how the problems are compounded by many veterans’ reluctance to seek help: ‘war veterans on the whole don’t do counselling, though they will come for mentoring’.
Ann Feltham, from Campaign Against Arms Trade, pointed to another worrying trend: the government’s increased use of private security companies to source and deploy military force in combat overseas. The sector is unregulated and there is no right of redress for the families of civilians killed overseas. These companies recruit from developing countries where employment opportunities are thin on the ground, the employment market is unregulated and healthcare facilities for injured veterans may be few and far between.
The event concluded with some examples of action underway to promote change. Saskia Neibig spoke about the ‘Military Out Of Schools’ campaign that she set up with the Woodcraft Folk: ‘We thought that people were being shown a version of the military that was unfair, that was unrepresentative. It was dishonest and it was exploitative of the very poorest of our friends and classmates and that was what we wanted to oppose.’
