How many gun-toting children lurk in the war-torn underbellies of the world?

Ask an expert or search the web, and the same figure reappears: 300,000. Yet its origin is a mystery. It has survived for at least a decade, unaltered by the decline of several conflicts that were major recruiters of children, or by the commencement of others.

The figure is important because data on child soldiers is desperately needed in order to inform agendas for tackling the problem.

And tackling it is important for us all, says Simon Reich, director of the Ford Institute for Human Security, because the child is father of the man, of the suicide bomber, of the terrorist, and of those caught in the cycle of violent conflict.

Hard data on child soldiers is rare, and that's why the Ford Institute, along with Norway's Centre for the Study of Civil War, has convened two workshops on the subject, the second of which has just finished. Participants discussed a paper that Reich's team has just published in the journal International Security, which assessed the proportion of child soldiers in 19 conflicts in Africa.

"What's really fascinating is that there's huge variation," Reich tells AlertNet."Everyone seems to work on the assumption that it's the same across Africa."

Some conflicts registered no child soldiers at all. At the other extreme, 53 percent of combatants in one conflict were children.

The reasons for this variation are also shrouded in myth, according to Reich. Traditional explanations link a preponderance of child soldiers with poverty, high orphan rates and abundance of small arms.

"We show that none of these arguments hold," Reich says. Instead he believes he has found a single, powerful determining factor.

"We found an incredibly strong relationship between how well IDP (internally displaced people) and refugee camps are protected and child soldier rates."

Basically, conflict causes displacement, which leads to the formation of camps to shelter the displaced - offering pools of thousands of unprotected children, eminently raidable by government and rebel forces.

The best contemporary example of this is in Uganda, where the Lord's Resistance Army was notorious for abducting children and the child soldier rate may have been as high as 90 percent.

Reich believes that the situation is similar outside Africa, though sometimes with variations on the theme. In Sri Lanka, there have been reports of the abduction of children from tsunami camps to fight in the conflict. In Myanmar, which has the largest single number of child soldiers, unsecured schools are a common hunting ground.

Not everyone at the workshop agreed with his analysis, but it has produced a research agenda: to find out with more precision about camp and border security in conflict.

Good. But hang on, what about that elusive figure - the number of child soldiers?

We still don't know, says Reich."I suspect it's probably a little higher than 100,000, below 200,000 for sure, probably below 150,000."

Can anyone improve on that?

Aisling Irwin
AlertNet Journalist

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