3. Early Enlistment: An Opportunity Or A Cause Of Harm?
A rights perspective
So far, we have focused on the precarious path of a 16-year-old army recruit who drops out of training, noting that their suicide risk at this point is three times that of a non-veteran of the same age. To account for this, we have charted the recruit’s heightened vulnerability to stress due to their age and background, followed by their sustained exposure to stress during and after their time in the military.
All children, including those in adolescence, have a legal right to be safeguarded from undue harm, be it caused by sustained stress, mental coercion, or onerous legal obligations, all of which follow military enlistment.
152
For these and related reasons, experts in adolescent health and development have repeatedly called for the enlistment age to be raised to 18.
153
The neuroscientist Katharine Campbell writes:
In the face of overwhelming evidence that childhood adversity, up to and including adolescence, renders young people especially vulnerable to long-term alterations in brain structure and function, culminating in mental health problems and increased risk for suicide, it is particularly disturbing that the minimum age of enlistment into the British armed forces continues to be 16 years."154
The Trades Union Congress has argued that initial military training constitutes ‘hazardous work’ as defined and banned by the Child Labour Convention, 155 and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has said that all military work is incompatible with international children’s rights law and should be reserved for adulthood. 156 The Children’s Commissioners for the UK have said the same. 157
The narrative of opportunity: a response
An alternative narrative of child enlistment from age 16 is that it offers a secure route out of unemployment for young people from deprived backgrounds. Ministers have suggested that raising the enlistment age to 18 would deny young people this opportunity.158
30 years ago, this argument might have held weight, since most young people joined the jobs market straight from school. Today, four in five (81%) young people from a background of deprivation, who form the army’s primary recruitment demographic, now continue in full-time education after age 16 to enhance their grades and thus their lifetime employment prospects (Figure 10).159 Most of the remaining fifth of deprived 16 year-olds are in full-time work.160 By continuing to enlist from 16, the armed forces are now much more likely to be drawing young people out of full-time education than saving from unemployment.
The position of those who do enlist at 16 is highly insecure. At 16, an army recruit is much more likely to drop out of their training than a civilian is to drop out of a local college.161 As noted earlier, each year around 600 young recruits leave the army after a few months, or are dismissed as unwanted, at which point they face immediate and potentially lasting precarity.162
Despite the army’s description of the Army Foundation College as ‘effectively a school’,163 the accredited education available to most recruits consists of short, sub-GCSE courses amounting to less than one day per week, as described in our briefing. Ofsted does not examine the suitability of the courses offered and discourages comparison with a school:
"AFC Harrogate is not a civilian sixth-form or further education college, despite the inclusion of “college” in its title. It is an army initial training establishment, and we inspect it as such."164
The legally binding obligations imposed on recruits also undermine their agency. A child recruited to the army has no right to leave in the first six weeks; if they try, the law still allows the army to impose a custodial sentence.165, 166 A restricted right to leave at written notice is then available, but from age 18 recruits are automatically locked into the army until they turn 22.167 These terms could not be imposed on any civilian of any age in any kind of work or education, with or without their consent.
In summary, the enlistment of children from age 16 poorly resembles an opportunity, insofar as the word implies a promising path freely chosen. To the contrary, the policy tends to draw young people out of full-time education, offers only rudimentary accredited education when compared to a civilian college, and prevents them from leaving for an extended period. The large number who leave in their discharge window or are dismissed by the army carry a markedly elevated risk of mental illness and few prospects for returning to full-time education or finding work.
Joe's Story
Joe joined the Army Foundation College in 2013, aged 16.
The following is a short excerpt from his longer testimony, which describes a year of abuse.
One corporal is ok, all the rest are cold and
uncaring, or worse. They can see we’re new and
we’re scared, but if you ask for help, it’s ‘Piss off,
you,’ or ‘Shut the f*** up.’ [...] A decent person
would try to talk to you, ‘How are we feeling,
gents – yeah, it’s hard isn’t it, right?’ But not these
guys. I’d say the staff at Harrogate fall into three
categories. The first is psychopathic. The second
is just cold. The third is the good guy who’s being
tough for show.
And some of them are just foul, like this one
physical training instructor who’s an animal to
us. First time we meet him, he puts us all in the
press-up position apart from this one kid he
doesn’t like. He makes that kid say, ‘Raise, lower,
raise, lower...’ It’s to turn us against that recruit,
make us resent him. The corporal knows that
when we’re all back together and the lights are
turned off, things will happen, and they do, and
they encourage that, the corporals. [...]
Another time, they announce a tattoo check.
We’re ordered to strip to our underwear and
stand on the line, then to pull up our pants
so they can see everything but our genitals.
The corporal walks down the line bantering
with those he likes and then he comes to me.
And he tells me, as I’m almost naked, what he
thinks of my body. He starts from my head and
he goes down, and he laughs. He just makes
fun of my body in front of the entire platoon.
What a man. [...]
This isn’t the public image of [AFC] Harrogate,
of course, because they fake that. One time,
some visitors have arrived and the corporals
make us wait by the obstacle course until
these guests come round the corner.
Then we’re all told to work like a team to impress them. It’s
a stunt. We’re not being thrashed that day, of
course – if civilians or TV cameras come into an
army camp, you’ll have the best food of your life
and you’ll get a completely different experience
from normal. It’s all a performance, though. Like
when we’re told to fill out a survey about our
experience of training and there’s a question
about whether I feel safe and I’ve answered ‘No’,
but the company sergeant major is watching –
he comes to read my screen and I change my
answer and he walks away...
Apparently, Ofsted talk to recruits, but if they’d
asked me, I wouldn’t have told them the truth –
because the people I’d be talking about literally
have the power to put me in prison. The truth is
that the friends I met in that place were broken by
it. It gave them PTSD, and me as well. Harrogate
is dangerous but a recruit can’t just say that to a
visitor – it’s too risky.
I’d have gone home – I wanted to – but in the
first six weeks you don’t have a right of discharge.
This ‘college’ can literally put you in prison if you
leave it – we’re not students, we’re soldiers. Even
leaving the camp gets you arrested. [Note: any
recruit who tries to leave in the first six weeks is
charged as Absent Without Leave and arrested;
later in Joe’s testimony, a Sergeant-Major
threatens him with prison if he tries to leave.]
And at the end of the six weeks, we’re all told that
our right of discharge has come to an end, which
is actually the opposite of the truth. [...] And
bullying is everywhere.
For the few who come out reinvented, great, but
it’s a tiny minority, absolutely tiny. Of the rest,
some quit, some just get on with it, and some
are left traumatised. It’s a very dangerous policy
[enlistment at age 16] because you’re attracting
all kinds of people who don’t want to be there,
and they’re leaving more damaged than when
they went in. That’s exactly what happened
to me and most of my friends.
Read Joe’s testimony in full.
***
Footnotes
152 The military training of child recruits, the legal obligations imposed on them, and certain additional risks associated with a military setting contravene several provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, including Arts. 3, 12, 13, 15, 19, 24, 32, 34, 36, 37, 40(3), and in respect of the risk of suicide specifically, Art. 6.
153 Louise et al., 2016, op cit.; Campbell, 2022b, op cit.; Abu-Hayyeh and Singh, 2019, op cit.
154 Campbell, 2022b, op cit.
155 Trades Union Congress, ‘UK Compliance with major ILO Conventions 2019’, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/rwvayho; Trades Union Congress and CRIN, ‘Annex 3: Armed Forces Recruitment and Convention 182’, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/vry9n2h.
156 UN CRC, 2016a, op cit.
157 For example, in their 2020 report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the four UK Children’s Commissioners stated, ‘Despite the Committee’s recommendations, the UK continues to enlist children in the Armed Forces from 16, and actively recruit 16- and 17-year-olds. They enlist over 2,000 children annually, and target areas of deprivation to recruit young people.’ They urged the Committee to ask the UK, ‘Will the State Party raise the age of recruitment to the Armed Forces to 18?’. UK Children’s Commissioners, 2020, op cit.
158 For example, see letter from Penny Mordaunt MP to Child Soldiers International, 4 July 2016, https://www.togetherscotland.org.uk//pdfs/MoD-Response-to-Joint-Letter-July-2016.pdf.
159 ‘Disadvantaged’ is defined by the Department for Education (DfE) for schools in England as students eligible for free school meals or in care. DfE, 2019, op cit.
160 DfE, 2020a, op cit.
161 In 2018–19, the retention rate in full-time education in England for the post-16 age group was 89.3%, varying little by qualification level between a low of 88.9% among learners at Level 3 and a high of 89.8% at Level 1, which equates to an attrition rate of approximately 11%. DfE, ‘2018 to 2019 education and training NARTs overall headline’ [see table ‘Headline’, cell H7], 2020b, read here.
162 In the three-year period 2015–16 to 2017–18, the army enlisted 5,280 recruits aged under 18, of whom 1,580 (30.0%) dropped out before completing their Phase 2 training. Applied to 2021–22, when the army enlisted 2,030 children, a 30% dropout rate is equivalent to c. 600 individuals per year. Calculated from MoD, 2022a, op cit. and Heappey, 2020, op cit.
163 Major General Paul Griffiths, Director Personnel (Army), giving evidence to the House of Commons Defence Subcommittee on Women in the Armed Forces, 8 November 2022 [video, timestamp 11:18 ff], https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/cd5cf1d5-6638-48c5-a54a-976d73d7e5aa.
164 Letter from Paul Joyce HMI, Deputy Director, Further Education and Skills, to CRIN, 16 June 2022.
165 Judge Advocate General, Guidance on sentencing in the court martial (Version 5), pp. 53 ff, 2018, https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/sentencing-guide-v5-jan18-1.pdf#page=53&zoom=100,92,954.
166 Although a sentence of detention is now only rarely handed down to a service member under the age of 18, former recruits and their parents have told CRIN that recruits thought to be considering going AWOL are often threatened with prison should they try. For example, see CRIN, 2021a, op cit.
167 The Army Terms of Service Regulations 2007, no. 3382 (as amended, 2008, no. 1849).
168 DfE, 2020a, op cit.