The military is about to sign off on a set of guidelines for Canadian soldiers on what to do when they encounter child soldiers in the field — a move one expert says would be the first of its kind in the world.

While Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan is widely expected to unveil Canada’s pending contribution to UN peace support operations in Africa before Parliament rises for winter break on December 16, the past year has seen the military quietly ramping up its strategy for training soldiers on what to do when they encounter child soldiers, laying out their responsibilities under international and military law.

“We’re well aware we’re going to encounter this,” said one senior military source. “When that happens, our troops go through the spectrum. If someone was walking towards you slowly, you’d have time to employ possible several options to try and deal with the problem.

“But if someone is running at you from a fairly short distance, at some point the bottom line is our soldiers always have the right to defend themselves. It doesn’t matter the weapon, the context or who the attacker is. And it sounds maybe to the uninitiated jaded that our soldiers could maybe use deadly force against a child if the child was about to kill them, but the bottom line is if we didn’t do that, our opponents could use that tactic all the time.”

The instructions are currently in draft form but will be finalized shortly and will reflect input from the Romeo Dallaire Child Soldier Initiative — input which stresses the need to remember that child soldiers are children first.

“We’ve been working with the Canadian Armed Forces over the last year and a half to make this point really clear and we’ve had good support from the Minister of National Defence and from the chief of defence staff,” said Shelly Whitman, executive director of the Child Soldier Initiative, a Dalhousie University-based NGO that works to eliminate the use of armed children in warfare.

“We’ve been doing presentations with them, working through with them the doctrine. They have a draft doctrine note that they have put together on this, and they would be the first country in the world that would have doctrine on how to encounter and interact with child soldiers.”

The Liberal government has committed 600 soldiers and 150 military police to United Nations peace support operations but has not yet announced which UN missions in Africa Canadian troops will join.

The missions cited most often as possible targets for Canadian operations are in Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, which host UN missions MINUSMA, MONUSCO and MINUSCA respectively.

All three of those countries have seen the use of child soldiers in recent conflicts, raising questions about what kind of training and support soldiers will receive to help deal with situations where they may be fired upon by kids too young to shave.

Whitman said militaries are paying more attention than ever before to the problem of child soldiers in light of their prominent use in execution videos distributed by the terrorist group ISIS.

Under international law, the Rome Statute bans the use of children under the age of 15 by armed groups — but part of the challenge faced by militaries lies in the fact that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child defines as a child anyone under the age of 18.

The optional protocol on the Convention of the Rights of the Child, which specifically prohibits the use of children by armed forces and armed groups under that convention, allows for the use of children between 16 and 18 by state armies so long as they are not on front lines, are recruited voluntarily and have parental consent — which is the reason cadet programs are permitted. The convention also says that non-state armed groups cannot use anyone under the age of 18.

Human Rights Watch has documented repeated reports of Islamists in Mali using child soldiers as fighters and in support roles: checkpoints, patrols, guarding prisoners and preparing food for fighters.

Roughly ten per cent of the world’s child soldiers operate in the Democratic Republic of Congo, while between 6,000 and 10,000 boys and girls are believed to be members of armed groups in the Central African Republic.

Generally speaking, military rules of engagement revolve around the principle of using the minimum amount of force possible to remove the threat.

For example, soldiers can use warning lights or horns to warn someone approaching a checkpoint, or physical force to shove or restrain or even kill someone posing an immediate and uncontrollable threat.

However, the optics on killing child soldiers would prove far more difficult for any western army — and the moral challenges such situations pose to soldiers require explicit and formal training to make sure they know exactly what they are authorized to do, one expert said.

“If Canada is still considering deployment to Mali or Democratic Republic of Congo or one of those theatres where, tragically, child soldiers are common, then I would say it’s essential that the Canadian military think deeply about this issue and ensure that our doctrine and our rules of engagement and our pre-deployment training account for that reality,” said Paul Champ, a law professor at the University of Ottawa specializing in military and international humanitarian law.

While rules of engagement will authorize soldiers to use deadly force in cases where there is no other option, soldiers also will be drilled to make sure they understand their specific responsibilities when dealing with child soldiers.

For example, under international law child soldiers cannot be detained in the same facility as adult soldiers and must be transferred to rehabilitation centres.

However, the military’s job is not to actually transfer them but to create a “safe space” for child protection workers in their operations to conduct that work themselves.

“If you’re in a UN peacekeeping mission — which in this context any of the African missions our troops will be on will be UN peacekeeping missions — in those instances every UN peacekeeping mission has child protection centres and a child protection cell within the peacekeeping division,” Whitman said. “The military are not there to be the social workers or the child protection actors … Allow them to do that, but you provide the safe space.”

While soldiers in Afghanistan also encountered child soldiers in the insurgency there, the pending Africa mission is what prompted the military to draft formal instructions for its troops.

“In the short term, we want to ensure they’ve got the proper training so they know how to respond in a sudden situation of encountering child soldiers, but also for the long term psychological well-being of that soldier,” Champ said.

A large part of the challenge faced by the Canadian Forces in dealing with child soldiers is the likely psychological fallout of killing a child — even an armed and dangerous one.

While the peacekeeping mission in Rwanda and its psychological legacy over the past two decades has led to a national and international focus on the devastating effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, that discussion is evolving and increasingly focusing on what’s being called a ‘moral conflict’ or ‘moral injury.’

“To me, (this) is probably one of the best examples one could ever come up with of the ultimate moral conflict that a human being will ever face, in having to kill or injure a child,” said Lt.-Col. (retired) Stephane Grenier, who served in Rwanda in 1994/1995.

As a result of dealing with his own mental health challenges from Rwanda, Grenier coined the term ‘operational stress injury’ in 2001 and has since created and launched a national peer-support program for the Canadian military.

“This is going to cause huge amounts of illness and psychological turmoil afterwards, but not in the sense of post-traumatic stress disorder,” Grenier said. “Probably the most prominent cause for developing a moral injury would be firing on a child soldier.”

As a result of that conversation, and of presentations given by Grenier, the Canadian Forces are actively focusing on the need to treat moral injuries in soldiers and make sure that pre-deployment training includes both the doctrine currently being formalized for soldiers faced with child soldiers, as well as support for their home and family lives.

In December 2015, the Canadian Forces launched the Canadian Army Integrated Performance Strategy (CAIPS), with the goal of creating a formal support system for helping soldiers build up their mental resilience prior to deployment.

“We’re definitely going to put some more focus on preparing people for those kinds of situations, making sure that they understand that it’s possible to talk through those kinds of scenarios,” the senior military source said.

“We used to talk about post-traumatic stress syndrome. Nobody wants to come forward and have a syndrome. That’s why we talk now about operational stress injuries, it’s more like a physical injury. You have a knee injury? Well you can also have a moral injury and you go and get help and get better and then you come back. That’s the kind of mentality we’re trying to foster and I think will be important in any kind of peace support operation as well.”