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A: Terrorism intentionally creates insecurity and fear. It deliberately ruins the social fabric of a society by ignoring the common laws of humanity—then many of those with education or financial means flee, and those who remain try to live amid the violence and downward economic spiral. Families are destroyed and children are robbed of their innocence. The losses they experience are material, social, and emotional.
Having grown up amid violence, the young boys I came to know in the camp were more familiar with Kalishnikovs and APC guns than they were with their alphabet. They spoke about the fear they felt—at night when they could not sleep because of bomb blasts and gunfire, about being injured when outside of their home in the daytime, and about being forcibly recruited into or confronted by a local militia.
When a generation grows up under this kind of violence and fear, it is deprived of an education and knowledge of its true culture. Young children are forced to fend for themselves on the streets—often sent out to scavenge for food or to work at dangerous jobs for money. They are treated as adults and not as children. This is one of the successes of the perpetrators of random violence: They create an environment where children cannot behave as children but, instead, are forced to take on adult responsibilities.
Most of the young boys I spoke with had never spent much time with their fathers or older brothers because they, the adult males, had either been killed or were away from home for a long time. These young boys were essentially, then, the "men" about the house, handed the responsibility of providing for and protecting the women of the family. They had to learn how to use a gun at the age of six or seven and, by the time they were 14 or 15, were ready to go off to fight themselves.
This is how terrorists ensure having a steady supply of recruits—creating an unworkable society, then offering an alternative one—one which they, of course, control with violence, intimidation, and manipulation. They make use of disasters, both natural ones and those they created, by offering aid to those in need, but with very tangled strings attached.
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He continues to compare this phenomenon with child-soldiers in Africa and South-America