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Hundreds of thousands of children under the age of eighteen are involved in armed groups in 37% of the world's countries and territories. This chapter reviews the key issues affecting these children, including the historical involvement of children in war, the challenge of universal age-based criteria, children's experiences in armed conflicts, and the process of reintegration. Children are vulnerable to becoming child soldiers as a result of political, religious, ethnic, cultural, economic, and social instability in their countries. Social workers must gain as full an understanding as they can of the specific context of armed conflict and the subjective experiences of child soldiers in order to work effectively with such children, their families, and their communities.

This book explores the emasculation of surrender and the efforts of German military prisoners held in the UK from 1914 to 1920 to overcome the stigma of captivity. It was not combat deaths that crippled the German army in autumn 1918 but rather waves of surrenders that occurred among its troops in the war's final months. More than 325,000 German soldiers surrendered to the British during the Great War, at least 132,000 of whom spent some portion of their captivity in British military camps. Drawing upon a wide range of materials such as unpublished memoirs, capture reports, camp newspapers, and previously unused letters written by prisoners and their families, this book follows prisoners from capture through their attempts at social reintegration following their return to Germany. It considers a soldier's manhood in relation to his status as a defender of the German nation, as well as his existence as a prisoner within the context of his efforts to reestablish a place within the national community.

This chapter explores different platforms for public speaking, such as group therapy or bible studies, and how they offer recovering gang members opportunities to experience reform from gang life, as well as to earn legitimacy for being reformed. The public talk of gang recovery invited situated performances that rearticulated Chicano masculinity. Recovering gang members used public talk to advance “redemption scripts” and construct reformed barrio masculinity, facilitating recovery from gang life and social reintegration. The chapter probes deeper into how this gendered redemption sequence operates as a discursive process. Gang recovery programs, through the spaces they provide for public talk, centrally negotiate masculinity and facilitate reform. Public talk in gang recovery reformulates Chicano gang masculinity into warm, nurturing expressions. During these sessions, the recovering gang members talk about their personal lives and encourage each other to talk about family and to feel empathy for family members.

This chapter examines the hardships faced by German soldiers held captive by the British during the Great War as they attempted to gain financial compensation and recognition as honorable veterans in the Weimar Republic. The stigma of captivity remained with the German prisoners in the years after repatriation and served as an obstacle to full social reintegration. Many observers continued to associate the mass surrenders of the summer and autumn of 1918 with the German army's defeat and considered former prisoners of war (POWs) to be second class soldiers. This chapter considers the prisoners' battle for respect and redemption following repatriation and eventual alliance with Adolf Hitler and National Socialism, as well as the persistence of the sacrificial masculine standard that marginalized POWs.