Growing Up in the Crossfire: Children, Youth and the Human Cost of Armed Conflict in Africa — Lessons from Cameroon’s Anglophone Crisis

Armed conflicts across Africa have consequences for children and young people that extend far beyond immediate death, injury and displacement. They disrupt education, fracture family and community structures, expose children to recruitment, abduction, sexual and gender-based violence, economic exploitation and psychological trauma, and diminish their prospects for social and economic development. This article examines these consequences through the lens of Cameroon’s protracted Anglophone crisis, which evolved from peaceful protests in 2016 into an armed confrontation between state security forces and armed separatist groups in the North-West and South-West regions. Adopting a doctrinal legal methodology complemented by socio-legal and contextual analysis, the article evaluates the protection afforded to conflict-affected children under international humanitarian law, international human rights law, international criminal law and the African regional human rights system. Attention is given to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, its Optional Protocol on children in armed conflict, the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol II, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The article argues that the Anglophone crisis exposes a significant protection gap between the extensive normative architecture governing children in armed conflict and its implementation in protracted, fragmented non-international armed conflicts. It introduces the concept of cumulative conflict harm to explain how mutually reinforcing violations progressively erode childhood, agency and future opportunity. It concludes that protecting children requires moving beyond emergency humanitarianism towards accountability, continuity of education, psychosocial recovery, child-sensitive peacebuilding and long-term institutional reconstruction.