By Alvin Lansana Kargbo (ATJLF/MRCG Fellow 2025)
Over 20 years after Sierra Leone’s civil war, the country continues to count its losses and reckon with its past. While efforts at justice and reconciliation have recognized ex-combatants, amputees, and war widows, one group remains almost entirely forgotten—the children born of war.
These are the sons and daughters of women and girls who were raped or forced into sexual slavery during the brutal conflict from 1991 to 2002. They are now young adults, many in their early to mid-twenties, living across the country from Kailahun to Kambia, and yet they remain invisible in national records, policy plans, and public memory.
Though they played no part in the conflict, they carry the psychological and social burden of a war they didn’t start: stigma, rejection, poverty, and a crisis of identity. Most of them do not know their fathers. Many were never told the truth about their origins. And some have lived with names like “rebel pikin,” “bastard,” or worse.
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