Infancia y conflicto armado: Un análisis de las experiencias de niños y niñas en medio de la guerra a través de las narrativas de la Comisión de la Verdad

Abstract

This research analyzes childhood experiences during the Colombian armed conflict, based on testimonies from the Comisión de la Verdad’s 2022 report.“It Is Not a Lesser Evil: Children and Adolescents in the Armed Conflict” It explores how memories narrated by those who were children during the war resignify the role of childhood in the history of political violence. The analysis draws on five key categories: culture, childhood, experience, memory, and narrative. To enable a situated understanding of these facts. Childhood is approached as a social construction shaped by power, memory, and subjectivity. Through the narrative analysis of four testimonies, the study identifies impacts such as kidnapping, forced displacement, child labor, territorial control, sexual violence, and identity alterations. The findings reveal how war reconfigures childhood, disrupting the symbolic, normative, and cultural frameworks that define it, and transforming the ways children see, inhabit, and make sense of the world.