Former child soldier sums up the point of war crime trials

While I was doing my interviews [of former child soldiers in Sierra Leone], I had asked a few children what they thought of the Special Court, if the ones living far from Freetown even knew of it. One boy, not even thirteen at the time I met him, put it best: "For some of us, our lives were miserable, they trained us to come up in a bad way. By trying them, it shows people that if you do bad, there will be consequences."

Jessica Alexander, Chasing Chaos: My Decade in and out of Humanitarian Aid (New York: Broadway Books, 2013), p. 298.