"I told them to draw whatever they wanted. After 15 minutes, the kids had completed their task. Most of them were drawing weapons, guns and armored cars," explains child protection caseworker Tatiana Bie from Kumba in southwestern Cameroon. She works for the Reach Out, an NGO which works with victims of conflict in Cameroon's Anglophone regions.

It seemed like a benign task for the children at an orphanage near Kumba, where Reach Out operates. In the region, there exists a state of civil war.

Children have been kept out of school since 2016 as warring militias and Cameroonian government troops clash. Schools, children and teachers have become targets. Deadly attacks on school grounds, such as the massacre at Kumba in October 2020 have received international attention, and condemnation.

But this series of drawings created by about 60 children in Anglophone Cameroon indicates the violence is far from sporadic, and plays a significant role in their daily lives.

Horrific images

"The kids can even tell differences between weapons," says Reach Out coordinator Marc Serna, who suggested conducting the drawing exercise to Reach Out caseworkers after hearing of a similar program among refugees from Darfur. He says caseworkers did not prompt the children to draw scenes of violence — only to draw pictures about their lives.

The drawings are simple, but striking in their detail and include a lot of graphic references to violence.

Dr. Shelly Evans, a counselor who has worked with children affected by conflict in Uganda, Sudan and Sierra Leone, has seen the drawings. The pictures, she says, "suggests that this is what they are living every day".

"[The pictures] were drawn in just black or blue ink. But the blood was prominent in bright red ink, so everything else was just kind of faded into the background, except the blood," says Evans.

The illustrations also prominently feature an array of weapons, sketched in noticeable detail, which the characters hold, and use on their victims.

"Also, the size of the weapons was enlarged in some of the drawings. That takes up most of their thought," says Evans.

"The characters, in some of the pictures are smiling, as if this is a normal part of their daily life or activities, as horrific as it is." 

Detriment to children's education

The attacks on schools in the  Anglophone regions since the conflict began have set back education programs by years, and there are fears of a generation of Cameroonians not receiving an education.

According to the Reach Out coordinator, Serna, the violence affects children in rural areas especially, because schools are more vulnerable to attacks.

"Every child will have a gap of maybe two years, three years, but some of them have five year gaps and they'll never go back to school," Serna explains. "This is one of the most neglected crises in the world. We know that every day there are atrocities committed against civilians."

Precedent from Darfur

The concept of using drawings for children living in conflict zones to work through the trauma came about by accident. In the mid-2000s, Rebecca Tinsley, who is joint chair of the Global Campaign for Peace and Justice in Cameroon NGO, was working in Chad with refugees from Darfur in Sudan.

"We wanted to talk to women who had survived the ethnic cleansing in Darfur, but they had children around them and were distracting their mothers. So somebody had the idea of giving the children paper and crayons. And all we said was to the children, go away and draw us a picture about your life."

The result was a disturbing, and detailed, collection of drawings that illustrates the presence of violence in the children's lives.

"We smuggled the drawings out of Chad and we took them to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. And they said, this is amazing," according to Tinsley. "This is evidence of the context of genocide, because the Sudanese regime refused to allow any human rights groups or any journalists."

The exercise was a form of therapy where the children were able to record what was happening to them, and "express their fear" in a society that often interpreted fear as a sign of weakness, she says. 

While admitting an international legal process stemming from the drawings in Cameroon is a still a "long way off", Tinsley hopes the drawings bring attention to the severity of the conflict. "We have a moral duty to get the international community to see what is happening, because it requires the international community to put pressure on the government of Cameroon to enter peace talks."

For caseworkers like Tatiana Bie, performing their jobs includes severe personal risk, often without the necessary resources. But she and her colleagues are determined to give the children spaces to work through their trauma, and at least some psychosocial support.

"We make sure that they associate with friends, and that they play together. When a child plays with a friend or is amongst people who would like make him play and laugh, some of those bad thoughts would be going out of him."