Legal Protections in Theory, Absence in Practice: Street-Connected Children and the Collapse of International Obligations in Eastern DRC

Abstract

Despite the extensive international legal architecture designed to protect children in armed conflict—including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, the Geneva Conventions, and the UN’s Children and Armed Conflict (CAAC) agenda—children in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) continue to live and die in conditions that blatantly contravene these binding commitments. Nowhere is this failure more visible than in Goma, where thousands of street-connected children navigate a landscape defined by chronic conflict, militia activity, sexual violence, arbitrary detention, disappearances, and structural abandonment. Drawing on field data collected in partnership with World Hope Givers (WHG) in 2024-2025, as well as the War Rape Survivors Syndrome (WRSS) model of chronic, conflict-related trauma, this article examines the stark gap between international law’s normative promises and their practical implementation. The findings reveal a persistent protection vacuum produced by systemic weaknesses: collapsing state institutions, the impunity of armed groups, the militarization of public space, the economic interests of global actors in the mineral war, and the bureaucratic invisibility of unregistered children. These structural conditions nullify the rights theoretically guaranteed to every child, including protection from violence, access to humanitarian assistance, and the right to survival and development. This article argues that international law’s failure is not due to insufficient normative clarity but to the absence of enforceable mechanisms capable of restraining armed actors, compelling state compliance, or prioritizing children’s rights over geopolitical and economic interests. The case of Goma’s street-connected children exposes a broader global paradox: children are more protected in international law than in any other historical period, yet those living in the world’s most violent regions remain the least protected in practice. It is also crucial to explain from the beginning the War Rape Survivors Syndrome (WRSS) as a political-psychological framework that conceptualizes conflict-related sexual violence as a lineage-disrupting, community-level trauma embedded in legal, economic, and institutional collapse rather than as an individual psychiatric disorder.