London-based photographer Caroline Irby, who went to Sierra Leone for UNICEF last year shortly after the country's decade-long civil war was declared over, wrote in Saturday's Financial Times about the horror stories she heard while documenting reunions between families and children who had been conscripted by the rebel Revolutionary United Front or pro-government Kamajor militia.  Some 10,000 Sierra Leonean children were forced to be soldiers or prostitutes, Irby wrote.

"People I met said they had witnessed half their village being slaughtered, babies boiled alive, pregnant women slashed open to answer bets placed on the sex of the child," she wrote.  "I talked to children who had been forced to murder their parents and fathers forced to rape their daughters.  Villagers queued to have a limb hacked off by a child beneath the shadow of a rebel soldier."

Irby said many of those people now want to get on with their lives.  "We de-traumatize ourselves through laughter," one woman told her.

"The image that stays with me is of a boy returning home after a five-year spree of looting, rape and murder," Irby wrote.  "The first thing his mother did was fill a plastic tub with water from the river.  With great care she washed her son's feet in it, then bent down and drank the dirty water" (Caroline Irby/Naomi Mapstone, Financial Times, May 31).