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Freakonomics Radio

220. β€œI Don't Know What You've Done With My Husband, But He's a Changed Man.”

Freakonomics Radio

Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher

Documentary, Society & Culture

4.6 β€’ 32K Ratings

πŸ—“οΈ 17 September 2015

⏱️ 47 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

From domestic abusers to former child soldiers, there is increasing evidence that behavioral therapy can turn them around.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

All of us saw them. We heard of the war.

0:08.7

The war was a civil war. The first of two in Liberia, West Africa. It began in 1989.

0:15.0

Johnson Bor was 18 years old. This audio is from an ABC news report.

0:21.3

As rebels fire blindly, some duck recover. There is little place to hide.

0:28.4

Bor was in high school at the time, getting ready to move up to a vocational school.

0:32.3

But he says he was conscripted into the NPFL, a national patriotic front of Liberia.

0:39.0

That was a rebel group led by Charles Taylor, who would come to be known as an infamously brutal war lord.

0:45.4

The NPFL was fighting against the government of Samuildo.

0:49.9

When the war started, Johnson Bor was thrown right into the action.

0:54.6

It was just chaotic because when you are on the front line, the very first thing you think about is that your opponent should not be able to overrun you.

1:02.1

He became a company commander.

1:04.1

So I was around when people were tortured, I was around when people were killed because I was part of the ring.

1:09.1

The population of Liberia at the time was barely 2 million.

1:12.7

During the war, roughly a quarter of a million people died, many of them civilians.

1:17.3

Bor told our producer, Christopher Worth, about one distinguishing aspect of the Liberian civil war.

1:24.3

The use of child soldiers.

1:26.1

There were a lot of child soldiers to understand that we even had a unit called SBU Small Boy Unit

1:32.7

that was also headed by child soldiers.

1:35.3

And they are not afraid to go anywhere that they are requested to go.

1:40.9

They have not experienced life.

1:42.9

So that fear of death will not be there, especially when some of them are like the kind that taking drugs and all that kind of stuff or they have arms in their hands.

1:52.4

So, child soldiers will always use Indukan number instances to torture.

...

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