Four out of ten children aged 9 to 14 in Denmark don't want to do military service when they grow up. That's according to a new Epinion survey carried out for DR's Ultra Nyt.
This year, conscription was extended from 4 to 11 months, and women are now called up on equal terms with men when they turn 18. More than one in three girls say they would feel bad about serving.
"I fear having to go to war and then die," says 12-year-old Agnes Pagh Hargreave, looking across at her friend Ellen. Eleven-year-old Ellen Matilde Lollesgaard has a 17-year-old sister who is about to be called up. "So I also fear that she will have to go into the military," she says.
That fear is closely connected to the way adults talk about war, says Sonja Breinholst, a lecturer in clinical child psychology at the University of Copenhagen. She compares it with children's reactions during the corona pandemic.
"The children whose parents, pedagogues and teachers talked very negatively about the pandemic became more scared than if the situation was handled in a child-friendly and neutral or positive way," she says.
Her advice is to answer questions briefly and factually, and only when children ask. "You can tell the children that there are adults, politicians and people in the Armed Forces who are employed to handle this. It is not something we as a family need to worry about."
The Defence Command tells DR in a written reply that giving future conscripts a concrete and realistic picture of the training and everyday tasks is a large communication task. "We take that task very seriously," it writes.
Epinion based the survey on 1,026 interviews with a representative selection of children aged 9 to 14 in the spring.