ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the experience of Algerian adolescents as both victims and perpetrators in the violent years of the last decade of the twentieth century. Gender shaped and sharpened the experience in that era. Algeria won its independence from France in 1962 after a cruel eight-year war in which more than one million people died. The war challenged both colonial and Algerian gender arrangements: women enlisted to help the guerrilla struggle, which deliberately cultivated masculine hardness and violence. The absence of women in the conflict of the 1990s contrasts strikingly to the enlistment of young women some still in their teens, in the bloody eight-year struggle for independence. When the Algerian military eventually picked up the armed groups that recruited teenaged boys, a number of detainees aged between 16 and 18 came before the criminal courts, but any penalty imposed on them took account of their age.
