As the International Convention on the Rights of the Child is coming of age, children are still massively involved in war, be it as victims, witnesses, or even as soldiers in at least twenty-five countries, mostly in Africa and Asia. This paper focuses on Sri Lanka, where an almost twenty-five-year-old undeclared war continues to claim victims and displace people, with children often abducted from school or taken forcibly from families by the LTTE to be trained as cadres. Whereas child soldiers in some African countries are at the centre of films and novels like Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English, Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier or Patricia Schonstein Pinnock’s Skyline, the attention the war and its consequences have been receiving in Sri Lankan literature and film in English is countered by a surprising paucity of representations of child soldiers. While comparing the specific circumstances of these countries and their representations, I will focus on Carl Muller’s short story Monsters and Monstrosities (as yet the only explicit portrait of child use in Sri Lanka’s war) and, to a lesser degree, on Romesh Gunesekera’s Heaven’s Edge, in an attempt to investigate whether the situation is the result of a (self?)imposed censorship or of a conception of childhood that somehow legitimizes the phenomenon, bearing in mind the extra dimension of propaganda, where the construction of the child-as-adult, at the same time victim and executioner, exploits him/her as yet another site of struggle.