ROME -- On International Women's Day (March 8), when thoughts turn to equality between the sexes, Aminata's story is especially poignant. Back in 1998, she was captured while selling cake in Kabalah, Sierra Leone, and forced to join the rebels. Not only was she trained to fight and use a gun, she was also forced to marry the man who captured her. She was instructed by her superiors to order amputations and beheadings, but says she never did any herself, adding that if she had told them to stop, they would have killed her.

Aminata (her war name) is a survivor -- one of several thousand ex-combatants who have received food aid from the United Nations World Food Program in Sierra Leone to ease their reintegration into society. Many fellow ex-fighters have traded their machetes for scissors -- and are setting up as hairdressers. And it's not only women's work. In neighboring Liberia, boys who used to fight in the notorious Small Boys' Units of Charles Taylor (warlord turned president) have chosen hairdressing as a potentially lucrative business.

But reintegration only works if women like Aminata -- as well as former child soldiers -- are kept busy. Ideally they are either in school or involved in programs to teach them how to earn a living. With Ivory Coast and Guinea in turmoil, it is all too easy to imagine them sliding back into violence and what recently elected Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf calls "child recycling."