No one can have escaped over the last few years the media attention on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To think that children wouldn't know that the armed forces are dangerous is a naive and frankly ridiculous proposition.

School-leavers are indeed old enough to decide upon a career path for themselves. They are free to join any job they wish, and the army is a legitimate career path for them to follow. To stop them from doing so, or learning about the great opportunities the armed forces presents, is to deny them the right to determine what they do with their lives.

As already noted, there is a wealth of information about how dangerous the armed forces are. Just because they don’t tell children themselves about how many soldiers have been killed or wounded in the past x years, doesn’t mean those children don’t know about it. Any recruiter will naturally present the best side of their organisation, but at least in the armed forces’ case, the darker side is right there in the national press every day.

In any case, arguing that children are unaware of the possibility of being injured in the armed forces is unreasonable. By the time they are eligible to join (currently 15 years 9 months at the very earliest) they will undoubtedly have had an adequate chance to consider all aspects of the career. No one should choose a career on a whim, so assuming they have thought about it at all, they will surely be aware of the fact that as a soldier you may very well be shot at and in the worst case killed or horrifically injured. I don’t think recruiters are inherently more dishonest than most other professions. What about fire fighters and police officers? Are those recruiters dishonest for not showing examples of where members of the profession have been injured?