African girl soldiers have historically been subject to a triple invisibility: as females, as children, and as black Africans. Even when international campaigns against the recruitment and use of child soldiers emerged in 1980-90s, the stereotypical image of the ‘African child soldier’ was that of a young boy. Girls were conspicuous by their absence in these initial campaigns, despite an estimated 30-40% of child soldiers being female. These girls occupied multiple roles ranging from porters, to spies, ‘bush wives’, and armed combatants. When girl soldiers did emerge as objects of humanitarian concern in the later 1990s, attention focused not on their active participation in combat, as with boys, but in relation to their victimhood, and specifically their experiences of sexual violence. When it came to ‘saving’ these girls and ‘rehabilitating’ them however, there has been a clear failure within international peacebuilding efforts to include girl soldiers in DDR programmes. This paper seeks to explore why, despite the fact that African girls figure so prominently in humanitarian discourses as ‘universal icons of suffering’, African girl soldiers have been so marginalized in the delivery of humanitarian aid and action? How was their victimhood constructed? And how was the violence that they experienced, and participated in, represented? This paper is based on archival research in UN, ICRC, and Quaker records combined with humanitarian reports, interviews, and memoirs from Sierra Leone, Liberia, Uganda, Eritrea, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The paper thereby questions how ideas of childhood, race and gender have intersected to shape humanitarian interventions in contemporary African conflict.