Everybody’s Child: An Exploration of Images of Children that Shocked the World

Sarah J Richards

doi:10.3390/genealogy4030073

Abstract

Despite the passivity and vulnerability of childhood as a social construction, the image of the child is both powerful and transformative. Such is the power of images of the child they can and have shaped the history of nation states, shifted policy and become emblematic of a cry for change. In journalism, filmmaking, and news media the child can become the symbol of a nation, a conflict, a tragedy and the failure of policy, or indeed the adult world, to care and protect childhood itself. Using evocative images from across the 20th and 21st century, this paper interrogates how idealised notions of childhood become focal and challenged by images which reveal the death, deprivation and destruction of children. The image of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi’s body on a Turkish Beach in 2015 resonated around the world. It became the biggest trending photo on Twitter within 24 h and graced the front of hundreds of global newspapers the following day. It also demanded a political response, as presidents and prime ministers scrambled to hold press conferences and generate policy to respond to the Syrian and wider so-called Mediterranean crisis. This is just a recent example in a long line of iconic images of ‘the child’ that have shaped policy and shifted hearts and minds. The power and influence of these photographs is traced here to highlight where the discursive vulnerability of a single child becomes emblematic of the failures of the powerful: adults, governments, nation states, and global governance. Using the examples of famine stricken South Sudan (1993) and the ‘migrant crisis’ of the Mediterranean Sea (2015), how these hitherto anonymous children briefly become everybody’s child is explored here.

Highlights

Despite the passivity and vulnerability of childhood as a social construction, the image of the child is both powerful and transformative
The distressing image seen around the world was of both father and daughter face down in the water with Valeria tucked inside her father’s tee-shirt and her arms around his neck
Our reactions to the image of a young dead child is a complex combination of our emotional responses, the current social construction of childhood. our culturally relative perceptions of death and our anxiety around the failure of adults and nations to keep the most vulnerable in society safe. It is representative of a failure in the present, induces anxiety for the future and embodies a lost childhood cherished by adults as a place of safety in an uncertain world

Summary

Introduction

‘I hope that the picture alone will catalyse this Congress, this senate, this committee to do something’. Valeria Ramirez and her father, Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, were fleeing El Salvador with the desperate hope of reaching the safety and opportunities of the USA Their bodies were found in shallow water on the banks of the Rio Grande on 26 June 2019 as they tried to cross from Mexico. In this article other such iconic images including the starving child and the vulture in South Sudan famine in 1993 and Alan Kurdi, a victim of the refugee crises in the Mediterranean Sea (2015), are discussed Providing this genealogical lens enables an exploration of change brought about by these images as well as commonalities in the public and political response to them. It is within this social construct that children are attributed particular characteristics which inform and shape their childhoods

The Social Construction of Childhood

Literature Review

The Vulture and Child

Alan Kurdi

Everybody’s Child

Conclusions