Portrayal of children in humanitarian spaces: How far has the sector come?
At the beginning of the Ebola crisis in 2015, aid organizations released the name and age of patient zero, a two-year-old boy from Guinea who was playing in a bat infested tree. Throughout the media the boy is identified by name with a picture of his face accompanying coverage of the event on news websites as prominent as the Independent, NPR, BBC, and CNN.
For years, this coverage has defined the narrative about the Ebola outbreak in Africa, making the young boy’s story common knowledge. “Emile loved to dance and Philomene liked to carry little babies on her back and pretend she was a mom,” Suzanne Beukes of UNICEF wrote about patient zero and his 4-year old sister who was infected along with the boy’s mother and grandmother. “Emile liked to listen to the radio and play with his ball,” writes the Daily Mail.
The tensions in ethically portraying children
Ebola’s Patient Zero story emphasizes a prominent and highly debated theme in humanitarian spaces: the use of children to elucidate feelings from an audience. In particular, the literature distinguishes between ‘shock effect imagery’ and ‘positive imagery’ in the portrayal of people suffering in crisis.
In ‘shock effect’ imagery, the responsibility is to represent suffering on ‘its plain reality’, an appeal to the discourse of authenticity, in order to unsettle the viewers. This representation style has a substantial financial impact in increased donations, but is mired with overwhelming criticisms. The primary critique is its dehumanization of the subject.
Rather than victimizing the sufferer, ‘positive imagery’, on the other hand, banks both on the untapped potential of the people in crisis and draws on the moral desire of audiences to contribute to its realization. Positive imagery is however criticized for its tendency to erase the complexity of suffering and crisis by emphasizing individual agency.
In the case of Ebola’s patient zero, one critical interpretation of the release of the young boy’s name and information, is that the child’s parents are either complicit or somewhat to blame for the crisis and their child’s suffering. When organizations put out calls for aid that are rooted in the experiences of children, or publicize information about a child’s suffering, the inherent implication is that the child’s wellbeing has become a global responsibility, implying that the parents are either no longer present or no longer capable of caring for their child.
The narrative combines “shock effect” and “positive imagery,” as the significance of the child’s suffering is contrasted with their youth to create an unsettling feeling that calls Western audiences to the child’s defense in place of their parents. The youth and innocence of the child serve as “positive imagery” to elucidate moral desires for Western audiences to serve as benevolent parent figures. This advertising works in tandem with ‘shock effect’ imagery, as the significance of the child’s suffering when contrasted to their youth and innocence is jarring to viewers and creates a subconscious call for Western audiences to intervene for the child in the way a parent would. This joint narrative strips adults in crisis areas of the respect and authority that parents have in finding better lives for their children and reasserts Western paternalism towards conflict zones.
Farther ahead but still work to be done
Since the Ebola case in 2015, humanitarian actors have taken steps to address the exploitation of people in need. For example, the 2030 Pledge for Change is an agreement signed by leaders of INGOS that emphasizes ethical storytelling. Similarly, over 100 NGOs and campaigners have contributed to a report by M&C Saatchi World Services, titled “Better Conversations about Ethical Storytelling,” which incorporates hundreds of diverse voices from within the humanitarian section and pledges commitment to addressing unethical storytelling. These agreements signal a change in the humanitarian space towards more recognition of how using children in humanitarian advertising creates problematic storylines.
However, despite these agreements, it only takes a quick scan of any major aid organization’s website to be confident that there is still a lot of progress to be made. There are still examples of starving children, often depicted alone against a grim or wartorn backdrop. I have also seen examples of campaigns that depict numerous photographs of young children crying in their parent’s arms, even when the appeal itself has little to do with children in particular.
A balancing act
Humanitarian organizations carry a lot of responsibility in giving visibility to different humanitarian crisis in a world with competing interests and unequal access to represent people who are experiencing crisis. They have a massive role to play in balancing the need to identify unique sets of needs that children have within aid contexts, while also being wary of using them and their stories in ways that perpetuate problematic dynamics between organizations and the people that they aim to serve.
With the current crises in Ukraine and Gaza taking up so much of the media’s attention, there is an opportunity to adjust how aid organizations create the narratives of target populations. How can humanitarians take concrete steps to ensure that they address the needs and storytelling of entire populations while straying away from paternalistic rhetoric?
Image by Suzy Hazelwood
