THE CHILD IN THE POND

In their book Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System, Alexander Betts and Paul Collier use the thought experiment of what we should do if a child fell into a nearby pond and was unable to swim (Peter Singer, so far as I am aware, is the originator of the child-in-the-pond analogy in practical ethics: see Singer 1972). The thought experiment tells us that under certain circumstances we have a duty to rescue others, and Betts and Collier argue that the situation of refugees fleeing Syria is such a case. ‘Those Syrians forced to flee their homes by violence are ethically analogous to that drowning child’ (Betts and Collier 2018: 99). The analogy is poignant, as what we are faced with in the English Channel and the Mediterranean and other waters are drowning children, and the names of Alan Kurdi and Artin Iran Nezhad, and images of them, are stark reminders of this fact. However, I pointed out in the previous chapter that refugees and other displaced people are not in need of rescue, as they most often rescue themselves from the dangers they face by moving. The people in danger of drowning at sea or in rivers or dying crossing deserts or mountains, including children, do not need to be rescued from the danger they have fled from. They are dying precisely because of their agency, not the lack of it, as global North states and their proxies seek to undermine that agency, to block it, and repel them and ‘warehouse’ them in zones of containment.

Despite this, when it comes to their representation in political and media discourse displaced people are more often than not framed as victims, as passive and helpless, without agency and without voice. Kaarina Nikunen comments on the gap between the representations of refugees in the news media and the experiences of those refugees, with them being framed as ‘dangerous others or voiceless victims’. She says, ‘While refugees and migrants are highly visible, as subjects of many news stories, their representation tends to culminate in invisibility and silence’ (Nikunen 2020: 411; on media representation of migrants and refugees, also see Moore et al.