The world is full of suffering children. Why did the child Ryan receive all this attention?

Five whole days during which the international media closely followed the developments of the attempts to retrieve the five-year-old Moroccan child "Rayan" from the deep well into which he fell while having fun in the city of Chefchaouen in northern Morocco, and all available drilling methods were used to save him.

With the news that the child was still alive at the bottom of the well, at a depth of 32 metres, hopes were raised that he would be rescued at the end of the drilling saga.

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The shock that dashed hopes was when the Moroccan Royal Court issued a statement declaring its condolences to Rayan's family, after his young body was recovered from the well dead, turning Arab social media, especially into a big condolences book for the little boy with an innocent smile who met a painful fate.

However, a bewildered question also appeared that started shyly, then turned into a general and widespread question: Why did the whole world follow the case of the child Ryan specifically, while he neglects the cases of hundreds of thousands of children everywhere who suffer no less than Ryan?

Children always pay the price

According to a report issued by UNICEF in March 2021, Syria has witnessed the killing and injury of at least 12,000 children since 2011, noting that this number is what has been confirmed, with the possibility that the actual numbers are much more than that.

This number means that over the course of 10 years, a Syrian child dies every 8 hours, due to circumstances related to the tragic situations of the Syrian crisis.

The report also talked about monitoring many cases of sick children and others forced to work, as well as the recruitment of at least 5,000 children to participate in hostilities.

The report also indicated, citing United Nations statistics, that at least half a million Syrian children suffer from stunting as a result of malnutrition, and that there are about 3.5 million children who have not enrolled in or been forced out of school, 40% of whom are girls.

In Yemen, the situation is not much different.

According to the UNICEF report, the war in Yemen has killed and injured about 10,000 children, the equivalent of killing 4 children per day since the start of the war.

400,000 children suffer from acute malnutrition, more than two million children are out of school, and 4 million children are at risk of dropping out of education.

According to the website "The World Count", which specializes in statistics, there are 3 million children die from hunger and malnutrition around the world annually, i.e. an average of one child dies every 10 seconds.

In turn, the World Health Organization monitored about 41,000 deaths of children under the age of fifteen due to the ill-treatment they receive from their surroundings, which are ultimately attributed to regular falls and burns.

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Why Ryan specifically?

“The death of one person is a great tragedy, and the deaths of millions are just statistics.”

(Joseph Stalin)

You may have been horrified by the numbers we mentioned about the millions of child victims in our region and the world, but certainly your feeling remains bearable compared to him during the follow-up to the operation to rescue the child Ryan and retrieve his little body from the well, lifeless.

It is true that they are all children, and they all went through tragic circumstances in their childhood, yet everyone focused on the case of just one child and ignored the thousands who might be suffering at the exact time of Ryan's suffering.

What is the reason for this contradiction?

In a famous study entitled "The More Victims, the Less We Care: Psychological Numbing and Genocide" (The More Who Die, the Less We Care: Psychic Numbing and Genocide) was written by a number of researchers in psychology at the University of Oregon, led by the famous psychologist Professor Paul Slovik has found that people show much greater emotional reactions to the death of one person than to the death of larger numbers, even if the circumstances of their deaths are involved.

The study concluded that the greater the number of victims or injured in a particular situation, the less empathy felt towards them, and thus the less willingness to be involved to provide assistance.

This result, according to Slovik, explains the secret of people's cold feelings towards major mass tragedies, such as genocide or victims of disasters and famines, or the increase in the number of people infected with the Corona virus, or even the move to confront a global crisis such as global warming.

This phenomenon is called by psychological studies the term "psychic numbing", and in short, it means that the higher the numbers, the numbness seeps into people's emotions, interest, and sympathy for the misfortunes of others, and the less they are interested in helping.

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Emotion retreat

In another research study, Paul Solvik and a group of researchers in Sweden sought to measure people's level of empathy and willingness to help others under different models that study their responses.

A number of people were shown two pictures: the first showed a child who appeared to be poor and suffering, and the second picture showed two children who appeared to be in the same condition, and the participants were asked about their willingness to donate.

Surprisingly, the majority of donations went to support the only child, and that the percentage of donations decreased significantly for the two children.

When another picture was added that included 8 children in need of help, the percentage of aid decreased even more, and the positive feeling of the participants towards the suffering of the children also decreased.

In the same context, when the participants were shown a picture of one child, and included statistics telling them about the number of other children who need help and suffer from poverty in the same area of ​​the child, another surprise awaits Slovik and his companions.

Contrary to what the research team expected that the statistics would increase people's enthusiasm to participate, what actually happened was the level of donations halved.

Slovak coined a special term for this condition, which he called "compassion fade" or "singularity effect", which means that the feeling of empathy and willingness to help decreases as more people are deserving of it.

Again, this study provides a plausible explanation for the widespread indifference to mass disasters.

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Why does our sympathy decrease with the increase in the number of victims?

“One child who gets sick or dies of starvation rips our hearts out and moves our hands (and our wallets) to action. But once the number of victims increases to two or more, empathy, both deep and behavioral, begins to wane.”

(Paul Slovik)

One of the most famous justifications for the state of psychological anesthesia in the face of mass disasters is that it is a defensive psychological trick that allows an individual's nervous system to receive tragic news with controlled reactions, and adapt quickly to it.

However, it is also selfish, according to Slovik, who said that one of the main reasons for the decline in interest in the collective tragedies of others is our feeling that any effort we will make to help will be in vain, and that our help in this case - if we offer it - will not satisfy us The same self that we feel after helping a specific person.

In another study conducted by Slovik and his fellow researchers following the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, which killed more than 800,000 people in just 100 days, a group of people was asked a specific question: You are responsible for running a refugee camp that can accommodate 4,500 refugees, and you have an option to host this The number is among a group of 250 thousand refugees, and another group of 11 thousand refugees.

The study showed that study participants tended to host 4,500 refugees from the group of 11,000 refugees, more than they tended to host them from the group of 250,000.

The justifications were their feeling that for the first group of 250,000, housing only 4,500 of them did not seem useful, while if 4,500 refugees were hosted out of a group of 11,000, this would give them a greater sense of positivity and the usefulness of assistance.

Briefly summarizing the lack of empathy and help with the suffering of groups, Slovik says in an interview with the BBC: "We donate in many situations not only because we want to help, but also because when we give this help we feel better. So we don't feel happy. "When we help one child and then discover that it's just one in a million other children who need help. It makes us feel bad because we can't help everyone, that bad feeling interferes with our good feelings and reduces them, so the impulse to really help goes down."

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The psychology of donation

From this psychological base, it is natural to always find yourself faced with charity advertisements that focus almost entirely on showing one case in front of you to attract your sympathy, regardless of the type of advertisement, whether it is for the purpose of collecting donations for refugees, conflict areas or medical institutions to treat patients for free Or to treat children, the focus is always on reviewing a single case that embodies the suffering to ensure that it leaves a greater impact on the viewer, rather than distracting his emotions and focus with more than one model.

One of the clearest examples in the Arab world is the advertising campaign of the Magdi Yacoub Charitable Foundation, which was launched in 2012 to collect donations for heart operations for children, and focused on one sick girl among a number of children saying one sentence: “I myself live.”

The result was the success of the campaign in garnering large donations at the time, so that every pound spent in this campaign brought in 28 pounds in donations in return.

According to psychologist Natalie Nahai, in her statement to the Guardian newspaper, the "psychology of donation" depends on focusing on only one case that leads each member of the audience to draw similarities between the case presented to him and his personal life, which motivates them to provide assistance.

“The most impactful charity ads focus on one person, because if the ad shows one person and focuses on their condition, it feels more real and therefore has a greater impact on the audience,” says Nahai.

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In the end, despite the many disasters and tragedies that revolve around us, and the news that we read daily about the suffering of millions, our minds remain equipped to deal with individual stories and be affected by them, while they are unable to interact to the same extent with collective disasters, and treat them only as numbers.

Remember how touched you were watching Titanic, and your grief over the sinking of the film's hero, when you weren't touched by the sinking of hundreds of other passengers on board, just because the camera lens didn't spot their stories.

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