The lost generation, the desensitized and the vocal youth

Take a moment, think back to when you were a child, when you would wake up in the morning, your mum or dad yelling through the house to get up — “you’re late for school and breakfast is on the table.”
You would brush your teeth, get washed and dressed and then head to school, where you would see your friends. Maybe it was your favorite class that day, or you could not wait to chat to your friends about the previous night’s football match or soap opera.
Later, you would go home, where your mother was already making dinner but would still take the time to wipe that smear of dirt from your face. Dinner was nothing special, maybe a stew — it might be the cheapest thing your parents could make — but it was made with love.
This is a mundane reflection on life, a life that, fortunately, is the norm for five out of every six children around the world. But according to War Child and Save the Children, the other 468 million children either woke up one day and there was no breakfast, no warm bath, possibly no toothpaste and no school — let’s take that one step further, maybe a lost parent, sibling or friend — or maybe they were born into this and never knew anything different.
Worse still, imagine you are 10 and that bomb you saw fall just detonated, killing your entire family — we will come back to that later.
According to the War Child report, one in six children live in a conflict zone — that is within a 50 km radius of armed violence.
In the wake of Israel’s bombing of Gaza, and with no sign of a decline there, in Sudan or in other warzones, it is not just a bad time to be a child — according to War Child CEO Rob Williams, it is one of the most dangerous times in recent history.
When wars break out, most receive some level of coverage — Ukraine was the top of every news bulletin when Russia first invaded. But as time has passed, it has gradually worked its way down the running order and, in some parts of the world, it does not even feature.
Gaza remains high on the news agenda in the Middle East, but elsewhere — including the West — it does not necessarily feature as regularly, especially in countries like the UK, where there is a general election in the works.
The footage that is shown is blurred to protect viewers who watch from the safety of their homes, while the people there see the blood and smell the charred remains of their loved ones.
In an article for the BBC in March, Amanda Ruggeri argued that the abnormal gets normalized; that the more we are exposed to such images, the more desensitized we become.
The footage of Ukrainian troops running through the trenches, shooting dead blurred Russian soldiers, was not dissimilar to the video games we buy our children.
The images of children sobbing in Gaza should haunt us every waking moment and leave us with nightmares when we sleep.

The images of children sobbing in Gaza should haunt us every waking moment and leave us with nightmares when we sleep.

Peter Harrison

The world should be ashamed that it ever watched footage of a fleeing woman shot dead in the street by a sniper, in full view of her child, and call this Israel acting in self-defense.
The children who survive these attacks suffer from what Save the Children describes as “toxic stress,” which displays itself in a number of ways, including anxiety, loneliness and insecurity; emotional withdrawal, which stops them from having successful relationships; and aggression, which seems hardly surprising given the exposure they have had to the bombs dropped on their homes by absent strangers.
For others, the symptoms present themselves psychosomatically — a child’s stomach might hurt when presented with stressful situations, or they might find it hard to breathe or speak.
Then, of course, there are those children, some as young as 10, documented as wanting to self-harm, some through guilt that they somehow survived a bomb blast when the rest of their family was killed.
Meanwhile, we watch from afar, maybe sharing an image on social media of a sobbing child, who just saw the tent his father was in erupt into a ball of flames, or a little girl struggling to carry the bags weighing her down as she begs for the war to end.
We raise awareness by creating a story on social media, accompanied by emotive music, before putting down our phone and watching that TV show we have wanted to see for so long.
There are some positives that have come out of this. The children/young adults of Generation Z have plucked up the courage to fight the norms so many of us just accept as something we can do nothing about.
Ty McGlynn, of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, wrote this month in an article entitled “Generation Z Faces a Troubled World” that, rather than following in the apathetic footsteps of their predecessors, young people are instead engaging in the “public sphere for things they believe in.”
McGlynn states that demonstrations involving students make up more than 40 percent of all US protests related to the Israel-Palestine conflict, something that their counterparts in other parts of the world cannot do.
In 2016, while working in a previous job, I was sent to cover the work done by the British Council with Syrian refugee children in Lebanon. During that week, I spoke to children who had fled their homes with their parents and just a bag of clothes. They spoke of how local communities treated them with contempt, forcing them to relocate, often numerous times.
The parents of these children, who were once engineers, doctors, schoolteachers, janitors or car mechanics, were forced to sleep on the floor of the same room, with another family in the neighboring room.
But despite all this, these children still had ambition — they wanted to follow in their parents’ footsteps and become business people, scientists and teachers. Another told me how he wanted to be a doctor so he could “help people back home.”
Childhood is supposed to be idyllic; it is supposed to be filled with adventure and discovery. Children should be allowed to have dreams and enjoy their innocence.
But there is one other thing that stays with me from that trip: An 11-year-old girl who, when I asked her how, despite leading such a traumatic life, she still managed to smile — and it was a big smile — replied, “I might be smiling, but on the inside I am heartbroken.”

• Peter Harrison is a senior editor at Arab News in the Dubai office. He has covered the Middle East for more than a decade. X: @PhotoPJHarrison