Images of children are a constant, sometimes numbing, and often striking feature of many human rights appeals. These images—currently coming out of Ukraine, Tigray, and Myanmar, among other places—cause us to wince and look away even as the images show us the awfulness of what people can do to one another.
I have three images of children in distress above my work desk. Two are quite personal.
One image shows the writer Marcello di Cintio with a girl I’d written about after seeing a photograph of her digging through the ruins of her home in Gaza in 2014 (here’s the article). The wonderful Marcello contacted me after reading the piece, then found the girl and sent the photo to show that she was still alive. One day, I hope Marcello will include this story in a book and publish the photo.
The second photograph is by a former student, taken in September 2016. A talented artist, my student whited out a portrait she’d made of another Black person and used the painting to shield her head, bowed in pain, anger, and fear.
Both of these photographs have the consent of the people pictured. The Palestinian girl I call Liesel—after the heroine in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief—looks steadily into the camera, perhaps a bit nervous yet at the same time willing, her arms formally straightened at her sides. Similarly, the student crafted this image, her protest against the rising tide of racism and xenophobia whipped up by the Former Guy’s campaign.
But the third image—coincidentally sharing the same orange and beige palette of the other two—is completely involuntary. The girl in the foreground and the boy behind her likely didn’t even realize their photographs were being taken. They’d just survived a bomb attack in Aleppo, Syria. Their skin is chalky with dust, suggesting that they’d been pulled from rubble. Their clothing is the kind any child might wear around the house on a lazy afternoon. Neither one still has shoes.
All three photos are striking, though for very different reasons. Separate from the horror and emotion of each image, what I want to write about is how we can trace back, at least in part, the tactic of using photos of suffering children to a specific moment and a specific person: Eglantyne Jebb, one of the founders of Save the Children and an important inspiration for the idea that children have rights.
Jebb is a hero I profile in my new kids’ book, Righting Wrongs: 20 human rights heroes around the world (June 2022, Children’s Review Press). No one would have predicted that Jebb would become such an important advocate for children. Born to privilege in the United Kingdom, Jebb initially adopted her mother’s approach to charity, a kind of noblesse oblige that never questioned the systems or structures that created inequality and generational poverty.
A relative funded her university education, unusual for a woman of her class at the time. Jebb thought that she wanted to be a teacher. But she’d never really had much contact with the working class or the poor. In her diary, she wrote that she realized she’d rather visit the dentist than be a teacher. Jebb dreaded going to work, calling it “infinitely worse than breaking stones.”
Jebb seemed to jump at the chance of becoming a permanent companion to her widowed mother. But traipsing around the spas of Europe soon bored her. While Jebb enjoyed solitude, she became increasingly frustrated with her “useless” days.
World War I changed everything. Just as today, international agreements protecting civilians were weak to non-existent. The Germans sacked cities, massacred civilians, and destroyed sites like libraries. Huge numbers of civilians fled, most women and children.
Friends convinced Jebb to tour the English-run hospitals set up for refugees in the Balkans and help raise funds. This took great bravery. At the time, it was rare for women of Jebb’s social class to travel alone. Once, fearing for her own life as well as the lives of local supporters, she sewed written notes of her interviews with refugees into her clothing to hide them. “The names of murdered men seemed to press against my heart till I could almost have cried out with pain,” she wrote in her journal.
Few expected Jebb to focus on children (she once wrote that the “Dreadful Idea (sic) of closer acquaintance [with children] never entered my head.” Her real genius, her biographer Claire Mulley writes, was to use writing and visual material, including photographs, “to catch people’s imagination, enabling them both to empathize with the human issue, and believe that they could contribute personally to a meaningful solution.”
And principal among those photographs was one featuring a starving infant.
Her decision to focus on children went against many assumptions of the time, when childhood was seen as little different from adulthood. Throughout the UK and Europe, adults expected children to work. The law considered children the property of their families, not individuals with rights.
In 1919, the Jebb sisters founded Save the Children Fund, to send donations directly to groups working with Central European children. Jebb’s travels had taught her that while men often praised the glory of war, women and children bore the brunt of the destruction and suffering.
“It is the thousands of sick and starving and helpless and deserted for, whose misery is unrelieved by the sense of adventure and history, who pay the price for war’s arbitrament,” or finality.
In just a few years, Jebb’s hair went completely white, the inspiration for her nickname, “The White Flame.” In April 1919, London police arrested Jebb for handing out leaflets with the photograph of the starving infant to promote a Save the Children organizing meeting. Authorities accused Jebb of being anti-war, a crime at the time. She was convicted, fined, and spent eleven days in jail.
The arrest and trial didn’t teach Jebb to shy away from notoriety. Even bad publicity can help a cause, she realized. Interest in Save the Children skyrocketed. Jebb became an expert at using visual images to raise money. She pioneered the use of celebrities to bring attention to her cause, in what some derided as “stunts.” But these are now standard techniques used in human rights and relief work.
“The world is not ungenerous, but unimaginative and very busy.”
In 1922, Jebb drafted a five-point “Charter for Children,” declaring that children must have the opportunity for school, health care, protection from exploitation, and assistance in times of distress. The charter was the basis for the Declaration on the Rights of the Child, ratified by the League of Nations in 1924, and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), ratified in 1989.
Jebb died in 1928, health battered in part by constant travel. But her legacy is powerful and enduring. By 2020, every country save one—the United States—had ratified the CRC, now the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the world. US reluctance stems mainly from conservative opposition to anything that might give children rights, like freedom of speech and the freedom to live their gender identity, to do or think things their parents disagree with.
Of course, there are serious ethical issues around the use of images of children. Often, unscrupulous groups circulate them to raise funds that can be diverted to their pockets. At the same time, just as in Jebb’s time, the image of a suffering child can move the world to swift and necessary action.
It’s important to have the ethical debate and ensure that images of children are used responsibly. At the same time, we must have the courage to witness the harm done to children and take action to protect them.
Jebb left us important tools. It’s up to us to use them wisely.
For a deep dive on Jebb, check out Clare Mulley’s excellent The Woman Who Saved the Children : A Biography of Eglantyne Jebb, Founder of Save the Children (Oxford : Oneworld, 2009). Find the audio version, read by Joely Richardson, on Bookshop here.
Book news
On a different subject entirely! The re-release of The Bond Trilogy draws near. Both The Bond and The Hive Queen have new, fabulous covers thanks to the brilliant Molly Phipps at We got you covered book design. There’s also new content and new interior design as well as Travis Hasenour’s marvelous map.
The final and as yet unpublished book in the trilogy, The Mother’s Wheel, will have a cover reveal in May—stay tuned (and please put these on your to-read lists). I’m still building a team of early readers, so let me know if you want an electronic advance reading copy.
Thank you for reading!