A Sea of Excuses: When Some Children Are Left To Sink

Beaten. Shot. Drowned. Detained. Left to bleed. This is how children's rights die today under international law.

Illustration created by Viviana Laperchia

Sometimes it happens under the radar, like the death of a 2-year-old boy from Sierra Leone who went missing on March 15, when a boat transporting dozens of immigrants sank near Lampedusa, Italy, leaving only 64 survivors. His body has not been recovered yet and chances are slim. We learned this hard lesson in 2015, when the picture of a 2-year-old Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, washed ashore in Turkey, made global headlines amid a renewed wave of immigration from West Asia and a hard-to-contain humanitarian crisis in Europe.

Some other times, the story is a pattern that repeats itself since 1948. Mohammad Wahbi Hanani, a 17-year-old boy, was beaten to death by the IDF (Israel Defense Force) during an incursion in the West Bank on the first day of this year’s Ramadan. Similarly, last November, Jad Jadallah, a 14-year-old Palestinian boy from a West Bank refugee camp was shot at close range by Israeli soldiers and left to bleed on the ground for 45 minutes under their eyes, as reconstructed in a recent BBC analysis.

These murders happened against the backdrop of an iconic death retold for the big screen by director Kaouther Ben Hania with her award-winning film “The Voice of Hind Rajab.” On January 29, 2024, 5-year-old Hind Rajab was shot 355 times in Gaza by an approaching IDF tank while waiting in the car for a Red Crescent ambulance that will be purposely prevented from reaching her.

If we think atrocities of this nature only happen on this side of the world, plagued by ethno-religious wars and political instability, it suffices to take a look at the current state of affairs in the United States under Trump’s administration to gain a different perspective.

Emmanuel Gonzales-Garcia, a 15-year-old autistic boy from Houston went missing on October 5, 2025, after selling fruits with his mother. 48 days later, he was released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which includes ICE, due to a court decision that ruled his custody unnecessary.

Perhaps more popular was the detention of the boy with the blue hat, Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old child from Minnesota detained by ICE on his walk home from school in the middle of an asylum claim advanced by his father — a peculiar case that led the public to believe his arrest was indeed a “bait” to detain and deport his family.

In the overarching narrative of bringing democracy to the Middle East and freeing women from oppression in Iran, the US are deemed responsible for the deadly Tomahawk missile strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school that killed over 170 people last month. Evidence gathered by Amnesty International, BBC Verify, and The New York Times, among others, and supported by ongoing US military investigations, puts the States at fault in preventing the casualty.

In a world where former Foreign Ministry Annalena Baerbock is heard stating before the German Parliament that “civilian places can lose their protected status because terrorists abuse this status” with reference to the alleged Hamas’ tunnels beneath Gaza, the killing of over 64,000 Palestinian children, including at least 1,000 babies in the last two years (UNICEF, 2025) become a justified exception.

Whether by a misguided interpretation of international law or by the deliberate targeting of non-white peoples, what we are witnessing is the systematic erosion of human rights, in particular those of children, at the hands of self-proclaimed civilized countries, in an unsurprising colonialist fashion.

Italy is no stranger to this dynamic, as it advances a migration bill designed by Meloni’s conservative cabinet to impose a 30-day blockade on sea arrivals in the event of “a serious threat to public order” and a possible detour to Albania’s migrants centre — a move heavily condemned by human rights groups and never concretely implemented.

The concept of “migration crisis” at the core of most right-wing political parties’ programs across the globe is widely seen by rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, as a dehumanizing expression engineered by the West to shift the blame on migrants rather than addressing the root cause of immigration, which historically lies within oil wars, imposed poverty and persecution perpetrated by Western powers.

It is in this very framework that children’s rights easily become an appendix to international law or a casualty in the name of security. However, empathy alone will not save these children from an endless cycle of death and discrimination. According to research by Prof. Carolyn Pedwell at the intersection of Theory of Mind and power dynamics, a true reconciliation between being born privileged and “putting ourselves in someone’s shoes” can only happen through the decolonisation of the mind, that is, breaking the narrative of superiority over an inferior race that needs to be saved.

This entails rewiring our brain by rethinking our language: migrants are not a danger to public safety, let alone illegal aliens, but humans looking for a better future; Palestinians are not terrorists or animals but peoples indigenous to the land of Palestine, deserving to live a dignified life; it is not a migrant crisis but a humanitarian one, when Europe’s infrastructure is not able to facilitate global movement while guaranteeing basic equal rights.

When Alan, Mohammad, Jad, Hind, Emmanuel, Liam and every single child will be equal to the eyes of the international community, only then children’s rights will be protected.

Until that day, they will always be someone else’s children.