Sophia University Junior College Division Faculty Journal
第 43 号, 2022, 1-17

Opportunities for Empathy:
Journalistic Accounts of Migration and
Migration Crises
Chris Oliver
Abstract
This paper considers how journalistic writing, particularly in the form of news
articles, serves to provide readers with opportunities to empathize with refugees,
asylum seekers, and other migrants and displaced persons. Toward this end, the paper
considers a number of articles on migration and migration crises published since themid-2010s in three major, English-language news outlets: the Washington Post, the New
York Times, and the Guardian. Examining how various articles incorporate migrants’voices and portray migrants’ experiences of attempting to flee their home countries
for a destination country or region, the paper shows how empathetic opportunities aretied most often to in-the-moment accounts of migrants’ journeys, and less so the local
cultural particularities that inform migrants’ backstories.

Introduction“This border is like a river of death.” In a newspaper article, those are the words
used by a Moroccan migrant to describe the thickly forested area between Belarus andPoland (Glensk & Vulliamy, 2021). He had walked for two nights through this borderzone in an effort to enter Poland without being detected and captured by Polish border
patrols. Like many other migrants in 2021, he had been attempting to make his way into
the EU by way of the Belarus-Poland border. Those found by the Polish troops deployed
to the border zone would be unceremoniously deported to Belarus, whose own guards
would force migrants back into the forest, where some would spend weeks and some die(Henley, 2021; Morris & Dixon, 2021). Media reports on this migration crisis and others
over the past several years have, at times, presented the more individually “human”
aspects of migration crises, giving readers a sense of what it is that migrants go throughin attempting to flee their home countries.
In this regard, it can be said that journalistic writing, particularly that foundin news articles, provides readers with opportunities to learn about and in a sense
vicariously experience what it is like to be a migrant or similarly displaced person in the─1─Chris Oliverworld today. Reporters regularly position themselves at sites where migration crises are
unfolding, so as to not only provide description and analysis of the various geopoliticalfactors contributing to migration and migration crises, but to also present the stories ata more individual, human level. For those of us reading from afar, journalistic writing
provides a readily accessible medium to learn about the experiences of migrants andeven opportunities to empathize with them.
Yet the facilitation of empathy, through what could be called journalistic empathy,
is no mean feat. Often enough, the words that migrants use to describe their experiences
point to a realm of desperation and suffering that, for undoubtedly many readers
including myself, is far removed from one’s own world of lived experience. To what
extent can most readers of a news article even begin to comprehend what it is like tohave made one’s way on foot through “a river of death”? Or, what it is like to have been
kidnapped in the process of migrating and been held hostage for ransom, where thekidnappers “threatened to kill my son and sell his organs” (Lakhani, 2017)? Or, to bea newly married young man living in a refugee camp who can bluntly state “It’s better
to die without children in Syria than it is to bring children into the world as refugees”(Sullivan, 2013)? Such statements do offer a glimpse into the mindsets of displaced
people, but they do not readily lend themselves to us putting ourselves in the shoes ofthe people who uttered them. This may be true for people like myself, having moved
from one developed country and now residing in another, but also even for people whoseparents fled their home countries under much more precarious circumstances. As one
14-year-old put it, referring to the manner in which her parents had left El Salvador for
the U.S. in fear of gang-related violence, “I don’t know how to connect to that” (Miller,2018).
In this paper, my aim is to ascertain not whether or in what ways readers may
actually empathize with the people described in media reports on migration crises, butinstead how journalistic writing—particularly in the form of news articles—provides
1

opportunities for readers to empathize with migrants and other displaced people. Bynecessity, this entails examining how news articles variously draw close to the very
people who are at the heart of migration crises: migrants themselves. It includes, forinstance, how news articles incorporate individual migrants’ stories and own words,
how they depict migrants’ motivations and reasoning behind their decisions to leave
their home countries, and migrants’ own narratives of and perspectives on the migration
experience itself. Migrant activists and others sometimes serve as proxy voices for
migrants, but it is most often migrants’ own accounts of their in-the-moment difficulties

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Opportunities for Empathy: Journalistic Accounts of Migration and Migration Crises

during their journeys—rather than the cultural or other influences shaping theirbackstories—that provide the points of opportunity for empathy.

Orientation to empathy
Empathy is a subject about which much has been written in the last decade orso from a variety of perspectives, including psychological (Davis, 2018), philosophical(Coplan & Goldie, 2011), educational (Henshon, 2019), anthropological (Hollan &Throop, 2008), and even biological (de Waal, 2009). In common parlance, empathy isoften paraphrased as putting oneself “in the shoes” of another person, to see and feelthings from the perspective of that other (e.g., Empathy Museum, n.d.). In academic
literature, a distinction is often drawn between affective empathy and cognitive
empathy, with the former referring to feeling the same emotions that another person
is experiencing, and the latter indicating the taking of another person’s perspective
such that one can understand what that person is feeling (Shamay-Tsoory et al., 2009;
Hoffman, 2011). Strictly speaking, empathizing does not mean aligning oneself with or
taking the “side” of the other—e.g., one can empathize with someone who is ideologically
opposed to one’s own political views without ultimately agreeing with that person—
and neither does it mean having feelings of pity or concern for someone in a difficult
situation. Such reactions are better understood as sympathy and compassion (Young,2012).
In recent years, there has also been a significant upswell in societal discourse on
empathy. As I have discussed elsewhere, this is reflected in a pronounced increasein news articles explicitly referring to empathy (using the word itself), in training
programs offered to corporate employees and medical practitioners, and in debates overimmigration (Oliver, 2018). In popular discourse, empathy is generally characterized
as a social and moral good, and a large amount of the popular literature on empathy isaccordingly prescriptive in tone (e.g., Krznaric, 2014). Among journalists, too, empathy
is talked about and sometimes advocated as an important element of professional
journalistic practice (Bodin, 2021; Bui, 2018; Herman, 2016; Terceros, 2018). A“Journalism of Empathy” course at Northwestern University, for instance, offers toteach students to report in a way that “giv[es] voice to those without, introducing
readers to people they otherwise would never have reason to meet” (Kotlowitz, n.d.). It
should thus come as no surprise that news reporting on migration and migrant crises isoften empathetic in tone.
In this paper, I use the term empathy in relation to journalistic writing dealing with─3─Chris Olivermigrants and how the writing draws close to the lived experiences of migrants. This may
variously include their state of mind when in the process of deciding and preparing toleave their home countries, or in some cases leave again from an intermediary country,
the often perilous journeys they make in attempting to make their way to a destination
country, and their struggles after making their way to a destination country, at times
including their efforts to reunite with family members who did not make the journey
themselves or who became separated en route. Rather than attempting to evaluate
whether or to what extent a particular journalist, news article, or news outlet is
empathetic or exhibits empathy, here I am interested in how the words and sentencesused in the articles provide opportunities for readers to empathize with the migrants
under discussion, how they provide a window to the particular circumstances andexperiences of migrants such that readers might be able to put themselves in the “shoes”
of those people.

Methodological considerations
Toward this end, the present study examines a number of English-language news
articles from the last several years dealing with migrants, would-be migrants, andmigrant crises. Apart from news articles, there are of course many types of media andchannels of communication that give voice to migrants’ experiences. These include
novels, such as Dina Nayeri’s Refuge (Nayeri, 2017), non-fiction books and long-form
journalism (e.g., McDonald-Gibson, 2016), documentaries (e.g., Ingarasci & Temple,
2015), and reports from governments and other organizations (e.g., United Nations, n.d.).
News articles, however, as short-form journalism, can exhibit empathetic perspectives
accessible to a broad range of people without the investment in time and concentrationneeded to consume a novel or non-fiction book or watch a documentary. They provide avehicle for empathetic opportunity that can be readily utilized by significant numbers ofpeople.
The articles considered here were all drawn from three sources: the Washington
Post, the New York Times, and the Guardian. All are news articles rather than opinion
pieces, analysis-opinion essays, or photo- or audiovisual-based works appearing on
news outlets’ websites (e.g., Kirkpatrick, 2015; Ponomarev, 2015). Although the photos
accompanying articles in some cases are more empathetically inclined than the written
article content itself (e.g., Miroff & Sacchetti, 2021), I restrict my discussion to thewritten content. All articles were selected because they employ empathetic devices to agreater or lesser extent; thus, excluded were articles that discuss a refugee crisis only

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Opportunities for Empathy: Journalistic Accounts of Migration and Migration Crises

in terms of, say, the political machinations of certain governments without attempting
to draw close to the experiences of migrants themselves. Articles selected either cameup organically in my own regular reading of the news or were found through online2

searches. The three above-mentioned news outlets were chosen because of the presumed
likelihood that they would provide articles suitable for the present study; no assertionis made that similarly empathetic articles are not also published by other news outlets.
It is possible that certain news outlets may, by choice, be inhospitable to empathetic
reporting, but it is not the purpose of the present study to ascertain the extent to which
this is true.

Migration news without empathy
Among the many articles related to migration crises published by the three news
outlets used for this study, the majority seem to be written from the premise that theessential story can be told without incorporating an empathetic touch. Many such news
articles, after all, take as their subject matter the more broadly political, economic,
and other factors at play in migration crises, including how developed countries havecontributed or responded to them. A New York Times article, for instance, on the 2021
American withdrawal from Afghanistan and the desperation of many Afghans wishing
to leave their country, focuses not on the would-be migrants themselves but on American
public sentiment toward refugees and the unlikelihood that the U.S. government
would back a mass resettlement effort (Jordan, 2021). Although one Afghan man, aninterpreter who had worked with the U.S. military and who had been evacuated to
the U.S., is briefly quoted, his voice is but a minor embellishment to the article. In
many articles dealing with migration crises, migrants’ experiences simply do not figure
prominently.
In other cases, even when migrants do figure prominently, the apparent purposeof the article may limit the development of an empathetic tone. A Washington Post
article features seven Afghan refugees in the United States from various walks of life.
A section of the article is devoted to each person, with a photo portrait, a description of
the person’s background and route out of Afghanistan, and their views on the unfoldingcrisis in the country. One man stated, for instance: “‘It’s like you are watching the people
you love the most in the world from afar and they are staring at the future, and there’s
nothing but a big, black void,’ he said in tears. ‘There is no hope’” (Villegas, 2021). Theinterviewees’ words are sometimes almost poetic, sometimes more dryly analytical.
Yet, as the overall thrust of the article seems to be to introduce a multiplicity of Afghan

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voices so as to illustrate that there is no singularly “Afghan” perspective on the complex
situation in the country, each person’s view is simply introduced as a quotable snippet.
With no attempt to inquire further into any one person’s thoughts, the article briskly
moves on to the next person profiled.
In a similar vein, in articles where the reporters were positioned close to where
migration crises were unfolding on the ground and had first-hand access to migrants
themselves, often the articles do not draw especially close to particular migrants. In a
Guardian article on the 2021 migrant crisis developing on the Poland-Belarus border, areporter at the border zone came face to face with a Syrian family that had just managed
to slip through to the Polish side and, therefore, into EU territory. They begged not tobe reported to police. The article initially describes them in a curiously detached, aloofmanner, almost as if they were figures in a painting: “The infant was still, though notasleep. They looked like waxen figures, their faces blank, though one woman’s face wascovered in bruises” (Glensk & Vulliamy, 2021). The article goes on to give accounts fromother migrants regarding that border zone, including one who said that the people inhis group resorted to drinking water from mudpuddles after Polish guards refused themwater. And yet, the article does not linger on any one migrant or migrant family in a
way that might help allow readers to more fully grasp what that person or family had
been through; instead it provides brief snapshots of various migrants’ experiences ofattempting to traverse the border zone.

In-the-moment empathy
Where news articles on migration seem to draw closest to migrants is in recounting
their in-the-moment experiences of travel, especially crucial moments that were
exceedingly difficult or where something went terribly wrong. The narratives are
sometimes long and detailed and can be gut wrenching. “My wife and baby, they weredead,” one man recalled, after losing his loved ones when the boat they had been on, in
an attempt to migrate to Europe, capsized. “They drank the water of the ocean when theboat went down” (Alderman, 2016).
Stories dealing with migrants attempting to reach Europe by boat from northern
Africa are rife with accounts of migrants paying large sums to smugglers promising
to ferry them across the Mediterranean, only to find themselves on overcrowded,
unseaworthy vessels, or even abandoned at sea with no shelter and insufficient
provisions. From one article on Lebanese and Syrian migrants crowded by smugglers
onto a small boat in Triploi:

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The smugglers collected the passengers’ bags of clothing, food, water andphones and said it would all be carried in a second craft that would meet thema few miles offshore. No second boat ever appeared. For hours, and then days,
they drifted without fuel in the searing sun.
Mohammad Sofian, 21, was aboard with his pregnant wife and 2-yearold son. Without water, his wife was eventually unable to nurse the boy. Afteragonizing days, they gave him seawater to drink. On the fourth day, he died.
“I wrapped him in clothing,” said Sofian, who is now back in Tripoli withhis wife. “After a few days, I put him over the side.” (Hendrix & Durgham,
2020)
Although most readers surely have not experienced a similar journey or lost a young
child in such a way, the article provides a detailed narrative of what the migrants on theboat were going through, creating an opening for readers to imagine what it was like tohave been on the boat in that desperate predicament.
The article goes on to describe the actions of a 22-year-old man named Lisheen,
who, after the boat had been adrift for a week and the situation had become increasingly
desperate, went into the water to try to swim for help.
Lisheen swam and floated for days, stung by jellyfish, bitten by unknown sea
creatures. On two occasions, he said, he tried to let himself sink to oblivion,
only to find himself floating again. (Hendrix & Durgham, 2020)
The article does not explicitly state what had been going through Lisheen’s mind at thetime, but the account nevertheless allows one to sense that the situation for him hadgone beyond desperate, and that he was at this point willing to succumb to the ocean.
While it is typically interviews with migrants and their own narratives of theirordeals that provide the most gripping accounts of migration experiences, sometimes
other people quoted in articles serve as proxy voices for migrants. At times this concerns
the general character and motivations of migrants, such as expressed by the mayor
of a Polish town near the Belarus border: “These people are not criminals and havenot disturbed order in any way in my town. They are peaceful, desperate people whojust want to cross to a better life” (Higgins, 2021). In other cases, activists and others
working on behalf of migrants describe aspects of migration that, most likely, only
migrants themselves have experienced. An emergency medical worker in Poland, for─7─Chris Oliver

instance, described the migration on foot through the forested border region thus: “Itwas pitch black, in a densely forested area, with everyone trying to navigate through the
darkness by holding on to each other,” adding that the migrants she had encountered
were “scared, hungry, and cold” after having spent four nights in the forest (Henley,2021).
In some articles on migrants, it is actions of parents toward or on behalf theirown children that provide windows of opportunity to empathize. One article features
a Haitian man named Jeff Pierre, father to a young son, and his efforts to flee the direcircumstances in Haiti. He had paid $250 for a risky trip by sea that he hoped would
take him to the United States, where he could find work and provide for his family fromafar. After four days into the journey, with the boat adrift on the ocean and taking onwater, the captain apprised his passengers of their fate:
There was nothing but darkness around them. Darkness and desperation.
“We are lost,” the captain told four dozen men, women and children
squeezed tightly together on a flimsy wooden boat somewhere in the Caribbean
Sea. “There is no hope.”
Jeff Pierre thought of the 2-year-old son he left back in Haiti. He imagined
what it would be like for the boy to grow up without a father and started
crying. (Mérancourt & Villegas, 2021)
Here, by way of the man’s recollections of that attempt to leave Haiti, the article
provides a glimpse of the interiority of the man as he imagined himself dying at sea andleaving behind a child with no father. His concern for the boy is palpable, even if theprospect of dying adrift at sea is likely far less easy for readers to relate to.
In other cases, in-the-moment acts of parental care provide opportunities toempathize. In one article an Afghan woman, whose toddler daughter had been trampled
to death at the Kabul airport in the chaotic final days of the American occupation of thecountry, recalled how she had earlier told her daughter that the gunshot sounds they
could both hear were firecrackers rather than weapons, and how her daughter had beenso brave whenever they heard the sound of “crackers” (Zucchino, 2021). Although thesituation was far more dire than what most readers have themselves likely experienced,
the act of a parent telling a white lie to her child to soothe her fears is something thatmany parents can likely relate to.
Another article features an Afghan man residing in the U.S. who had ended up in

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a desperate predicament when his wife and children, who had made a return trip to
Afghanistan to visit family, found themselves unable to leave as the American military
withdrew from the country. In an earlier video chat that the man recounted to thereporter, the man’s young son had begged his father to save them:“Why can’t you just buy a plane to bring us home? When will you buy thisplane for us?” the 4-year-old had asked.
“He thinks it is a decision I’ve made not to bring him,” Mohammad said
with a sigh. As horrible as it made him feel as a father, he decided it was better
than explaining to his son the danger surrounding them.
“I told my son, ‘I am collecting my money now. I will let you know when I
have enough for the plane.’” (Wan, 2021)
Here as well, although the grave situation itself is likely to be far removed from thedirect experiences of most readers, the man’s act of lying to his son in order to notworsen the boy’s fears is an act of fatherly concern that those of us who are parents
can perhaps readily relate to and empathize with. While it may certainly be difficult toempathize with the totality of a migrant’s experiences in such extreme situations, theparental acts of devotion revealed in articles about them is something that readers canmore easily identify with; we can perhaps see ourselves doing the same thing for ourown children.

Backstory empathy
While news articles can thus provide opportunities to empathize through inthe-moment descriptions of immigrants’ ordeals, they less often seem to provide an
empathetic take on migrants’ backstories—e.g., their motivations for migrating, theirthought processes at the time of resolving to undertake a journey that could well beperilous, their rationales for undertaking the journey alone versus together with otherfamily members, or their feelings about leaving behind a social world of family, friends,
and others. To an extent, this may result from the fact that one major concern amid
migration crises is the immediate hazards that migrants face as well as the potential
for the loss of lives. Migration crises are accordingly often regarded by Oxfam, Doctors
Without Borders, and other relief agencies as humanitarian crises calling for responses
that treat migrants first and foremost as fellow human beings.
Many news articles do address in fairly broad terms the political, economic, and─9─Chris Oliver

other factors fueling surges in migration. A New York Times article, for instance, on
the mass deportation of Haitians trying to enter the U.S. refers to an overlapping
set of problems driving many Haitians to flee their country, including widespread
impoverishment, political instability resulting from the assassination of the country’s
president in July 2021, and a devastating earthquake a month later that left hundredsof thousands in need of emergency assistance (Isaac & Porter, 2021). A Guardian article
discusses the surge in migrants seeking to enter the EU through Belarus in terms of theBelarusian government actively encouraging migrants from the Middle East to enter thecountry and cross through the border with Poland, thus deliberately provoking an EU
migration crisis as a means to exact revenge for sanctions that had been imposed by the
EU (Tondo & Chulov, 2021).
Overall, however, in the articles considered for this study, far less attention isdevoted to migrants’ own voices considering their particular backstories, and where they
are taken up, it tends to be with little probing. In a 2018 article on the thousands-strong
convoy of Central Americans traveling together on foot in hopes of making their way into
the U.S., the reporter seems to have briefly talked with one woman who was walking
with her two five-year-old grandsons in tow:
Orellana did not seem equipped for such an epic journey: her only luggage
was a shoulder bag with a few clean clothes; on her feet, she wore a pair ofageing espadrilles.
But she said she had no choice: the boys’ father was murdered, and no one
would employ a 65-year-old domestic worker. “I can’t feed them any more,” shesaid, gesturing at the two boys. “I’m too old. I can’t get a job.”
So she was heading to Texas to be reunited with her daughter, who
migrated from their home in northern Honduras three years ago in searchof work. She had written her daughter’s phone number on her hand so shewouldn’t lose it. (García, 2018)
The exchange with the reporter seems to have been brief, and while it provides a
glimpse into the woman’s motivations for deciding to migrate, it leaves it up to readers
to fill in what is unstated about the woman having “no choice”: e.g., that she waswithout a support network of extended family or others who could help provide for her
grandchildren, that her daughter had migrated before due to poverty, that she did notview other Central or South American countries as viable migration destinations, and─ 10 ─

Opportunities for Empathy: Journalistic Accounts of Migration and Migration Crises

so on. There is no mention of whether the woman’s daughter was residing legally in the
U.S., in which case her view on the prospect of an extraordinarily long migration on footmight be brightened by the hope that there could be legal channels available to facilitate
the reunion with her daughter in Texas. Such gaps in the woman’s backstory, whilecertainly not crucial to the telling of a news article, may nevertheless limit the way inwhich it serves to invite readers to empathize with the woman.
Omissions related to migrants’ backstories, while easy enough to skim over, canprovoke questions that some readers may find disconcerting or even alienating. A New
York Times article features an Iraqi Kurdish man, Karwan, who had been attemptingwith his family to make their way through the heavily patrolled border zone into Poland.
Here, the article states, he faced a wrenching choice: whether or not to request urgent
medical care from the Polish side for his ailing two-year-old daughter, which would
alert Polish authorities to the group’s presence and could well jeopardize their journey.
“Worried that his ailing daughter and others in the group might not survive,” the article
states, “Karwan decided it would be best to seek medical help” (Higgins, 2021). One
thing that struck me when reading this episode is that while the man had been travelingwith his family, presumably including his wife, there is no mention of a wife and thedecision about how best to deal with the child’s medical issues is presented as a choicefor Karwan alone. Was not the child’s mother involved in deciding such an importantmatter, as would surely be the case in many readers’ families? The article at once seems
to invite empathy for Karwan and “[t]he choice for the father” that he faced, whileleaving unaddressed the role and status of the child’s mother.
Such omissions related to migrants may be tied to cultural, religious, or ideologicalissues that reporters or news outlets are reluctant to delve into, either because theyrequire excessive additional words to describe adequately or because they detract fromthe presumably more newsworthy content of the story. One exceptional article in thisregard appeared in the New York Times and profiled a 23-year-old Senegalese man
named Samba Thiam who was on the verge of becoming a Europe-bound migrant. With
his brother having drowned the year before in an attempt to reach Europe, Thiam wasnow considering whether he himself should try to migrate as well. Even at the young
age of 23, Thiam was now the oldest male in the family, the article tells us, and as such
was now “expected to support his brother’s widow and three daughters, not to mention
his mother and his own wife and son” (Searcey, 2016). While the article does not directlystate that this is a culturally rooted expectation, readers can infer that it is so. Unable
to provide for all these people by working his small farm, he moved 400 miles away from─ 11 ─

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his home village to Dakar in hopes of finding work. If unable to do so, he said, he would
attempt the risky journey to Europe. Another man, sharing a crowded room with Thiamin Dakar, summed up their predicament thus:“If you don’t have money in our society, they don’t even see you as human. If
your kids come to you and want even just one dollar and you can’t give it tothem, you are ashamed. What if your parents need something and you can’t
support them? At a certain point you become overwhelmed with bitterness. To
take the risk will be better than doing nothing. Even if you die, it’s worth therisk.” (Searcey, 2016)
Here as well, this expression of what compels these Senegalese men to migrate,even knowing that it could cost them their lives, would appear to reflect local cultural
sensibilities about the responsibility of men to provide for their extended family.
Accounts such as those appearing in this New York Times article help provide a fuller
picture of the motivations and inner dialog informing individual migrants’ decisions tomigrate, and thereby invite readers to empathize with them. At the same time, articles
that delve into local cultural particularities may throw into relief to some readers thatthey are inescapably unlike the people they are reading about in certain ways. Drawing
close to migrants, particularly concerning their culturally shaped backstories as
opposed to their in-the-moment experiences of hardship and suffering while traveling,paradoxically can expose differences that may not be bridged so easily by readerly
empathy.

Empathetic restraint
As I have discussed elsewhere, in societal discourse today empathy is widely
characterized “as a basic social good—as something that is intrinsically tied to bringing
about positive effects in our relations with others” (Oliver, 2018, p. 5), whereby a lackof empathy or failure to empathize is often depicted as a moral, human shortcoming. In
this paper I have attempted to highlight some of the ways that journalistic writing on
migrants and migration crises may provide opportunities to empathize, but it is not myintention to suggest that highly empathetic news articles on migrants are necessarily“better” than those that are less so, or to advocate a more empathetic tack in journalistic
writing. Indeed, empathetic restraint may be the more morally defensible choice in somecases. This is not because I believe that empathizing with others has a detrimental effect─ 12 ─

Opportunities for Empathy: Journalistic Accounts of Migration and Migration Crises

on our ability to think rationally about socially charged issues, as some have argued (mostnotably Bloom, 2016), but because the interlocutory work required to attain empathy
has the potential to harm vulnerable others.
Consider the example of a group of Honduran migrants, mentioned briefly in the
introduction to this paper, who were kidnapped and held for ransom. The group of five—a mother with her 15-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son, as well as two adultmale neighbors—were ambushed by several men with guns while walking along a road.
They were subsequently stripped, beaten, and held captive. The mother and daughter
were both raped. With the mother having left Honduras with only $30 in her possession,
the group was forced to provide phone numbers of relatives at home who could becontacted for ransom payments. The mother later recounted, after her brother had paida ransom and they had all been released: “They said they would kill us and our families
if we told anyone. We’re terrified – my son cannot get what happened out of his head”(Lakhani, 2017).
While the article as written provides a gripping, horrifying account, a reporter withaccess to the victims could have plied them with further questions about the ordeal
and its aftermath. Doing so could conceivably result in a more richly descriptive reporton the trauma those migrants experienced and the psychological scars it may have leftthem with, thus allowing readers to more fully put themselves in the migrants’ shoes.
Yet, while pressing the mother to relive the experience and to reveal her innermost
thoughts and feelings about it could have resulted in a more “empathetic” written
account through which readers could vicariously experience what the migrants had gone
through, this would likely have come at the cost of inflicting further harm on a woman
already in a highly vulnerable position. Empathetic restraint may thus be the more
morally sound choice when questioning and writing about displaced persons and others
in states of vulnerability.

Notes
1

	For the sake of simplicity, hereafter I will use the term migrants as a shorthand forrefugees, asylum seekers, would-be illegal immigrants, and other similarly displaced
people who are routinely the subjects of migration crises in recent years.

2	In the process of selecting articles to use for this paper, I read dozens of articles
related to migration published since the mid-2010s. In the end, approximately 20
are cited in the discussion herein.

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Chris Oliver

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