Why We Rage Against Predators But Shrug at Airstrikes

I came across something online recently that stopped me cold: “Standing against child abuse means standing against governments, institutions, and militaries that inflict cruelty against children, not just individual perpetrators.”

It sounds obvious when you read it like that. Almost painfully so. Yet it triggered something in me, a kind of cognitive dissonance I’ve been carrying for years without fully naming it.

As someone who has reported from conflict zones and who has documented what war does to the most vulnerable, I’ve watched this compartmentalization play out in real time. I’ve seen it in myself. I’ve seen it in the discourse. We rally, rightly, against child trafficking rings, against predators in our communities, against anyone who would harm a child. The outrage is visceral, immediate, and unequivocal. There is no nuance when it comes to protecting children from abuse.

Until there is.

Until those children are far away, until they speak a different language, pray differently or not at all, or live under a government we’ve deemed an enemy. Suddenly, the calculus changes. Suddenly, there are acceptable casualty rates. Collateral damage. Strategic necessity. The passive voice takes over: children were killed, not we killed children. Bombs fell, rather than we dropped bombs or we funded the bombing.

I want to think that almost all the people I know in my professional alliances would never tolerate the abuse of a child in their own community. Yet, they speak in clinical terms about operations that leave pediatric wards in rubble or entire communities held hostage in fear. Isn’t this child abuse, too?

The psychology behind this compartmentalization isn’t complicated. It’s protective. It’s tribal. And it’s as old as warfare itself.

We dehumanize to cope. The human brain struggles to process mass suffering; psychologists call it psychic numbing or compassion fatigue. One child’s face moves us more than statistics about thousands. Add geographic and cultural distance, and the mechanism kicks into overdrive. Those aren’t children like our children. That’s war, not abuse. That’s geopolitics, not cruelty.

We also grant moral permission through narrative framing. When violence against children happens in our communities, we call it what it is: abuse, torture, murder. When it occurs in conflict zones, we wrap it in the language of necessity and inevitability. We talk about difficult decisions and impossible circumstances. We emphasize the evil of the other side, and their violence against children becomes proof of their monstrosity, while ours becomes an unfortunate reality of confronting that monstrosity.

Photo by Marina Shatskih on Unsplash

If that truth makes us uncomfortable, maybe that discomfort is precisely what we need to sit with. A child burned to death in an airstrike experiences the same terror and agony as a child burned by an abuser. The geopolitical context doesn’t change the physics of suffering.

I understand military necessity. I understand existential threats and actors who weaponize children’s suffering for strategic advantage. We have collectively, in my view, become far too comfortable with a moral framework that treats identical suffering as categorically different based solely on who inflicts it and why.

What would it mean to stop compartmentalizing? It wouldn’t require pacifism or ignoring security threats. However, it might mean a different kind of accounting.

The uncomfortable truth is that we have collectively, and largely unconsciously, decided that some children are grievable and some are not. Some cruelty demands justice, and some demands only a shrug about the nature of war. The compartmentalization serves a purpose: it lets us off the hook. It enables us to rage against individual predators while giving a pass to institutional violence.

Maybe the first step is just naming it. Recognizing that when we say we stand against child abuse, we need to mean all of it; the kind committed by monsters in basements and the kind committed by governments with flags and mission statements.

Would very much value your thoughts and opinions. Please message or drop a comment.

- Hollie xo