Introduction

In the early hours of 2 September 2015, the photo-journalist, Nilüfer Demir, arrived at a beach in Bodrum to photograph refugees embarking on treacherous journeys in rubber dinghies across the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece. As the morning light broke she spotted the small drowned figure of three-year-old Alan Kurdi washed up on the shore. Alan had died along with 11 other Syrian refugees, including his mother (Rehan) and five-year-old brother (Galip), who had set off in the same boat. Demir took a series of photographs of Alan who was wearing a red t-shirt, blue shorts and trainers. Some depicted him alone lying face down on the beach as the water lapped against his face. Others showed him being carried by a Turkish police officer. The photographs were initially posted by journalists on Turkish social media and then rapidly shared across the world accompanied by the hashtag #KiyiyaVuranInsanlik (humanity washed ashore) (D’Orazio, 2015). They went on to become iconic images of the refugee crisis and were a catalyst for an unprecedented outpouring of sentiments of compassion among media, the public and politicians.

Since the late 19th century it has been claimed that some immigrants and refugees are ‘undesirable’, and that their arrival should evoke hostility in receiving societies because of the supposed threats that they pose to citizens and their way of life. However, although such responses have remained an enduring and dominant feature of political and public discourse, these are not the only emotions present in contemporary debates on immigration and asylum. The current and following chapters examine how a discourse of ‘compassion’ has been incorporated into political and public debates on immigration and asylum policy. The discussion begins in this chapter with the case of the iconic visual testimony of the death of Alan Kurdi in 2015, which was (prematurely) heralded as a turning point in public attitudes to refugees in Europe. After discussing the role of testimony and the phenomenon of witness bearing, the response to the tragic death of the child is examined to explore how compassion was mobilised in critiques of the restrictive policies and lack of action by the UK during the refugee crisis.