Tear Gas and Tough Talk - The US Border Crisis Escalates

Tear gas, classified as a chemical weapon by the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, has been banned from use in warfare. It’s effects, which include a “burning, watery sensation in the eyes, difficulty breathing, chest pain, excessive saliva… skin irritation” and, after prolonged exposure, vomiting and diarrhoea, can in some cases also lead to death. Yesterday, it was used to disperse 500 migrants at the US-Mexico border after some attempted to breach the fence between Tijuana and San Diego.

This is not the first time that the US government has used tear gas against civilians. Indeed, somewhat illogically, whilst the use of tear gas in a conflict zone is tantamount to a war crime, it is perfectly legal and standard operating procedure for police forces around the world to use it for the purposes of crowd dispersal and control. It was used in 2014 during the Ferguson protests and the use of chemical agents such as tear gas and pepper spray against peaceful protesters has become so normalised that the UC Berkeley Science Review hosts a handy guide to the difference between the two and how to treat the effects of an attack.

The use by American law enforcement of a chemical weapon to combat civilian demonstrations by US citizens is nothing new, and therefore it should be unsurprising that such force would be extended to the “stone cold criminal” migrants just south of the border. Trump’s inflammatory language following the gas attack and the administration’s previous policy of separating families at the border leave no doubt as to the position of the US government on the migrant caravan, and it seems as though this latest escalation may be only the start of an even tougher response to those seeking refuge in the United States.

Which begs the question, exactly what is this a response to?

Trump has previously described the migrant caravan as “an invasion” that has required the deployment of troops to the southern border. But an invasion is usually identified as an aggressive act undertaken by an organised armed group, which the migrant caravan is not. If it were, and the migrant families at the border could be defined as an enemy combat force, then the use of tear gas against them could potentially be treated as a war crime.

The migrant caravan consists of around 7,000 migrants who have made their way from Central America to the US/Mexico border at Tijuana after fleeing conflicts in their home states. Although additional numbers of migrants continue to make their way towards the US, the notion that this constitutes a major increase in those seeking asylum from Central America is incorrect. As the journalistic fact-checking site Politifact notes: “the recent numbers of people apprehended at the southwest border also aren’t as high as they were in the early 2000s. Border Patrol apprehensions during that time often surpassed 1 million. Total southwest border apprehensions in fiscal year 2018 were below 400,000.”

This is a manufactured crisis. Trump ran on a platform that outright labelled Mexican migrants as criminals, rapists, and animals. His push for a border wall is also designed to stoke anti-immigrant fear in a rapidly fracturing America, and my fear is that the rhetoric, and the response it generates towards immigrants, is going to get worse before it gets better. The day after the tear-gassing, the Associated Press referred to the migrant march towards the border as a “show of force”, again portraying the scenes at the “war-like” border as some sort of battle between US troops and a dangerous invading enemy.

Men, women, and children have been stopped at the border after walking thousands of miles to flee violence and unrest in their homelands. Allowing unrestricted access to the United States may not be a possibility, and that is not what I, or anyone else, is suggesting. But turning them into scapegoats – making them at turns into enemy combatants, criminals, or animals – is a dangerous and deeply worrying development. Now stranded in Tijuana, the migrant families are finding that the Mexican authorities and local residents, themselves being portrayed as rapists and security threats by their increasingly aggressive northern neighbour, are also turning against them.

This is dehumanisation unfolding in real time. This is the most powerful country on earth gearing up to go on the offensive against some of its weakest and most vulnerable people. The anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been festering in the US and Europe over the last few years is now poisoning everything, including, with this latest tear-gas attack, the migrants themselves.

Compassion Fatigue - Fighting Hopelessness in an Interconnected World

In the modern age of 24 hour news cycles and social media, we are constantly bombarded with images of human suffering on an unimaginable scale, argues a recent Guardian Long Read article by Elisa Gabbert. With global peace and security deteriorating and immediate access to the horrors of violence and disasters through social media, we have never been more aware of the trauma of others. With this new exposure to suffering, argues Gabbert, there is a very real risk of becoming numb to the headlines. When there is that much trauma, what can one person do to help? What’s the point in doing anything, if the one person you might help will only be replaced by a million more in an even worse situation?

This sense of helplessness and desire to turn away is clinically referred to as “compassion fatigue”. As Gabbert references, the psychologist Charles Figley defines compassion fatigue as “a state of exhaustion and dysfunction... as a result of prolonged exposure to compassion stress”. The effects of compassion fatigue are particularly detrimental to first responders and carers, individuals who are exposed to trauma every day as part of their job, but with more direct exposure to conflict, disaster, and suffering than ever before, there’s a risk of compassion fatigue manifesting itself in the general public as well.

Throughout the Guardian article, Gabbert wrestles with the consequences of this feeling of apathy that comes from prolonged exposure to compassion stress. It’s hard to watch the news, when, as journalist Susan Moeller puts it, the media careens “from one trauma to another, in a breathless tour of poverty, disease and death”. You can only watch so many such stories before it becomes too emotionally taxing. How many times have you heard someone say that they don’t like to watch the news because it’s “too depressing”?

The media, activists, and campaigners have long been aware of the very real effects of dehumanisation, and it’s opposite. Telling someone that one million people are suffering as a result of the latest disaster or conflict rarely inspires action because it is impossible to comprehend that many people, let alone that many people’s suffering. But telling the story of one of those people elicits a much stronger emotional reaction and desire to respond, because suddenly the tragedy has been ‘humanised’, it’s suddenly real. However, if that very human story of personalised trauma appears on our screens alongside twenty other very human stories of personalised trauma, then for many of us, our reserves of empathy and compassion have already been used up and we’re back to square one.

Combating compassion fatigue in this interconnected world is therefore increasingly difficult. A scroll down my Twitter feed shows news reports depicting the latest violence in Yemen and Syria, project updates from Medecins Sans Frontieres detailing the struggle to support refugees in the Mediterranean, and even comedians and actors bemoaning the latest policies of the Trump administration that continue to separate families at the border. If I really want to make a difference, which one of these issues deserves my attention? And even if I picked one, what can I actually do to make any real impact? And, if somehow I managed to do something, anything, will I just have to do it all over again when the next thing comes along? It certainly is overwhelming.

Gabbert struggles with her own conclusion that stepping away from politics is one way of coping with compassion fatigue. There is comfort, she argues, in knowing that if you personally just need a break from the worries of the world, there will be other people to pick up the slack until you’re ready to carry on the fight. However, as she acknowledges, sometimes this feels more like avoidance than a real solution to the problem. Is there anything else we can do to overcome compassion fatigue?

The humanisation of a problem certainly seems to galvanise a response and gain support for humanitarian operations in the immediate aftermath of a disaster or conflict, but focusing only on the human trauma is increasingly unhelpful. Instead, we should be focusing on the whole human experience. Individuals that have lived through war or a major disaster are still individuals, with their own aspirations, skills, family histories, and stories to tell. Those stories are not limited to the trauma. We are at risk, with our current news coverage, of labelling a survivor of conflict or poverty as simply that; another wretched soul in need of assistance. This breeds the apathy and even indignation symptomatic of compassion fatigue. What makes this person more deserving of my help than anyone else?

But refugees, conflict survivors, those displaced by disasters or suffering from poverty, are not defined by their current status. They might need some help right now, but mostly they want to help themselves. And so often, they do. These are the stories we don’t hear. That malnourished, crying child on the news today, if given the right sort of support right now, will have far happier stories to tell in the future. Human stories that don’t drain our compassion, but inspire us. Last year I spent three months living and working in Sarajevo with the Post-Conflict Research Center (PCRC). Sarajevo today is a vibrant, unique city surrounded by the most incredibly beautiful natural environment, and filled with people who do amazing things every day. Just over twenty years ago, it was a burned out husk that dominated our newsreels as a place with little to no hope for the future. Whilst I was there I spent some time covering the still-developing Rohingya crisis, and the burned out homes, displaced populations, and ethnic violence echoed many of the scenes in the former Yugoslavia two decades prior. I found myself wondering what the status of the Rohingya people will be in twenty years time. What will Syria look like in 2040?

Humans are survivors, and even in the darkest times there are sparks of light. Those sparks of light can lift us out of compassion fatigue and inspire us instead. Those are the stories we should be telling. PCRC first opened my eyes to this with their Ordinary Heroes project, which focuses on ordinary people who did amazing things to save lives in the darkest days of the conflict. These people never had their faces on the news. Similarly, UNHCR’s Stories page has been set up to tell the stories of re-homed refugees who are now making an impact in their new societies in various unique and interesting ways. Again, these are the stories that don’t get featured in the headlines.

The helplessness that many people might feel watching the news stems, at least in part, from a sense that the suffering is so severe, so extreme, that there’s nothing we can do to help. It is important to remember that what we see is a snapshot of the lowest point of these people’s lives. Their stories don’t stop when the journalists and aid agencies leave. They pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and carry on. And make many new stories that involve laughter and love. We should seek these stories out, because they can lift us up and inspire us when we might be starting to feel like there’s no hope.

You don’t need to save a life to make a difference, and you should not take that weight with you. You need to give someone a chance to save their own. And if we as socially-conscious citizens can manage that then we are given the chance to see how resourceful and incredible people can be. I found inspiration in the stories I heard of survival in the darkest days of the former-Yugoslav wars, and continue to feel energised by the tales of everyday heroism in today’s conflict and disaster zones.

The world can often seem like a dark and scary place, especially when we are exposed to its darkest and scariest moments. But if we focus on the human stories, the full human stories, suddenly it feels as though things might be a little more hopeful than we first thought.