One of my most vivid childhood memories growing up in South Uist was our school’s annual fundraising for “the black babies”. Even in primary one, the realisation children my age and younger were at risk of starving to death in a faraway land was something that troubled me deeply.

Our “reward” for doing our bit were small pocket-size pictures of those innocent, hopeful and desperate faces we were trying to help - which we would thumb through to pick a favourite, to take home to our parents with such enthusiasm it looked like a macabre version of the panini sticker album.

A few years later and when very much still in primary school, the reporting by Michael Buerk from Ethiopia meant the horror of starvation and famine, as what seemed like constant coverage of the “nearest thing to hell on Earth” went viral before going viral was even a thing, such was the reach of the BBC. A million had simply starved to death, millions more were on the cusp of doing the same. The unholy trinity of political instability, conflict, and global ambivalence had created an environment where life simply didn’t matter - until there was no hiding from it any more.

Read more by Calum Steele

The images of emaciated corpses of livestock, endless flies around the eyes and mouths of equally emaciated children, starving mothers unable to breast-feed their babies, distended bellies, helpless whimpering and silent screams of the agony of a slow and painful death were indelibly etched into the memories of anyone who saw them. Yet the fact there was now no denying what the world was seeing before its very eyes seemed to awaken our primal instincts for compassion, and revulsion at injustice as the world was forced into action. Quite simply when confronted with inhumanity, humanity stepped up.

I don’t know if this is nostalgia or not but it seems our collective ability to empathise and respond to the pain and endless suffering of others is on the wane. Individual opinions and feelings seem more important than the realities of how others are living (and dying) than at any time in my lifetime, as do sadly the belief that they need to share them.

Perhaps we have become so inured to death and devastation that human suffering doesn’t hit our consciousness the way to used to. 24/7 rolling news has shown the obliteration of people and place in full Technicolor ever since it came to life in the late 1980s. We have watched countless conflicts from the Gulf, the Balkans, and Afghanistan; the brutal consequences of the Arab Spring especially in Syria and Libya, and have seen so many people die that the reports no longer cause us to tune in but to switch off.

But it's worse than that. The softening of our instinctive reactions to suffering and brutality has seen an explosion in online clips showing all manner of horrific and brutal deaths. What was once the stuff of mythical snuff movies is now actively promoted for clicks and money as anyone ever unfortunate enough to find themselves on the "For You" tab on X can attest.

The impact of conflict is not confined to the borders of the lands where it happens. The displacement of millions provides ripe opportunity for the exploitation of the desperate, and criminal enterprises have zero compunction about heaping misery upon the hopeless. The abduction of women and children to be raised and kept as sex slaves is a tragedy that no one wants to hear about let alone believe. Hundreds of infants went missing in Ukraine at the start of the most recent Russian invasion and will likely never know a life of anything other than sexual abuse and exploitation as they are traded like commodities whilst still young enough to attract premium returns.

The millions who flee persecution are met with antipathy and suspicion as their basic needs for survival divert resources from already underfunded and overstretched domestic services. Bogeymen and scapegoats are easily created and targeted by loathsome politicians for their own cynical ends and all as a distraction from the root causes they inevitably support. Victim blaming is a tactic as old as time and war itself but so it seems is our ability to fall for it.

Famine-hit Ethiopian children in a refugee campFamine-hit Ethiopian children in a refugee camp (Image: Getty)

Surely, we can all agree that there can be no moral justification for the brutality visited on Israel on October 7 just as much as we can agree there is equally no moral justification for the relentless bombardment and devastation visited upon Gaza in response. We can all agree the terrified women and children abducted off the streets at gunpoint are as much innocent victims as the tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands who have been blown to pieces in response. If we can’t agree on that then humanity is truly lost and we have simply surrendered the world to anarchy and chaos.

The mental gymnastics required to square away inflicting so much fear on a young woman that she defecates herself as she is dragged away in a pick-up truck as the inevitable price of years of oppression is as perverse as the justification of the razing of Gaza to the ground in response.

I don’t care about the blame game any more: that can wait for another day. I care that entire families have simply been eradicated and life is deemed so inconsequential the suffering, starvation and maiming of women and children is reduced to a mere footnote in cynical PR war propaganda. I care that the brutal human reality of war where guttural pain, devastation, and imagery of the innocents in so much shock they are unaware they have had limbs severed or flesh torn from their bones isn’t rammed down our throats every single day - in the same way the coverage from Ethiopia was in the 1980s. I'ts precisely because this is the new hell on earth that we should be forced to confront it and then maybe, just maybe humanity will step up once more.

Calum Steele is a former General Secretary of the Scottish Police Federation, and general secretary of the International Council of Police Representative Associations