What Is Compassion Fatigue?

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It can be hard to be aware of the suffering of children without being too overwhelmed with grief to act.

Allowing ourselves to grieve and experience compassion opens the door to action to protect children.

There are no small actions when it comes to caring for children, because every positive action leads to more.

Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish student at Tufts University, wrote in The Guardian about being abducted by masked men and detained by U.S. immigration enforcement, even though she had a valid student visa. Her “crime” was that she co-authored a letter in the student newspaper about the need to protect children in Gaza, not hurt or kill them. Öztürk has since been released from custody and earned her Ph.D. in child development.

Öztürk was moved to learn that people all over the world cared about her and her detention:

"I often wonder: what would it mean to suffering children if they knew they were cared for by so many people all over the world. The support I received helped me learn that even a few minutes of attention can transform someone's path to healing. I believe that this kind of care can help children suffering, even thousands of miles away. What if we offered just a few moments of our lives to care for them? There are countless ways to do this work. Two of them are grieving and taking action. Grieving is a testament to our humanity, a sign that we insist on feeling instead of giving in to numbness. Grieving for suffering children—who bear the cost of crimes they did not commit, trapped inside the consequences of someone else's power grab—is also a way to build a global community united through care. As James Baldwin said, 'The children are........

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