The Impact of Identified Individual Victims on Funding in Humanitarian Crises

Abstract

In humanitarian crises, when faced with evidence of large-scale suffering—or when such suffering is presented numerically to an audience over an extended period of time—the empathic activation of an individual or population decreases over time. In contrast, distilling such suffering into a single focal point for audiences—or metonymically presenting the death of an individual as symbolic of the deaths of many—has been proven to activate individuals and entire populations to expend greater financial and political capital for the sake of an Identified Individual Victim, rather than an equal or larger number of unknown individuals. In uniting these two concepts, this article draws attention to how the publicity of Identified Individual Victims narratives can break the sociological condition of psychic numbing in a general population and increase the financial and political response to ongoing or undersupported humanitarian causes. Utilizing the Syrian and Venezuelan Refugee Crises as case studies of symbolic individuals and the suffering of groups approached as a collective, we will examine how framing Identified Individual Victims for a specific humanitarian cause positively impacts the ability to generate renewed interest and financial support.