Who Will Think of the Children?

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a bit of a film nerd. Suffice to say I’ve learned the hard way few things end a conversation faster than launching into a 30 minute lecture on how “It’s a Wonderful Life” is actually an allegory for the evils of capitalism.

What can I say? I have a critical mind. And since my mind is often focused on human rights I tend to interpret movies through that lens. This may explain my recent affinity for horror movies. Horror films aren’t particularly smart films, they don’t require much analysis or thinking. It gets dark, crazy guy kills all the promiscuous teens and/or minority characters, roll credits.

It was with this mentality that I sat down to watch “Who Can Kill a Child?” One of the interesting things about Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s 1976 film is that it’s not easy to come by. Released in the United States and the United Kingdom under a number of different names, including “Island of the Damned”, it wasn’t released on any home video format until 2007.

The plot is fairly simple. An English couple goes to Spain for holiday. They travel to a remote island where they find plenty of children but no adults. Turns out the kids woke up one night and decided to start killing. Now the couple need to get off the island before they become the next victims.

Despite the title “Who Can Kill a Child?” is not too shocking when compared with recent horror films. There is killing to be sure, but the vast majority of violence is shown off-screen and the gory is quite minimal.

The purpose of the film is not to shock you with gore. No, the purpose is to shock you with the answer to the title’s question. Upon first glance our answer is no one. Killing a child is an act of unspeakable evil. This point is hammered home by the first eight minutes of the film which, using news reel footage, is a chronicle of the toll war takes on children from World War II to Vietnam. But as the film progresses, as the laughter of children becomes a grating noise, we find ourselves hoping the protagonists take out at least one or two brats before the credits roll. In the span of two hours we go from deploring evil to sympathizing with it.

The true horror in the film lies not in the violence, but in the realization that the answer to the title question is anyone, everyone. Children are casualties of war, true, but they are also victims. After the dust is settled and the peace is signed they are the ones who will suffer the most in the aftermath. Be it psychologically or physically. And it’s not just violence that claims children. Suffering can be found in relatively peaceful countries.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child may be the most ratified human rights convention in history but it also may be the least enforced. Just in Nepal, for example, between 2002 and 2006 over 22,000 children were forcibly recruited as soldiers. Australia’s policy of asylum detention has systematically denied children of number of rights, including depriving children of a family environment.

Children deserve a better world. A world where the answer to “who can kill a child” is honestly “no one.”