Yet it is not unusual to become desensitised to these images. According to professor Paul Slovic, a leading scholar on apathy towards genocide and decision research at the University of Oregon: “There are several obstacles to caring about distant suffering. One is that we react strongly to individuals at risk…but as numbers increase we lose our ability to engage emotionally. They become numbers…it is said that statistics are human beings with the tears dried off.”

In the summer of 2016, I decided to volunteer at a UNICEF supported refugee centre for women and children in central Athens. I felt compelled to help in any way I could, as if someone was pulling me by the hand, drawing me out of the safety of my life. It wasn’t until I had spent a week working at the centre that I began to realise that I had never really connected to the devastation I had seen on TV. The experience of being there for people during the most horrific circumstances of their lives opened my eyes; it moved me to tears and emotional exhaustion. Every day, new people flooded into Greece – families, lost and afraid, mostly from Syria and Afghanistan. In the evenings, I spoke to people in the square and heard their stories. I began to see the power that connecting with real people and hearing their stories could have.

“When we become numb to images of pain, fiction can help us feel empathy again”