A few months ago, volunteering for the Oxford Literary Festival, I had the privilege of shaking Sir Michael Morpurgo’s hand. Of more relevance to this article, I also listened to his talk on his recent retelling of Black Beauty (2025). It began with his meditations on retelling as a practice, before slowly drifting towards his fascination with writing from the perspective of the animal. He began his argument with a bold statement:
‘Children should be reading more about war’.
The previously responsive crowd was shocked into deafening silence. Morpurgo allowed the audience to feel each breath of the claim. In that moment, collective memory appeared to materialise into something tangible. Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan. Images of senseless killing and devastation were a brushstroke away from us all. In a seemingly antithetical train of thought, Morpurgo began to discuss empathy. War and empathy seem like juxtaposing ideas. Yet in Morpurgo’s words, they became inseparable.
Empathising With War
From Morpurgo’s experience, children are able to echo and empathise with the voice of an animal with greater ease than they are with a human’s. According to the London School of Childcare Studies, interactions with animals aid the development of emotional intelligence in younger children. This is for a multitude of reasons: a shared vulnerability (small, dependent), anthropomorphic empathy, or the clear moral binaries in animal relationships (to feed and play is good, to abandon is bad). And for children, empathy is a learned behaviour. While the question of nature versus nurture arises, empathy is nevertheless a skill to be trained and refined.
Morpurgo’s fiction has operated on this principle for years. He rarely presents conflict through militaristic or political abstraction. Instead, he centres on horses, dogs, children – ordinary lives. Readers encounter war as a lived experience, rather than a distant event. It is not the battlefield itself that is the focus, but the relationships that the battlefield fractures. It is this perspective that allows children to approach difficult and traumatic experiences without the threat of desensitisation.
Children increasingly have easy and constant access to images and videos of destructive killing around the globe. A descent into apathy is unsurprising. Adults recognise the destruction in Gaza as horrific. For the next generation, it is nothing more than a mediated picture. Images become wallpaper; constant repetition normalises catastrophe. While the government has made steps to ‘give kids their childhood back’ through a social media ban for under-16s, this is not a permanent solution to the issue of empathy. VPNs can be downloaded just as easily as age verifications can be bypassed.
The role of video games cannot be ignored in the conversation regarding exposure to violence. Combat or tactical shooting games such as ‘Fortnite’ or ‘Overwatch’ have a recommended minimum age of as young as 13. It is human nature to imitate violence through childhood play. After the Second World War, wartime bombsites became playgrounds for children. British children would mimic the killing of Germans in the ruins their shells had created. The issue is therefore not whether children encounter violence (they already do), but whether they are given the tools to interpret it.
Children’s fiction has long encouraged empathy on these terms. War is an unavoidable topic of conversation for future generations. While it has unfortunately been prolific in global history, it has only become more accessible and prevalent in collective awareness. Social media bans, if implemented effectively, will still plunge 16 year olds into an unregulated tide of wartime imagery. Rather than attempting to shield children from conversations about war, it would be more effective to encourage engagement with empathetic narratives surrounding these events.
Narrative perspective allows for interiority and slowness. The novel form asks the reader to explore another consciousness, not to simply witness suffering – shock becomes inhabited, and rather than temporary it is held. The imagination children are forced to undergo through the act of reading becomes a labour of its own kind; it is an exercise in empathy. Literature refuses the speed social media demands. The reader lingers with another’s consciousness, experiencing what has happened but also how it feels to endure it. The spectacle of violence becomes humanised.
This is hardly a new role for the children’s novel. Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (1971) approaches Nazism through the bewilderment of exile; Ian Serraillier’s The Silver Sword (1956) follows displaced children navigating the aftermath of war; Michelle Magorian’s Goodnight Mister Tom (1981) intertwines wartime Britain with domestic abuse, showing how violence reaches far beyond the battlefield. None of these books ask children simply to witness suffering. Instead, they ask them to inhabit another person’s world, cultivating understanding before judgement, and empathy before spectacle.
The encouraging fact is that many of these novels remain classroom staples; indeed, The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education still recommends Goodnight Mister Tom as a core Years 5-6 text. Their continued place in schools reminds us that children’s literature has never sought to shield young readers from violence, rather to help them understand it. The challenge today is not simply persevering through these books, but preserving the kind of attention they demand in competition with the rapid circulation of violent images online.
Literature provides a language of care, giving violent experiences not just a face but a voice. Morpurgo’s The Kites Are Flying! (2009), aimed at children aged 7-11, is a novella following an English journalist who travels to the West Bank. He befriends a mute Palestinian boy who crafts kites to fly over the separation wall. While set against the ongoing Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the novella approaches political violence through friendship, grief, and everyday life rather than spectacle. The separation wall and soldiers at checkpoints become part of a lived experience, rather than symbols of conflict. In doing so, Morpurgo demonstrates how difficult histories can be made emotionally legible without becoming sensational. Today, this novella remains even more poignant in its consideration of grief, shame, and fear without apathy. Language provides the vocabulary necessary to make sense of our emotions; our children deserve the fundamental right to articulate and understand their feelings.
Violence Does Not Discriminate
Morpurgo’s statement ‘children should be reading more about war’ extends beyond itself – violence isn’t only military. The same crisis of empathy appears in the digital circulation of gendered violence.
Terms such as ‘manosphere’ and ‘red pilling’ are among the many buzzwords that are piling up in relation to the modern misogyny that is infesting the digital age. Adolescence (2025) or Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere (2026) are among many TV shows, documentaries, and movies that are detailing this violent and indiscriminate misogynistic change that individuals such as Andrew Tate have precipitated. In these cases, however, there is a brutal depiction or blasé mention of the assault or murder of women; a brutal depiction or blasé mention of femicide, a term UK criminal law is yet to acknowledge.
The central issue is not the act of witnessing violence itself – it is the manner in which children and young people are made to witness it. Violence, in television or short-form clips, functions narratively as shock, suspense, or character development. Victims of such violence deserve better than to be hidden under the mechanics of a plot. Conversely, through literature readers are invited not merely to ask what happened, but to consider what the violence means for the person who endured it. The distinction is subtle, but the possibilities literature provides are undeniable. Understanding is learnt through cultivation, not reaction.
While it is crucial to continue to create media that acknowledges violence against women, portraying these events visually lends itself to voyeurism that can be understood through what Karen Halttunen terms the ‘pornography of pain’ – the exploitative consumption of suffering. Her article ‘Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture’ (1995) refers more specifically to the concept of ‘dark tourism’, in which tourists seek out visiting historic sites of destruction and genocide to feel good about feeling bad. I believe that this same logic can be translated to visual media surrounding femicide and sexual assault against women. Oftentimes, excessively watching such traumatic scenes may resultantly cause a similar voyeuristic pleasure. While one can argue that these shows and movies often have older age ratings, it must be said that there is no true age barrier to stop young children from watching them.
I am not advocating for these portrayals to be placed instead in children’s novels. What I am suggesting is that children are inadvertently subsumed by social and visual media that does not shy away from violent misogyny. To engage with these sources often takes critical thinking that children have not yet learned. As with empathy in war, the vocabulary to grapple with violence against women is not offered to the younger generations. Violent experiences that women face are rarely shown with sensitivity or empathy.
The manosphere often succeeds as it offers vocabulary before evidence. Loneliness is oppression; rejection is injustice; empathy is weakness. Young boys become trapped in the manosphere as they are taught this language of entitlement; the manosphere is appealing as it is not simply ideological but emotional. Complexity and empathy are replaced by certainty and grievance. Children’s literature should seek to provide an alternate vocabulary, where vulnerability is strength; compassion is resilience; fear is endurance.
It is not enough to try to protect younger generations from spheres of violence: they will always exist. What we can do is to make children and young people more discerning and more caring. This is the work words can do.
The Language of Care
Access to reading must be defended as it improves literacy, examination results, and employability. But it must also be defended because it teaches children to recognise another’s interiority. Of course, books are not inherently empathetic; they too can sensationalise violence. The literary form offers possibilities, not moral virtue. Stories ask young readers to imagine perspectives external to their own family, geography, or social background. In an age of divided politics and unsanitised violence, this prospect is more pertinent now than ever. If empathy is a practice, access to literature cannot merely be an educational luxury. It must be a part of a broader culture of community.
If children’s literature still has the capacity to cultivate empathy, then children must be given every opportunity to read it. School libraries remain unevenly distributed across England, leaving access to reading increasingly dependent on geography and school funding. One in seven state primary schools in the UK do not have a library; Libraries for Primaries have long been committed to the cause of ensuring that there is a library in every school by 2029. Rachel Reeves’ decision in September 2025 to offer government support to the programme is therefore a welcome step. The Education Committee’s report, published on 17th July 2026, which argues reading for pleasure makes children ‘happier, healthier, develops their empathy and improves their attainment at school’ further reflects a growing recognition that encouraging children to read is a matter of public importance.
These initiatives deserve support because reading is ultimately more than an educational outcome; it is part of how children learn to understand other people. It would be unfair to expect children to empathise with suffering if we deny them the tools to engage with it.
If violence is unavoidable, then empathy cannot be optional. The children of tomorrow deserve the language of kindness.
Diya Sengupta is the Editor-in-Chief of Cutting Takes. She is also an Oxford graduate student in English Literature (1700-1830) and recently completed an undergraduate degree in English and History at Warwick. Read more of her work here.
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