OPINION: Aylan's body makes front page - what's next?

TRAGEDY: Little Aylan Kurdi, right, with his brother Galip in happier times.

I don't think there's a corner of the world little Aylan Kurdi hasn't touched.

The three-year-old Syrian boy, drowned while trying to escape into Europe with his family, ended up in almost every major international newspaper -- images of him lying washed up on a Turkish beach, face down in the sand, emblazoned on the cover.

Aylan has been called a force for change -- his image slapping the world across the face, jolting it awake to the reality of the current refugee crisis.

But there has since been much debate about the appropriateness of his photograph.

Friends of mine are appalled: the photo robbed Aylan of dignity and respect in death. A three-year-old cannot consent to being the symbol of a revolution. Some called it "empathy porn" -- exploiting a child to shock and traumatise people into caring about his countrymen.

My fellow journalists disagree. It is our role to bring to light that which turns the stomach and haunts the nightmare.

As a fellow journo said on Facebook, "this is our job: afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. This is an example of the former and a gesture toward the latter."

I agree. Problem is, there is more than a slight discrepancy in what types of images are afflicting the comfortable.

Over the years, we've seen our fair share of corpses in the news: lying bloodied in cornfields during the Rwandan genocide, lining beaches after the Boxing Day Tsunami, piled together after university massacres in Kenya, bruised and battered in morgues in Palestine.

But why does the Western media feel comfortable printing bodies from war-torn and "third world" countries, but not the victims of, say, the Sandy Hook, Utoya Island, and Port Arthur shootings? Of the 9/11 attacks or the London Underground bombings? Of shipwrecks, plane crashes, preventable fires, or any other "Western tragedy"?

No, these bodies are shrouded, invisible to the prying eyes of the general public.

It is because us Westerners need those graphic reminders of what's going on beyond our borders in order to give a damn?

Or are those third world atrocities just far enough away, just "other" enough that we can deal with seeing their lifeless forms on our newsfeed? Whereas images of a burning hot air balloon above Carterton are unfathomable?

Aylan's photo has set an interesting precedent. One hopes it will be used for good. But will we be sharing dead children in hopes of changing policy on state housing, family violence, or gun crime?

If the same fate befell a Pakeha child, would his image, cold and lonely in the surf, be going viral? I guess time will tell.