Why the Thai cave rescue got a movie — but other crises with kids get ignored

Updated August 8, 2022 at 6:07 PM ET

The new movie Thirteen Lives, now streaming on Prime Video, re-creates the dramatic rescue of 12 boys and their soccer coach who had been trapped in a flooded underwater cave in Thailand in 2018.

The world was riveted as rescue attempts were launched. Even Elon Musk got into the act by proposing a plan.

There was a happy ending to this story. So it's no surprise that Ron Howard filmed a movie about it.

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"It's tailor-made for Hollywood," says Brian Klaas, associate professor of global politics at University College London. "There's nothing harmful in a big budget film that tells a compelling story."

At the same time, there are millions of children who are suffering in the world's lower resource countries — and their stories are largely untold. "We ignore much worse tales of mass, avoidable tragedy," says Klaas. "Who's going to make a film about the 500,000 kids that die of malaria each year?

"And that's the trouble: The everyday tragedies that warrant our attention most — the ones where we can save the most lives — are the stories that are least likely to attract the attention of Hollywood or of ordinary people in rich countries."

Here's a post we published at the time of the rescue that touched on these themes.

Like millions of global citizens, Abraham Leno has been riveted by the story of the 12 boys and their soccer coach trapped in a cave in Thailand.

"I sat around the radio with my family and we wanted to hear the recent updates of the kids, every little detail," he says. "To see all the governments sending their best divers, giving them equipment, offering their moral support — it was a beautiful thing to see."

But Leno has another perspective. As a youth, he spent ten years in refugee camps in Guinea. Now working as executive director for the Eastern Congo Initiative at the nonprofit group Concordia, he wishes that the media had paid more attention to his plight and his fellow refugees: "It would have shed a better light to create the understanding necessary to help us."

Others share his concerns. Manyang Reath Kher became a Lost Boy at age 3 and later founded the charity Humanity Helping Sudan. He says, "I don't want to sound horrible to those kids [in the cave], but the attention they got, it should be spread around. Give that to other children, too."

The aid community is grappling with that issue as well. While they all stress that they were deeply moved by the story of the boys in Thailand, they raise a point: Can the world bring the same level of care and resources to other children living in crisis? More than half a million Rohingya children live in camps in Bangladesh, for example, and more than 1,300 children die of malaria each day.

Children face many dangers, say humanitarian workers, but their plight is often overlooked. For example, more than 1,300 children die of malaria each day. Above: A health worker vaccinates a child against malaria in Kenya.

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Brian Ongoro/AFP via Getty Images

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There are, of course, reasons why the cave story is so riveting.

"This is a human story. There's a clear drama," says Brian Klaas, an associate professor of global politics at University College London. "Everybody is rooting for them."

Other life-and-death situations do not resonate in the same way, says Klaas. In a viral tweet, he wrote:

He'd like to see stories about Rohingya refugees, Syrian refugees and South Sudanese refugees told "in a straightforward way."

More than half a million Rohingya children live in refugee camps in Bangladesh. Above: Rohingya youngsters dig up tree roots to use as firewood. Deforestation in the Bangladesh camps has increased the risks of flooding and landslides.

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Allison Joyce for NPR

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But there isn't always an audience for such stories. "Protracted conflicts are more and more difficult to get people energized about," says Christy Delafield, associate director of external communications at FHI 360, a human development organization. "It loses newness and novelty."

There's another reason why a story about 12 boys gets more attention than the world's 12 million refugees under the age of 18. The more people who are suffering in a crisis, the harder it is for people to become engaged with their stories, says Delafield.

That's because of a phenomenon known as "psychic numbing," which psychologist Paul Slovic has written about extensively.

As Shankar Vedantam, host of the podcast Hidden Brain, wrote when he was at the Washington Post:

"In a rational world, we should care twice as much about a tragedy affecting 100 people as about one affecting 50. We ought to care 80,000 times as much when a tragedy involves 4 million lives rather than 50. But Slovic has proved in experiments that this is not how the mind works.

"When a tragedy claims many lives, we often care less than if a tragedy claims only a few lives. When there are many victims, we find it easier to look the other way."

The cave crisis was also notable for the response by the world's rich and famous.

Soccer stars like Brazil's Ronaldo told the boys to "stay strong." After the rescue, all 12 were invited to the upcoming World Cup final. (They're reportedly unlikely to go because they are recuperating from their ordeal.)

Tesla CEO Elon Musk put together a team to design and build a special "kid-size" submarine to assist in the rescue efforts (although the Thai government said it was "not practical for this mission").

What if the same degree of brainpower and resources were devoted to other crises, asks Klaas. "A lot of [other] tragedies are much more solvable. If we had Elon Musk devote his attention to malnourishment or people dying from preventable disease, then things would get solved much quicker. We'd be able to save much more than 12 people in two weeks."

And even though big numbers can be overwhelming, they can still be powerful, says Martin Scott, associate professor in media and development at the University of East Anglia.

"The point is that it doesn't have to be human interest stories to tell about the suffering of others," says Scott. "I was reading a U.N. briefing and it made me cry. The statistics were so overwhelming. I didn't need the story of a child who's just lost her mother to make that meaningful."

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