With depressing frequency in this summer of diverse horrors, we hear tales of desperate human misery, suffering and depravity – and because we live now in an era where virtually every phone is a globally connected camera, we are confronted with graphic evidence of tragedy.
It's not properly menacing, more Desperate Housewives than Misery.
Last year saw 3,695 people drown and hundreds of thousands more endure a desperate march of misery across the continent.
In an attempt to convey the desperate and unyielding misery, the United Nations Children's Fund released a blank statement on 20 February.
"Under certain circumstances, people — they're not desperate or in misery — they start to wonder what's the best thing life can offer," says Martin Seligman, one of the field's founders, who heads the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
Cuts in child mortality, as a result of targeted health and nutrition interventions, alongside the provision of modern contraception, help to reduce rates of fertility and to slow and stabilise population growth.Second, it is often thought, if rarely said, that keeping very poor children alive is essentially futile, saving them for a life of desperate poverty and misery.
On one side of the river border are gathered clusters of Syrian refugees, desperate to escape the misery of war and put the Turkish camps behind them.
From last Wednesday, Joe and 55 other Syrian refugees desperate to escape the misery of Calais staged a three-day demo demanding that the UK grant them asylum.
But these are immigrants who have been screened and carefully selected not those so desperate to escape torture and misery that they scrape together every cent they can for a ride in a cramped lorry or a leaky boat, a journey that often ends in death.The numbers of smuggled refugees reaching Australia have been trivial compared with those who enter Britain and Germany.
It is now home to a thriving trade in humans, where misery piles upon the desperate at every stage of their way.
