The extent to which refugee children have been conditioned by their environment is heartbreaking. We wanted permission to take this young girl’s photograph, so we asked if her mother was nearby. Her eyes filled with the most uncontrollable fear that I’ve ever seen in a child. ‘Why do you want my mother?’ she asked. Later, her parents told us how the family had crouched in the woods while soldiers ransacked their house in Syria. More recently they’d been chased through the woods by Turkish police. After we’d spent a few minutes talking with her parents, she returned to being a child and could not stop hugging us, and laughing, and saying ‘I love you so much.’ But I went to sleep that night remembering the terror on her face when we first asked to speak to her mother.

(Lesvos, Greece)

I chose this picture because it shows one of the biggest issues of the refugee crisis which is the danger that the children are in. The children are being exposed to every facet of war and are losing family members at very young ages. I hate the fact that many of them will not have the opportunity to enjoy life as a kid and the fact that they may be traumatized for the rest of their lives.