A number appeared in the news this week. A body count. It was reported in the headline, repeated in the first paragraph, and contextualized in the third with a comparison to previous years’ figures.
No names. No ages. No descriptions of who these people were before they became a statistic.
I want to talk about this, because the way we count the dead reveals what we think the dead are worth.
The Number Problem
Numbers are necessary. Without them, we cannot measure the scale of a crisis, allocate resources, or hold institutions accountable. I am not arguing against counting.
I am arguing against counting as a substitute for naming.
When a headline reads “47 killed in attack,” the number performs a specific function: it communicates scale. But it also performs an erasure: it replaces forty-seven individual human beings with a digit. The reader absorbs the number, registers it as a data point, and moves on.
If the headline read the name of even one of those forty-seven people – their age, their occupation, the name of one person who loved them – the reader would not move on as easily. The name resists abstraction. The number invites it.
Who Gets Named
Notice which dead are named and which are counted.
When a prominent person dies, the coverage is biographical. Their life is narrated, their contributions enumerated, their survivors identified. When an anonymous person dies – a migrant at sea, a worker in a factory collapse, a civilian in a bombing – they are counted.
This is not a failure of journalism alone. It is a reflection of a deeper hierarchy: some lives are considered narratable, and others are considered numerical. The distinction is not random. It follows lines of power, geography, and proximity to the people who control the means of narration.
The dead in wealthy countries are named. The dead in poor countries are counted.
What Counting Does to Accountability
When the dead are numbers, accountability becomes abstract.
“Forty-seven people were killed” demands a response, but it does not identify who owes that response. “Maria Gonzalez, 34, a schoolteacher and mother of two, was killed when her classroom was struck by an airstrike” demands a very specific response from very specific people.
The name creates an obligation that the number does not. This is why authorities prefer numbers. A government that acknowledges killing forty-seven people faces less pressure than a government that is asked to account for Maria Gonzalez. The number allows collective regret. The name demands individual accountability.
The Practice
I practice a discipline when I write about loss. For every number I cite, I try to include at least one name, one detail, one fact about the life that was lived before it was ended.
This is harder than reporting numbers. It requires contact with the families, the communities, the survivors. It takes time. It takes emotional capacity. It is, by the efficiency metrics of modern journalism, inefficient.
I do not care about efficiency. I care about accuracy. And a report that reduces a human being to a digit is not accurate, no matter how precisely the digit has been verified.
What I Ask
I ask journalists: name them. When it is possible – and it is possible more often than you think – include the name, the age, the detail that makes the dead person irreducibly human. This is not sentimentality. This is precision.
I ask readers: when you see a number, stop. Ask: who were they? If the article does not tell you, notice that absence. It is a choice, and it is a choice that serves the people who would prefer the dead to remain uncounted, unquestioned, and unnamed.
I ask the powerful: remember that every number is a name. Every statistic is a family. Every body count is a collection of people who were alive yesterday and are not alive today because of decisions that were made by people like you.
Count them if you must. But name them first.