It was one year ago today when an image raced around the globe, an image which broke hearts and enraged sentiments. It was an image that made us question ourselves as human beings and wonder with how much shame we’d look back on 2015 and the way in which we failed the child in the picture, and so many like him.

A picture of a little boy whose name meant ‘exalted’, lying face down and lifeless on a Turkish beach. In the early hours of 2 September 2015, three year old Aylan Kurdi lost his life. His picture shook many of us to the core, and like so many mothers, I saw my children in him. I saw the curve of my younger son’s cheek, the way he sleeps with his bottom raised in the air. I saw his little shirt, his shorts and his shoes, and I thought about the mother who had dressed him before they got onto that boat.

Were the clothes warm enough? Should he wear open or closed shoes? Would he need socks? Maybe not. But what if the wind picked up? Finally she must have decided no socks, it was a warm night. How do you even decide what to dress your child in for a journey like that, I kept wondering as I looked at the little shoes that were supposed to have stepped onto the shores of Greece, but never did.

I saw in my mind’s eye the sleepy child protesting against being lifted from his rest by his frightened parents, nestling in his mother’s arms and starting to fret as water splashed against him. And then the rest. The screams, the shock of the cold water, the eyes squeezed shut, the little mouth calling for his mother in complete terror and answered only with the salty water of the Aegean.

By early morning, it was all over. By an act of pure luck, a photographer at the right place at the right time, Aylan Kurdi escaped the anonymous fate of so many thousands like him, people whose names and stories we’ll never know. The name his parents had thoughtfully picked for him, smiling joyfully at their younger son as they held him for the first time, was now on everyone’s lips.

For those of us who had been following the refugee crisis in Greece, our timelines and inboxes filled with such stories and images of countless small children washed up dead on beaches, their nappies swollen with sea water, the wave of outrage that Aylan Kurdi’s death brought a tiny glimmer at hope that maybe now the rest of the world would feel the sense of urgency we did. Something had to change, didn’t it? For a little while, this did happen. But it didn’t last. It rarely does.

After a brief period of hand-wringing, Europe went right back to business as usual. They built fences and continued their swing to the right. They shut their doors and hearts. When Greece’s northern border shut, tens of thousands became trapped in Greece, and the flow stopped. In Greece, people who had been through indignity after indignity found themselves squelching through the mud and filth of Idomeni, wondering why Europe was working so hard to keep them out.

Keeping refugees out (or benefit-scrounging migrants, as some have labelled all of them) became such a political flash point that the UK decided to leave the European Union altogether thanks in part to this one point. If those voters only knew the full horror of what these people go through before they even get on those boats, they would change their minds in an instant.

A completely fractured European Union was unable to find a solution to the refugee crisis (helpful hint: safe passage would be a good start, as would reasonably speedy relocation) involved Turkey in their deal and as borders closed and numbers fell, everyone congratulated themselves on a job well done.

I think it’s time we can stop pretending the Europe has achieved anything meaningful when it comes to this crisis. The relocation programme is so slow it might as well not exist. The asylum process has been split into two steps, which rather than streamlining the process, has confused a lot of people who think the first step is the only one they need to complete.

“You’re a journalist? Do you know how long it will take? Is there any news from Europe?” are questions I get asked all the time from the women stuck in Greece trying to reach husbands, fathers and brothers who made the journey to Europe ahead of them. And I have nothing to tell them.

A year on from Aylan Kurdi’s death, people are still coming and they are dying in record numbers. Last week, the Italian coastguard reported its busiest day in years off the Libyan coast when they rescued 6,500 people.

In Greece, mayors on the front line islands have spent the summer making increasingly desperate pleas to the Greek government and Europe to speed up the asylum and relocation processes as their islands continue to see refugee flows, especially after the failed Turkish coup in July.

For the time being, we seem content with doing nothing in the face of a situation that is in my mind one of the most shameful in Europe’s history. The shame we should be feeling is something that doesn’t seem to bother us any more. We’ve grown immune to it. In 20 years’ time, when the pain from the refugee crisis has begun to fade, I don’t know how I will answer my children when they ask me “What did you do about it?”. Few of us do, and even fewer of us are bothered by this fact.

A fickle media and a public suffering from compassion fatigue went in search of the next story. They found Omran Daqneesh and once more hands were wrung. How awful! We must stop all this!

But be honest, we won’t. We’ll click a few links, share a few posts and think that’s enough, just like we did with Aylan Kurdi, and just like we’ll carry on doing, until we decide once and for all that the thousands risking the Mediterranean this year are human beings like you and me, with the same dreams and ambitions, and that they deserve a bit of dignity. Right now, I really don’t know what can make that happen.