Warning: this post contains graphic images.

You’ve seen the picture by now. An Australian boy, no older than seven, holding up the severed head of a Syrian soldier – the latest victim of the Islamic State’s brutal war of conquest in Iraq and the Levant. Below the picture, the proud words of his father, convicted terrorist and former Sydney resident Khaled Sharrouf: “That’s my boy!”

You’ve seen the picture, and that in itself raises questions about the lengths the media is prepared to go to show the horrors of war. Inevitably, a voice is raised in protest: how far is too far?

This fresh controversy comes just days after News Corp faced similar criticism for showing un-pixellated images of Malaysian flight MH-17 victims lying naked and torn in a field in Ukraine. But these new pictures weren’t taken by journalists – they were taken by an Aussie dad, proud of the man his son was turning into.

This adds a whole new dimension to the moral debate surrounding just how far we go in printing images of graphic violence; one of complicity. Certainly, social media has played a massive role in the Islamic State’s campaign to recruit and radicalise potential jihadists – by publishing their propaganda in all its violence and brutality, aren’t we just giving the would-be terrorist state a wider audience?

Whatever misgivings they might have had, News Corp publications such as The Daily Telegraph and The Australian (as well as the ABC’s online site) elected to publish the photograph in graphic detail, mildly pixellating the face of the dead Syrian soldier and stamping a black bar over the eyes of the seven-year old boy straining to lift the severed head on his own.

What expression does he have, under that black bar? We might like to imagine the child’s eyes screwed up in pain and disgust at what his father is making him do, terrified to do anything but obey the man who raised him. More likely there’s a look we recognise from our own childhoods, that eager-to-please concentration of a young boy desperate not to disappoint the grown-ups. There might even be no expression – just the bored, far-away look of a child sick of standing still for the camera. He might even be smiling.

Without forcing ourselves to see this photo, the idea of children as young as four being trained to rape and torture and kill in the name of God might remain just that – an idea, too awful even to contemplate. The power of photographs lies in their ability to shock an increasingly desensitised public out of apathy. It may sicken us to watch a monk burning himself alive or a child lying broken in the wreckage of a passenger jet, but what else should we be feeling when confronted by acts of violence and degradation?

We need to feel shocked. We need to feel outraged. We need to look at that child, so far from home, and ask ourselves if he’s smiling.