Poverty Porn: the Unethical Way to 'Save' the Poor

By Poko Lam

Emaciated children with flies buzzing around reach their hands out to you, their bodies covered with filth and their surroundings almost inhospitable, their protruding ribcages looking like they would burst out of their bodies any second. Have you ever seen disturbing images like these? This is, in fact, a common advertising strategy used by charity organisations - poverty porn.

Poverty porn is widely defined as “any type of media, be it written, photographed or filmed, which exploits the poor's condition in order to generate the necessary sympathy for selling newspapers, increasing charitable donations, or support for a given cause", as proposed by journalist Matt Collins in 2009.

So, what does poverty porn do? As a matter of fact, poverty porn actually does help in increasing awareness and donations towards the poor and their problems. By using hard-hitting and troubling images, charities make use of the empathetic nature of humans to induce them to donate money. This concept was first introduced in the 1980s and quickly became a trend within charity campaigns, some of these campaigns were very successful in raising money by using poverty porn. But, believe it or not, despite raising money for the poor, poverty porn actually harms people who are in poverty.

Poverty is misrepresented in poverty porn. Contrary to popular belief, poverty is much more than just a simple economic issue; social, political and cultural factors all contribute to shaping this undesirable situation. By portraying the problems of the poor as simply just suffering, such as homelessness, starvation and inadequate healthcare, poverty porn is actually leading the general public into thinking that people in poverty only lack materialistic resources, creating stereotypes and changing how the general public perceives the hardships of poverty in this process.

Because of this, poverty porn is also a form of manipulation and deception toward donors. The only reason why poverty porn works is that it successfully makes people feel bad for those featured in the photos, in order to achieve this, poverty porn only showcases the most extreme cases of suffering. By doing so, charity organisations are trying to incentivise people to give them money without showing them the full picture - the suffering side of poverty, donors can only see the materialistic side of the problem but not the social, political or cultural issues which cause the problem. One of the largest problems in using poverty porn to attract donations is that it has the wrong focus: Poverty porn focuses on manipulating people’s feelings so they would feel bad for the poor instead of actually giving them a reason to donate. As a result, people are manipulated or deceived into donating with a lack of information which leads to a misunderstanding of the big picture. In short, the audience is not given any depth of the given problem but is manipulated or deceived into giving money.

As a result of manipulating and deceiving donors, the donors’ perception of poverty will only stagnate into the stereotypical mindset of poverty equals suffering, and the only way to help them is by donating money. However what this perception neglects is the fact that people in poverty face much more problems than suffering, such as the lack of means to sustain themselves financially, lack of education to let them acquire the skills they need to make a living and the increasing financial demands as inflation continues, as mentioned, many factors intertwine and shape this problem of poverty, with donors overlooking all these different factors of poverty, a substantial change can never be made and poverty will never be truly eradicated.

Although poverty porn in itself is just a simple image, text or film, but in order to maximise its effects and achieve its goals of making people sympathise with the poor, charity organisations often use the most extreme cases of poverty to advertise their campaigns, in order to do so, some photographers may actually try to “stage” a dismal photoshoot.

In 2018, award-winning photographer Alessio Mamo took pictures of poor Indian children posing in front of a table of fake food to illustrate the problem of starvation, these photos were even featured on the social media accounts of World Press Photo, home to one of the world’s leading news photography prizes. In this photoshoot, Mamo exploited poor people by using them as “props” in order to show people the sufferings of poor people. Much like Mamo, many photographers, especially western photographers have staged poverty porn by exploiting the poor.

Imagine that you are in poverty, going through the most vulnerable moments of your life, out of nowhere, a bunch of photographers show up and ask you to participate in a photoshoot, what can you do? You can’t say no to them, they are essentially your patrons and your financial situation entirely depends on them, and thus, you cannot risk angering them. So you are basically forced to take part in these photoshoots that only project the fake stereotypes of poverty onto you instead of documenting what you actually go through every day, how would you feel? Photographers and charity organisations are able to exploit their advantageous position to force people into participating in shots which perpetuate stereotypes, this is extremely disrespectful to poor people and takes away their dignity, and thus is a form of dehumanisation.

Even if the photoshoots are not staged, poverty porn is still very problematic. International development expert Jørgen Lissner explains in his article “Merchants of Misery”, “The public display of an African child with a bloated kwashiorkor-ridden stomach in advertisements is pornographic because it exposes something in human life that is as delicate and deeply personal as sexuality, that is, suffering. It puts people’s bodies, their misery, their grief and their fear on display with all the details and all the indiscretion that a telescopic lens will allow.” Not only that people’s most painful and vulnerable moments are exposed to the world without their explicit consent, but poverty porn also drives actual human suffering into simple promotional material that is used for an unjust cause, perpetuating stereotypes. At the end of the day, poverty porn only works because viewers are overloaded with images of human suffering to stimulate pity, inevitably reducing such suffering into another object for consumption just because it can produce particular feelings.

There are a few alternatives to poverty porn that charity campaigns may use to address poverty issues correctly, introduce people to the roots of such issues, and inspire people to try and help make a change.

Firstly, instead of using graphic imagery, charities may focus on telling the story of individuals to identify factors contributing to poverty. By telling stories, not only do those in poverty have a platform to voice out about what they are actually going through and what they really need to change the situation but viewers are also provided with a more all-rounded explanation of the situation, giving them an actual reason to donate money instead of manipulating or deceiving them into donating. Charities may still use imagery to support story-telling, however, it is important to keep the nature of the photos in check such that these images will not serve as a tool to deceive and manipulate donors or perpetuate stereotypes, but instead raise healthy awareness for the poor to create advocacy and make a change for the better.

Secondly, charities may use simple statistics or graphs to replace exploitative images. By using numbers, charities are able to address the issue directly, represent the situation in a simple and easy-to-understand way, and donors will also be much more informed.

Thirdly, charities may shift their focus and change their methods of helping those in need. As the saying goes, “If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day; If you teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime”, in order to truly help poor people in need, charities may focus on trying to help people in need by making actual changes in society instead of simply providing financial support such that all the factors which are contributing to poverty are alleviated or even resolved, and by doing so, helping people sustain themselves and improve their lives forever. Here are a few examples of such:

Innovations for Poverty Actions is a nonprofit which aims to build a world with less poverty by creating and sharing data and equipping decision-makers to use these data to come up with solutions to reduce poverty. The nonprofit even engages with policymakers in order to come up with the most effective solutions that can alleviate or even eradicate poverty, it has helped with policy-making in countries such as Philippines, Mexico and Kenya. To date, the nonprofit has evaluated and pitched more than 550 solutions, with over 200 in the pipeline, it has informed hundreds of successful programmes that impact millions of individuals worldwide, truly making a change in society and substantially helping those in need.

Oxfam International is another nonprofit which helps those in poverty. This organisation focuses on providing those in poverty a sustainable way to gain the upward mobility in the social pyramid by means such as providing education and resources. Oxfam also tackles policy problems such as debt traps and unfair distribution of foreign aid. This nonprofit has helped people develop ways to sustain themselves and escape poverty, successfully alleviating the problem of poverty.

Outreach International focuses on helping communities to fight poverty instead of making them rely on donations. Outreach International operates on a system named “Participatory Human Development Process”, this is a nine-step process which includes members of the community in a solution-making process, this enables the solution to address issues that the community faces directly and thus provide more constructive and practical solutions, communities are brought together within this process and are given the right education and tools that enable the entire community to rise above poverty.

These nonprofits are all willing to help make changes in society and by doing so, improving and changing people’s lives essentially. If anything would eradicate global poverty, it is more initiatives like these that are willing to make changes and focus on the long term solutions, instead of initiatives that simply donate money and just focus on the short term solutions.

Poverty porn is indeed successful in raising money for the poor, but have charities ever considered the feelings of those who are quite literally forced to take part in this kind of immoral, manipulative and deceiving photoshoots that exploits their suffering, mispackages and misportrays what they go through every day, and dehumanises them by taking away their dignity in exchange for donations? Have we ever tried to understand what people in poverty have actually gone through and what they actually need? Has society ever reflected on the stereotypical perception of poverty whilst “saving” those in it?

Charities should and must stop the use of poverty porn in order to effectively, successfully, and substantially end the general misconceptions of poverty, deepen the general public’s knowledge on the topic of poverty, and alleviate the problem of poverty.

Instead of “saving” the poor and making them rely on donations to survive, practical solutions to solve the root cause of poverty, alleviate the poor’s suffering, and provide them with means to sustain themselves must be implemented to truly help the people in need.