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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 July 2009
Image: A Filipino child scavenges in a heap of garbage.
Image: A Sudanese mother stares at the camera while holding her emaciated and dying child.
Image: A Zimbabwean schoolchild sitting at a desk, pencil in hand smiles shyly; “Education Now” is emblazoned across the top of the picture.
These nongovernmental organization (NGO) ads implore you to help save these children. You can save them, the ads say, by sending money to the NGO for emergency food relief, to sponsor a child through monthly payments, or to help launch an education campaign.
PORNOGRAPHY OF POVERTY. This is a term used by development practitioners in the North and in the South to describe the worst of the images that exploit the poor for little more than voyeuristic ends and where people are portrayed as helpless, passive objects. It is a derogatory term, and it stimulated the ethicists involved in this project to request that we write to describe what we mean by the term, why it generates ethical debate, and what has been or can be done about it.
Most readers will know what it means – images of emaciated children with distended bellies or flies in their eyes, used to elicit a response from people who have never encountered this kind of suffering in their everyday lives.
These powerful images touch our hearts. They are used by NGOs in the North to raise money for their programs in the South. And they work.
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