Albert Lawundeh, TSE photographer

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Poverty Porn

In looking for other blogs on related topics (at the advice of my blog guru Ellen, who blogs about her adventures in India on A Reason to Write - India), I came across the blog of Owen, of Owen Abroad.  In it he writes this:
If you want to raise money for international development you will eventually encounter a dilemma. You want potential donors to be interested in their fellow human beings and to feel a connection with the people they are helping. You know that you will raise more money, and sustain a longer-term relationship with your donors if they are getting constant feedback about the people they are helping and the difference your programme is making. Your communications team tells you that statistics are not enough: you need “human interest” stories about individual lives. You need photographs and life stories.

And goes on to describe the result of the above as "poverty porn."  I need to chew on that a while, but while I understand what he's talking about and why it's exploitative, I wonder about things like donor sustainability.  I have heard it said that it is relatively easy to get people to donate intially to projects like the CRC in Africa - but what is really hard is to sustain it for the long haul.  Sustainability is critical in a human institution.  How tragic would it be if the US-based donors lost interest (or moved on to any one of a billion other equally worthy causes) and left these children to their own devices after having supported them thus far? 

I get that we don't want to perpetuate the "poverty porn" of pictures and words about destitute children languishing without your dollars to ease their burdens, but if we are brutally honest with ourselves it is hard to send money into a void without some sense of where it going, what it is doing and whose lives it is affecting.  Is it really that people want to see picture after picture of suffering?  Or is it about wanting a human connection for the gesture? 

There was a piece in the Washington Post Magazine this past Sunday about human beings' ability to comprehend suffering on a large scale.  Shankar Vedantam explains that we just aren't capable of comprehending on a visceral level the difference between donating to help 2000 vs. 20,000.  Either seems to big to be meaningful.  We much prefer to help the one. 

But I think it's more than that.  I think, at the end of the day, we also just want to be in relationship with each other.  I want the money I donate to Africa or Haiti or AIDS research to go where it is most needed, but I also want to know that the money is having an impact on a real human life, a real person living and breathing in the world.  I am much more likely to keep sending money if I know that my money is going into a fund that pays for Hawa's school tuition, that buys cassava for Albert's dinner, that enables Sallay to receive vitamins.  Is it wrong for me to want to know that my donation has an impact on a real human being?  How can we foster that connection; be in relationship with one another across oceans and miles and cultures in a way that is not exploitative?

1 comment:

  1. I think the "porn" part of the comment come more from the "pictures" without the relationship. Pictures of the current state of Africans that you have developed a relationship with is not "porn" they are "status updates".

    I think that Owen is more complaining about the pictures without context the are meant to invoke a momentary response, but are not steps on the path of true relationship with other humans.... See More

    If you think about it, this is the problem with "real porn" as well...

    ReplyDelete