Poverty porn (part I)

I spent a lot of time working on other topics, but soon I decided to write another post about framing. Do you ever think that sympathy can generate money, and, not a little, it costs a lot? Today I’ll talk about that.

“A camera pans onto a young black girl from a perspective slightly above her. She stands alone in a field in an unnamed, unidentifiable location, looking away with a forlorn look on her face, never meeting the camera’s gaze. The more miserable she looks, the better. The voice-over starts to talk: “This is Daniella. She’s nine. And her body is racked with pain from parasites; the same kind that killed her sister. Without help, Daniella could be next.” A single tear falls down Daniella’s face…”

This is a typical aid organization’s commercial, which, according to Lina Srivastava, is the kind of advertising that every one in North America has grown up seeing every night.

Srivastava is a social innovation strategist in New York. Lina has provided project design consultation to many social impact organizations, including UNESCO, the World Bank and UNICEF. And she calls such kind of ads is “poverty porn”, which is becoming more and more ubiquitous in the modern media.

It is not easy to give the precise definition for “porn poverty”. Some sociologist define poverty porn as “words and images that elicit an emotional response by their sheer shock value. Images like starving, skeletal children covered in flies…” that exploit “the poor’s condition in order to generate the necessary sympathy for selling newspapers or increasing charitable donations or support for a given cause.”

When talking about “porn”, people tend to think about sexual porn. But it’s not always true. We can have other desires. Desire to sympathize with others is one of them.

People tend to have strong emotions towards the poor and the miserable. We may feel sorry watching gloomy faces of penniless and starving children. We may feel angry if we cannot do anything to help them. If sex desire has a particular line of product serving for itself, so does the sympathy.

In the memoirs of the journalist Edward Samuel Behr (who worked for many years for Reuters, Time and Newsweek) there is a story which becomes very famous later. It happened in a refugee camp in the Congo – 1960s. In front of the war reporter, there were men holding jungle knives, women leaving their breast naked and children weeping away the time. Pretty classy, even too normal scene in the Africa.

The reporter knew that if he wanted his story to be incredible and extraordinary, he should do something. And he raised his voice to ask: “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?”. This question then became the title of a book of Edward Behr about poverty porn.

An African woman who had been raped is a “good” story to arouse the heartfelt sympathy in the audience. If there was a women who actually died because of that, it’s even “better”.

Another journalist, Jo Chandler, who has filed news and features from assignments across sub-Saharan Africa, Papua New Guinea and witnessed many deaths from serious infectious diseases in poor countries, admits that “In the warped currency of what we do as journalists, worst is best”, and “the bleaker the better”.

They need to find the most wretched life, to take the photos that are most likely to break your heart, but not necessarily to be fairly representative for the problem.

Eventually, poverty porn became a trend. It is applied in every situation, when people want to attract the attention, when they need to sell their media products, to raise funds, or simply to be famous for great humanity.

For African children, media even uses the normal stereotype of them as poor, orphan and AIDS victims to “frame” their lives intentionally. There are tons of ads airing to call to action for these kids with very moving scenes. And the reality, in fact, is not that bad.

(to be continued)