David Hudson was riding the Tube in London last year when a poster, featuring a bony child screaming in anguish while his mother looked on helplessly, caught his eye. The poster read: “£25 could provide a month’s supply of life-saving peanut paste to a malnourished child. Don’t Delay, Donate.”
Hudson cringed. He’s a professor of international development at the University of Birmingham and one of his research questions is: What makes people give money to things like famine in Africa?
Thousands of miles away, drought and conflict had converged to push East Africa to the verge of a devastating famine, threatening the lives of up to 20 million people in Kenya, South Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia. The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), a coalition of 13 U.K. non-profits, was in full crisis mode, leveraging the most dramatic images possible to rally the British public to save lives.
Despite the altruistic intentions, this kind of imagery has garnered a derisive name: poverty porn. You know the type. Babies with toothpick limbs, women in ragged clothing with their hands outstretched, big-eyed people projecting the message that only you, the viewer, can help them.
A lot of people find poverty porn offensive, but it’s pervasive. Why? Because it works. DEC’s campaign raised over $16 million in the first day — even the Queen donated.
Or at least, charitable organizations have always assumed it works. Despite how widespread this imagery is, research into its efficacy is limited.
Hudson’s research, some of it conducted on the same poster he saw on the Tube, is part of a growing body of research that suggests poverty porn might not be as effective as we think. These appeals may raise money for individual campaigns, but at the risk of making people disengage with poverty relief in the long run. This should make charities wonder, is poverty porn a necessary evil, or a relic of a colonial past?
PPoverty porn, like any media genre, has rules. It focuses on differences, often by “emphasizing the extreme poverty of the recipient, poor health, lack of education, or other disparities relative to the prospective donor,” writes Jacob van Rijn, a Ph.D. student in Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The images must induce guilt, which typically comes from realizing your extreme privilege relative to someone’s extraordinary challenges.
White celebrities — imbued with extraordinary privilege — have long been the messengers of that guilt.
In a recent DEC video, an emaciated child is sprawled across the floor, breathing shallowly, while actor Eddie Redmayne narrates, “More than a million children could be at risk of dying.” He adds later, before giving directions for donating, that a starving man appealed to an aid worker in “the most simple of human terms: don’t let us die.”
In a video about Liberian street children last year for Comic Relief, a major British charity, singer Ed Sheeran says to the viewer: “While you’re tucking your kids into bed tonight, children like J.D. are huddling together, sleeping outside in danger.” (After a backlash against the Sheeran video, Comic Relief announced they would no longer be using celebrity ambassadors.)
Guilt is powerful stuff, and people give money to try and get rid of it.
“It’s pretty evident that it does work in raising funds most of the time, which of course puts us in a strange position — who are we to complain about the means of bringing in the donations as long as people get help?” says Beathe Øgård, president of SAIH, an aid watchdog that gives out annual awards for the most offensive development campaigns. Last year, Sheeran’s video “won.”
The money raised by DEC and other international aid organizations helped avert a full-blown famine in East Africa in 2017. According to a report by United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, nearly $1.3 billion mobilized towards famine prevention in Somalia meant that over three million people were reached per month with life-saving assistance.
With these kinds of stakes, and especially when significant money needs to be raised quickly, it’s understandable that charities stick with a formula that works: an image of a desperately sad black or brown child that you can save with a donation.
WWhile guilt may be effective for aid organizations in the short term, they may be shooting themselves in the foot in the long term.
“If you Google enough, there will be someone with a child just like that looking at you and telling you, ‘Click here and send a dollar.’ So you pay some guilt money. But then after a while, you’ve paid some guilt money, and next year you’ll need something more horrific to notice, because you get more and more numb the more and more horror you witness,” said Kenyan writer and aid critic Binyavanga Wainaina in an interview.
This numbness may be part of what is contributing to a steady decline of engagement with global poverty in the U.K. Engagement isn’t just about giving money, it’s also actions like buying fair trade, attending a rally, or calling your local representatives — and in the U.K., every one of those engagements has declined since 2013.
Poverty porn is “increasingly seen as a key driver in the decline in public interest and engagement with development issues,” writes Hudson in an unpublished working paper.
These campaigns are pretty transactional, he says. “You’re asking people to hand over money with the promise that you’re going to fix something.” The problem is, global poverty is pretty tricky to fix at a holistic level — no matter how many people give five dollars a day.
When people who donated to the 2017 famine relief campaign see the same images of dying children pop back up on their screen a year or two later, they may stop believing in their ability — in anybody’s ability — to make a difference.
“It’s a little bit disingenuous that you’re telling people that the problems of poverty, of deprivation, of global inequity, are relatively easy to solve — if you give money,” says Hudson. “They turn around in ten or twenty years and they’re like, ‘I’ve given all this money to a problem so that it can be fixed and it hasn’t been.’”
These campaigns also don’t reflect that global poverty is getting better. Child mortality in developing countries declined by 25 percent in the 1990s and in 2015, global poverty fell below ten percent of the world’s population for the first time.
It’s a trade-off: Get desperately needed famine relief money quickly at the risk of diminishing people’s belief that they can make a difference, that anyone can make a difference.
HHudson’s research on the same DEC posters complicates this common wisdom. The poster of the child screaming in anguish, the one you can feed with £25? It made people less likely to donate; 22 percent of people who saw the poster said they’d donate compared to 28 percent who didn’t see it.
This could mean this kind of imagery is polarizing — you either love it or you hate it. The result could also be explained in the gulf between stated versus revealed preferences. But it could also mean that tolerance for poverty porn is waning.
There’s another, deeper argument not to use poverty porn: even if the images are effective, they’re dehumanizing.
In a talk in December, Olivia Rutazibwa, a Belgian-Rwandan researcher, said the aid industry perpetuates “a mindset of superiority [of the West] and inferiority [of the rest], whereby the betterment of peoples elsewhere cannot be thought of outside of a Western presence.”
And this mindset can have long-lasting consequences. “I don’t even know how much our GDP has fallen because of just the ubiquitous photographs of us looking like that,” said Wainaina in the same interview. “I don’t know, for every dollar given in that way, how many dollars somebody wanted to invest in a business in Nairobi have gone away.”
SSo what’s an aid organization to do? The issues Wainaina and Rutazibwa point out are powerful, but aid organizations have bottom lines too and not meeting them can jeopardize life-saving work.
The good news is that poverty porn might not be the only option.
Research published by van Rijn last year finds that charity appeals that focus on the similarities between donors and recipients — the opposite of guilt-based approaches — can also elicit donations.
He looks at Mama Hope, a non-profit that connects local entrepreneurs to global opportunities, using positive and funny videos to elicit donations.
In one video, which has over 1.5 million views on YouTube, four Kenyan men poke fun at the stereotypes of the machine gun-wielding African men with child soldier protégés. “A day without war is a day not worth living,” they say, before cutting to images of violence in Hollywood movies about Africa. Then, the four men, who reveal they are students in medicine and human resources, burst out laughing. “We are likable and friendly guys,” one says. “We’re even on Facebook,” exclaims another.
