In June 1981, New Internationalist published ‘Merchants of Misery’, a seminal article by Danish aid worker Jorgen Lissner that launched a blistering attack on the use of images of starving black children in NGO fundraising materials. The piece accused aid agencies of ‘social pornography’ in stripping individual children of their dignity and presenting them to the Western viewer as helpless objects isolated from any social or historical context, and called for an end to the racist distortion that this perpetuated in people’s conception of the Majority World. Lissner also noted that the use of such pictures was already considered unacceptable when fundraising for children’s charities at home. How could aid agencies get away with such double standards just because their images depicted children from other parts of the world?
The impact of the article was far-reaching. By the end of the decade, the General Assembly of European NGOs had adopted a code of conduct that instructed all aid agencies to refrain from using ‘pathetic images’ or ‘images which fuel prejudice’ in their depiction of the Majority World. An updated code adopted in 2007 affirmed that all future communications by international development NGOs must be based on core values of human dignity, respect and truthfulness. Similar guidelines have been introduced in other countries, including Australia, Canada and New Zealand/Aotearoa.
