“The Mission” is a new Italian reality show to be broadcasted on Christmas Time, and probably this says nothing really new about the landscape of Italian broadcasting.
The real new actually is that “The Mission” will be the first reality show produced in collaboration with an NGO, Intersos, and with the UNHCR. All-comforts houses and wild tropical island were in fact quitted by the Big Brother to follow a group of VIPs during a tailored volunteering experience in the refugee camps of DRC, Sudan and Jordan.
Although the show will only be broadcasted in December, a long and passionate debate is taking place on several media channels since last September. Media professionals and aid workers accused the show to exploit the dramatic actuality of African migrations for rolling down a massive fundraising operation during Christmas time. Several groups of aid workers, media and civil society groups have started online petitions asking to close the show and defining the initiative as another outrageous case of “poverty porn”.
The “poverty porn” definition made its first appearance on public media after the success of the multi awarded movie “Slumdog Millionaire” on 2008. The idea behind the expression was to discredit the use of extremely vulnerable and desperate uneducated people for public entertainment or NGOs fundraising. These practices are particularly rooted in the narratives of the benevolent western hero promoted through colonialism first, and through international aids later, that painted a stereotyped image of the reality in developing countries.
Most of these stereotypes were recently hit off by the collective SAIH Norway in a funny video project titled “Let’save Africa – Gone Wrong!”. The video has met an incredible success on web, stating that: “we need to create engagement built on knowledge, not stereotypes”.
In an interesting Google Hangout organized by the consulting Agency Kurante about the use of poverty porn as a marketing and media strategy, Linda Raftree indicates new social media as an important tool to open multiple points of view on development stories, to measure the real effects of their projects, and to help people in better understanding what their donation is actually doing. A wiser approach to participatory media could perhaps break the roles of “donors” and “beneficiaries” in a more dynamic and responsive relationship where community members can express and represent their own needs.
Of course, stereotypes are hard to break and poverty porn still represents the most effective means for eliciting emotional responses and easily raising funds. However, fundraising should not be the end goal of non-profit organizations. By driving people in feelings of pity or sympathy rather than to a real understanding of the situation, poverty porn reinforces stereotypes and does not encourage deeper and more egalitarian connections among different cultures and societies.
Cooperation is the key word, the real goal of development, and probably, the best story that aid agencies and social workers could ever sale.