Mennonite Central Committee and the End of Famine Pornography

It’s Christmas, a time for giving—and also a time for Christmas appeals.

Over the next few weeks you will see lots of ads and appeal letters asking you for money, including from aid groups.

While you will see lots of photos of people who need assistance, one thing you won’t see is famine pornography.

Famine pornography—the use of terrible images of dying children, with flies in their eyes and distended bellies, in order to raise funds—was very common in the 1980s and 1990s.

Use of the images was widely criticized by many for the way they promoted a negative stereotype of people in the developing world as always being needy, starving, desperate, and helpless.

But even though academics and some NGOs denounced the practice, famine porn continued to be used on TV, and in print for one simple reason: It worked.

At that time, I was directing communications for Mennonite Central Committee Canada.

Like many other aid agencies, we were upset by the constant use of famine porn, including by some leading Canadian NGOs.

But instead of just joining the chorus and criticizing the practice, we decided on another approach.

We decided to set the bar higher.

In 1992, we created the first Canadian code of conduct for reporting about needs in the developing world.

According to the code, MCC would portray people in the developing world in ways that affirmed their dignity, promoted their skills and abilities, and revealed them as active participants in efforts to improve their lives.

At the same time, we would report honestly about urgent needs, such as for food. But we would not use language or images designed to shock donors into giving money.

We announced the new code of conduct at a press conference on November 25, 1992. It received widespread media attention.

Immediately, the bar was set higher not just for MCC, but for all Canadian NGOs.

The code was a game-changer. For the first time, the media and donors had a yardstick against which to evaluate NGO fundraising appeals.

It would be wildly simplistic for me to suggest MCC's code of conduct was solely responsible for the demise of famine pornography in Canada.

But it played a significant part.

As was reported by Esther Epp-Tiessen in her history of MCC Canada, in 1995 a leading authority in the Canadian humanitarian sector credited the agency with raising the bar for other NGOs.

Of course, it didn’t stop all at once. But over time the use of famine porn lessened.

Today, you would be hard-pressed to find any famine porn in fundraising appeals. And any reputable NGO has a code of conduct to govern how it reports about and uses images of people in the developing world.

I’m not saying images of extreme need should never be used. Sometimes we need a picture of starving children to shock us out of our complacency—as with what’s happening in Yemen, right now.

But they should never be over-used, and they should never be the only kinds of images NGOs share about the developing world.

Today, the big challenge facing the NGO sector is not famine porn, but things like short term mission and service trips and Christmas shoeboxes—both of which are very popular, but are poor ways to address the issue of global poverty.

Maybe it’s time for another NGO to step up with a new kind of code of conduct.

The fall, 2018 issue of MCC's Intersections is dedicated to the issue of how the agency represents relief and development. Find it here.