The young girl in Sunrise Cambodia’s recent fundraising campaign has been labelled a “sex worker” in glossy typeface. Her face is smeared with dirt. She is accompanied by a “trafficked kid” and a “homeless teen” on the page.

The campaign, launched on April 16 to capture donations through the end of the fiscal year, had raised $162,956 at press time for the Australian organisation. But the ads – which say the money will go to vocational training programs – have earned ire from Sunrise’s peers.

Weh Yeoh, the director of OIC Cambodia, ignited a social-media firestorm last week when he tweeted the images. “I’m pretty sure this breaches all kinds of standards around positive portrayal of children,” he wrote. (Yeoh declined to comment for this story.) Sunrise’s chief executive and fundraising mastermind, Lucy Perry, quickly fired back: the models were paid, she said, and the ads drew donations.

Others soon piled on, labelling it “poverty porn”. The campaign and ensuing discussion raised a familiar question for development NGOs: When does a photo portraying local context – and children – do more harm than good?

Child-focused organisations sometimes commodify images: clean copy for support, and powerful photos for funds. But if the subject of a photo is dirty, in distress, or identifiable, some argue, the image serves only to exploit.

“The ’80s are calling – they want their pics of fly-covered starving African children back,” wrote Celia Boyd of Phnom Penh’s SHE Investments, on Twitter. “[The ad] seems to blatantly ignore the idea of portraying children as human beings with dignity,” she added in an email to Post Weekend.


more here : http://www.phnompenhpost.com/post-weeke ... hero-shots

Who is the girl in the picture? I wouldn't mind finding out for real.

You would have to ask Geraldine Cox, or her employee Lucy Perry

franzjaeger wrote:Who is the girl in the picture? I wouldn't mind finding out for real.

You fancy Lucy Perry? Good luck with that. Surely they could have cleaned those kids up a bit and changed there clothes before taking their photo. My nan would have been endlessly spitting on her hanky and rubbing the filth away.

I think it's ok, so long as they use white American kids and call them Cambodian. That way the average Joe has some way of telling what's what.
Also, what kind of dirt are they using? I hope it has an approved safety standard on the package.

Other organisations have countered “poverty porn” with awareness-raising ads. Friends International, which works to keep children out of institutions, has run a series of highly publicised campaigns, also featuring children (none beneficiaries, communications director James Sutherland assured).
Campaigns in 2011 and 2014 placed children in transparent display cases and boxes to highlight the harms of orphanage tourism. “We don’t follow the unfortunately common ‘pity charity’ models of fundraising,” Sutherland said. “Our campaigns . . . are designed to push people into thinking about the consequences of their actions.”

Interesting difference in the Friends International campaign. I would argue that putting kids in glass boxes is poverty "art" and not poverty "porn".