We reiterate our thanks and commendation to the many people and organisations who have been making selfless contributions to relief efforts since Hurricane Melissa’s passage. Their compassion, generosity, and humanity have been nothing short of inspiring.

Unfortunately, however, among the genuine helpers is a swarm of opportunists who see not devastation, but the chance to feed their egos with likes and clicks.

Like vultures scavenging for scraps, they have been swooping down on the affected communities, cameras in hand, hashtags ready, hearts seemingly bleeding.

When asked not to photograph the faces of those left homeless and vulnerable, not to steal the last shred of dignity from people already stripped bare, they bristle.

“Our donors need proof,” some insist, the names of unknown foundations emblazoned on new T-shirts.

Others smugly invoke the “public space” rule as a licence to violate privacy. Still others hide behind the hollow excuse that they are merely “documenting reality”.

More and more victims of Melissa’s wrath have publicly requested, “Don’t take pictures of our faces,” yet these self-appointed saviours keep clicking, convinced that their few cases of water and tins of mackerel have bought them moral immunity. When those same survivors dare to ask for mattresses and tarpaulins, instead of cup soup and crackers — for sustainable help — they are branded ungrateful and lazy. Because how dare ‘the poor’ have choices. How dare they question their benefactors, who, hazard lights flashing, race westward daily to broadcast their goodness?

Using images of vulnerable people in disasters has long been a silent, sanctioned abuse within the humanitarian industry. Charities use the same tear-streaked faces and outstretched hands of children to summon sympathy from even the coldest hearts, and to get funding at the cost of the dignity of the vulnerable. But the modern-day saviour complex dressed up as benevolence does nothing but use the vulnerable as props, and their innocent children as stars in videos they didn’t ask to make. As Fi We Children Foundation founder Africa Stephens reminded in Tuesday’s
Observer, “It is not only dehumanising, but strips children of the only thing many of them have left — their dignity.”

Ms Priscilla Duhaney of Hear the Children’s Cry warned that such exposure doesn’t just rob children of privacy, it endangers them. Every image posted online becomes permanent, traceable, and exploitable, archived for eternity.

It’s nothing more than poverty porn, and it should stop. Organisations like UNICEF have issued clear ethical guidelines for photographing and filming children in disaster situations; guidelines that emphasise context, consent, and care, but these have been largely ignored after Melissa, for the most part, drowned out by clout-chasing and scavenging behaviour where vulnerable people’s dignity become collateral damage.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Disaster photography can still tell stories without exploitation. The international non-governmental organisation Emergency Nutrition Network, for example, says despite the widespread use of children being standard practice in the humanitarian sector, an alternative can be showing instead the terrain, the rebuilding, the resilience, and not the faces of people who never asked to be the world’s sympathy symbols.

Documenting human misery by using images of the vulnerable is not charity. Let’s call it what it is: Exploitation.

And to those masquerading as humanitarians who continue to justify it, know that your images may tug at people’s hearts, but there’s something rotten where your compassion should be.