A STAGGERING number of crises plague our world as the dark last days of 2015 approach. Refugees fleeing war and instability and hopelessness perish on many of the world’s seas, terror attacks take down people from Maiduguri in Nigeria to Paris in France to Peshawar in Pakistan. Just a few weeks ago, an earthquake rattled the northern portions of Pakistan; diseases and epidemics stalk other parts, taking lives owing to a lack of resources.

Locally or globally, fundraising campaigns conducted by various charities take the victims of disaster, via television and computer screens, into the homes of those who have been spared. When a calamity strikes, these appeals tug at the heartstrings and elicit guilt, and in this way these charities use the power of mass media to collect cash for catastrophe, assumedly providing an opportunity for the lucky to share their fortunes with the unlucky.

A year ago I wrote about the complications within this equation. At the global level, the stereotypes of Africans and South Asians (yes, that includes Pakistanis) that are used in aid appeals paint those in need as helpless and powerless. There are starving children and acid-burned women; there is poverty and there is destitution.

While money for humanitarian causes must be raised, it is not necessary to victimise the sufferers a second time by turning them into a spectacle.

When the appeals are directed at a Western audience, the message is simple: the natives of these places are suffering and destitute; they will never be able to have food or shelter or go to school, and the women and minorities among them will never cease to be tormented. When the general helplessness of the subjects has been established, a ‘saviour’ — usually white and Western — emerges; the camera zooms in to the ‘help’ that he or she is providing. Then they ask for cash.

To much of the Western audience that consumes these appeals after every humanitarian disaster, they say simply this: if you don’t help, no one will help. The hidden and far more nefarious message is that brown and black people of the world, who are usually the subject of such appeals, lack the intelligence and ability to help themselves. On a macro level, all of them substantiate the premise that the West must save all the rest.

The recipe is so well known that there were, until recently, few critiques of it. One of these was an effort premised upon using social media nominations to gather contenders for the worst forms of stereotyping and poverty pornography. In using this shaming mechanism to call out charity appeals by organisations such as the Red Cross and Save the Children, the emphasis was on the idea that while money for humanitarian causes can and must be raised, it was not necessary to victimise the sufferers a second time by making them a spectacle for everyone else.

With such initiatives, in the last few years some startling improvements can be seen in the way aid appeals are being handled. For example, one such appeal is a fundraising call for Syria made by a group called the White Helmets who undertake rescue work in war-torn Syria. In their appeal, the focus is on a young Syrian man — who is also a rescue worker — and he tells a story of trying to do good in an environment that is highly dangerous. Footage from an actual rescue in which he participated comes on the screen. Rubble from an air strike has buried a baby; rescue workers try desperately to free him. Miraculously, the baby is dug out and emerges unscathed; the infant’s cry is heard by all and there are prayers of thanks.

The commendable thing about the endeavour described is that the aid appeal refuses to demean those for whom money is being collected. It’s a valuable lesson not simply for Western countries, too often eager to anoint themselves as the world’s saviours, but also for Pakistanis and the Muslim world. Islamic charities that are involved in gathering funds for victims of natural disaster in Pakistan or war in Syria are routinely guilty of presenting those who need help in the most undignified manner.

In many cases, footage of family members who are frantic with grief is presented not only without permission of the subjects themselves but often in a manner that may make their very real suffering seem theatrical.

In others, bodies of the dead (of those who can no longer consent or object) are shown as a means of evoking pity and are used as instruments for charity. No thought at all is given to the humanity of those who are supposedly being helped; if you are in need, or aggrieved or struck by catastrophe, it seems you may be deserving of charity but not consideration.

Pakistanis can get annoyed at the fact that people in the West see them and their country as something that needs ‘saving’ by the West. In response, they cite all the great things that they have done, the ways in which they can and do help themselves and negate the stereotype of hapless and uneducated brown hordes awaiting saviours. When it comes to the division between those who give charity and those who need it within Pakistan, however, they are less mindful.

Pakistan’s charitable routinely expect and demand to imprison in webs of obligation and indebtedness those to whom they give. That same callousness reappears when appeals for aid and charity are made via mass or social media. All of it may succeed in collecting money, but it fails to do what is an equally crucial part of the act of giving: recognition of the recipient’s humanity, an avowed respect for their dignity.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, November 18th, 2015