International holidays for Australian travellers are increasingly including sight-seeing tours of slums, according to a recent article by Mark Russell in The Age. Some see slum tourism as a form of philanthropic travel, whereas others see it as no more than a form of exploitation, in which the misery and squalor of the slum residents’ lives is put on display to satisfy the ghoulish curiosity of the wealthy tourist.
As someone who has visited slums many times, I have thought a lot about this issue. I think it is easy for Western visitors to think that, just by visiting a slum, they are doing something on the forefront of the fight against global poverty. In reality, the only thing you achieve by such a visit is gaining first-hand exposure to poverty, and this is only useful, in my view, if you then take some sort of action to address poverty.
There are many ways in which visiting slums can be helpful to those who live there. This is particularly the case if you are visiting to help some community-based program, but it can even happen if you are just there to visit and encourage the downtrodden, such as people who have been ostracised by the rest of their community as a result of AIDS. But if you do not not have a clear intention of helping, it is more difficult to justify visiting a slum.