UK 'sees poor as victims'

Many infants starve - but that is only part of the story

		By Alex Kirby BBC News Online environment correspondent

Most Britons have a negative and inaccurate picture of people in developing countries, a report says.

Overwhelmingly, they see the poor world in terms of starving children with flies around their eyes.

Yet more than half want a more complete portrayal, showing the positives as well as the negatives.

The report says the mass media and charities are blamed for promoting the victim image.

Out-of-date stereotypes

The report, The Live Aid Legacy: The Developing World Through British Eyes, is published by VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas), an international development charity which works through volunteers.

It is based on interviews with more than a thousand UK adults and visitors from developing countries, conducted in late November 2001.

The report found that:

• 80% of Britons are confident that the developing world exists in a permanent state of doom and disaster, "starving children with flies around their eyes, too weak to brush them off"
• 74% believe developing countries are by definition inferior to us and "depend on the money and knowledge of the West to progress"
• while 81% say it is dangerous to stereotype people from other cultures, most respondents believe developing countries "have the desire to change but no ability to support that".

The researchers say the images of Live Aid, famine and Western help in tackling it 16 years ago, "have caught British imagination in a vice-like grip".

The rich like to be the givers

VSO's chief executive, Mark Goldring, said: "The Live Aid images that were once such a force for good have left a legacy that hangs like a cloud over our relationship with the developing world.

"This research proves that British people are not only ready for information more complex than the usual images of doom and disaster.

"They will also resent both development agencies and the media if we don't promote a more balanced world view."

Live Aid organiser Sir Bob Geldof said that as a TV producer, he rejected the suggestion that the public wanted more programmes on culture in the developing world.

And he accused the writers of the VSO report of using "highly emotive" language.

"What happens when you see another human being in distress is a shared human-ness," he told the BBC's Today programme.

"There's an innate sympathy, not a superiority as the report says, that there but for the grace of god."

James McGoldrick, a former volunteer, found on his return to the UK that his friends assumed he had been helping starving children.

Wanting more

"Live Aid images give no room for a two-way process", he said. "They set up the assumption that the only thing we can gain from developing countries is the satisfaction of giving money."

The report says 55% of people surveyed said they wanted more television that showed the everyday life, culture and people of developing countries.

Most people in poor countries support themselves

It says this "contradicts the assumptions of editors and programme schedulers, who don't see such programmes as ratings winners".

Paddy Coulter of the Reuters Foundation, himself a former volunteer, told BBC News Online: "Maybe the penny will drop that this is an interconnected world.

"The US wake-up call on 11 September, their shock at finding that they could be so reviled, shows how we've all forgotten to try to understand other people's cultures.

"All we're left with is the bad news, with this unrelenting decline in the quality of coverage ordinary people are getting.

"It's a paradox - globalisation marches on, yet we live in such an insular society."