The Yankovska and Hannam article about dark and toxic tourism spends some time examining, or at least talking around, the ethics of dark tourism. It divides dark tourists into two groups — the younger tourists who are thrill-seekers, drawn to the closeness the sites provide to death, the eerie, and the morbid, and the older tourists who visit to learn about and pay their respects to tragedy. There’s no outright condemnation of the former type of tourist, but the language certainly suggests that this type of tourism is lesser somehow, or dirtier.
I think this kind of moralizing is unproductive. It seems most of the tour guides interviewed for the piece agree with me (though I suppose their inclusivity could be attributed to a desire for the visits of any and all tourists for their own monetary gain). What they volunteer is that despite a tourist’s initial motivation for visiting a place like Chernobyl, they go away having learned something.
One tour guide said, “this trip into the heart of the disaster and its surroundings makes everyone more conscious about the consequences and a need to volunteer for the suffered one.” In other words, it’s an empathy booster that could lead to action in the face of the next tragedy, as well as a warning of the tragedies we set up with our advancement.
Another tour guide said, those who visit some of the most gruesome sites “want to understand the price others paid for their life, understand human sacrifice and feel inspired for heroism in their life.” Surface level curiosity about the morbid might actually be a desire for deeper understanding of the human psyche.
In short, I don’t think there’s any reason to try to discern whether it’s right or wrong to visit “dark tourism” sites. They exist in commemoration of events that have transpired, and we have things to learn from any event.