Tourists ‘flirt with disaster’

A JAMES Cook University researcher has warned of the psychological dangers associated with “dark tourism” – the phenomenon where tourists visit sites of death and disaster.

Travel medicine specialist Dr Irmgard Bauer from JCU’S College of Healthcare Sciences said dark tourism covered a range of destinations of varying danger and horror, from historic dungeons and prisons to old and current battlegrounds, to sites of the Inquisition, Holocaust or Rwandan genocide.

“Memorial sites for the 1994 Rwandan genocide, for instance, attract visitors who are presented with displays of bloodstained clothes, the actual remains of victims and also the opportunity to meet some of the perpetrators in person,” Dr Bauer said.

She said such tours could inflict psychological scars, including descent into full-blown psychosis, with the reaction subjective, highly individual and unpredictable.

“Torture instruments in a mock dungeon may shock one traveller whereas another remains detached when visiting a former concentration camp,” she said.