It was Malcolm Foley and John Lennon, two Glasgow academics, who first coined the term “dark tourism” in the 1990s. Foley and Lennon were initially interested in why people would travel to Dallas, Texas, and follow the route taken by President Kennedy prior to his assassination in 1963.

Since then, their pioneering studies about dark tourism have become a subject that intrigues a number of scholars from different academic disciplines – especially criminology – and has started to attract more popular interest through an eight-part Netflix series called Dark Tourist.

However, as everyone disappears on their summer holidays, there are still a number of questions that need to be answered about this growing and popular phenomenon.

Exactly why are people attracted to the sites of death, disaster, violence, trauma and suffering? Is it morally acceptable to create profitable businesses taking dark tourists to sites as diverse as Chernobyl, or war zones in Africa and Ukraine?

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And perhaps most important of all, are there ethical boundaries that separate a legitimate tourist destination from an experience that is simply voyeuristic – such as when American citizens join illegal border crossings from Mexico into the USA?

Different answers to this latter question were given a recent airing during the controversy surrounding the implosion of the submersible Titan in June 2023, which killed its five passengers – all of whom were on an expedition to view the wreck of the Titanic, located in the Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland.

The costs alone were eye-watering, but was it even right to view what was essentially a graveyard for the 1,500 people who had perished in 1912?

Those who think that it was not would have taken some comfort from a sign that appeared at Grenfell Tower in London, where 72 people died – “Grenfell: a tragedy not a tourist attraction”.

I’ve thought about these questions a great deal myself after meeting Andrew Drury – a self-confessed “dark tourist” – and the author of a book called Trip Hazard. Andrew, a successful businessman, happily married with four children, likes to visit war zones and get as close to the front line as possible.

So, in the last 25 years he has visited Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Chechnya, North Korea and, of course, Ukraine. As we spoke, he told me excitedly about his plans to visit Kyiv later in the year and Andrew now likes to think of himself as a journalist, rather than a tourist. He’s reporting what he sees, he assured me, and was simply telling the stories of people that might not get told through more traditional media reporting.

I didn’t accept any of this, and challenged Andrew’s motivation for what he was doing by offering him an historical perspective.

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The first Battle of Bull Run in July 1861 was not only the first battle of the American Civil War, but also one that has been described as “the picnic battle”.

The wealthy, Washington elite – believing that the war would be over very quickly – wanted to watch events unfold for themselves and so loaded up tables, chairs, blankets and picnic hampers onto wagons and made the seven-hour ride into Virginia from the American capital to observe hostilities.

Several years later in 1899, when the second Boer War broke out in South Africa, Thomas Cook stole a march on his competitors by advertising tours to live battlefields. Indeed, Thomas Cook’s earliest tour groups took people to watch public hangings across Britain – using the newly formed Victorian rail network to get his tourist parties from one part of the country to another.

In other words, war tourism is not new and it has always attracted the same sorts of people: those who are wealthy enough to afford to engage in this type of tourism. In other words, people who could pay the rail fares, or the costs of sea passage in the Victorian era, and now those who can stump up the airfares to get to the war zones and then hire the security guards who typically accompany them, or even the $250,000 it reportedly cost for a berth on the Titan.

Inevitably this does mean that some forms of dark tourism – specifically war tourism – are about the wealthy viewing poorer people experiencing trauma, within potentially life-threatening situations.

No matter that I’ve heard some claim that dark tourism is a more “authentic experience” – more real than a “packaged tour” – what is actually genuine is the experiences of those who are suffering or who are in danger, rather than the experiences of those tourists who are merely viewing, rather than participating.

Frankly, war tourism seems to me to be about privilege and power, and therefore voyeuristically repackaging life and death as just another form of commodity.

Of course, there are other dark tourist destinations that are educational, inspiring and which offer lessons from the past about how we should live our lives in the present.

I have myself visited Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ground Zero in New York – both of which I found to be profoundly moving and inspirational.

In the UK, I have enjoyed and benefitted from visiting the Glencoe Folk Museum, taking a taxi ride along the Falls and Shankill Roads in Belfast, and entered into the spirit of the occasion at the National Justice Museum in Nottingham where actors playing convicts, guards, police and judges entertained visitors whilst explaining the history of crime and punishment.

All of these sites required me to be respectful: to buy a ticket and guidebook; to wear certain clothes; gave me advice about where I could and could not take photographs; with tour guides also outlining what sort of behaviour was expected of me and the other tourists when we were visiting.

These parameters on what I experienced were not limiting – they did not prevent me from becoming fully engaged in what I was viewing – but they did create an ethical context and rationale for my visit.

That context and rationale did not render what I experienced as any less authentic or real, but it did serve to remind me that I was not about to go into a gas chamber, walk to the scaffold, or be shot at by an opposing army. After all, I was only visiting.

Tourism should never be about appropriating someone else’s trauma, disaster or death as a perverted means to make us feel more alive.

Andrew Drury’s Trip Hazard is published by Candy Jar Book