In early 2016, I went on a Soviet Europe tour run by a company that specialises in “destinations your mother would rather you stay away from”. One of their most popular tours is North Korea. My partner had already been to DPRK, and now wanted to head to Eastern Europe to Ukraine, specifically to visit the nuclear disaster site of Chernobyl.

This was before HBO’s Chernobyl or Netflix’s Dark Tourist, and the only recent references I’d seen were gauche B-grade horror films that exploited stereotypes about radiation mutations. I was sceptical it was even possible to visit. I expected that there would be bribery and deals to get us in – but of course there were not. The site has been open to the public since 2010. And when we rolled up to the border of the exclusion zone, about 150km north of the capital Kyiv, we waited in a queue of white tour buses for about half an hour.

Visiting Chernobyl is a strange experience: you’re body scanned at the border to test radiation levels and you’re required to sign a waiver acknowledging the risks associated with encountering radiation. The theatre of that aside, the levels within the zone are safe – given that you stay only for a short time. We spent the day exploring the huge Woodpecker over-the-horizon radar and some sites around Pripyat – the abandoned school camp and the buildings in the centre of town – Geiger counters in hand.

Recently there have been a slew of stories about Chernobyl selfies, snapshots taken against macabre backgrounds that give the impression that tourism to these places is suddenly booming. But this kind of tourism is not new. It’s been dubbed dark tourism, travel to places where death or tragedy has taken place. David Farrier’s 2018 series Dark Tourist captured the phenomenon as the New Zealand journalist explored narco-tourism in Colombia and Mexico, nuclear tourism in Fukushima, shooting ranges in Phnom Penh and tours of the Manson family murder sites in the US, among other destinations.

People are often fascinated by death and disaster – maybe morbid curiosity is inescapable. Early examples of dark tourism, or thanatourism, are familiar in the form of medieval public executions or pilgrimages to cemeteries and battlefields. But why are we so fascinated? The philosopher Damon Young believes it takes us out of the mundanity of our everyday lives. However, he stresses, one can only feel a thrill about death if you are safe. Tourists in the hyper-curated experience of an organised tour might get physical proximity to disaster sites but are protected from the place’s real trauma. It doesn’t sit comfortably with Young. He tells Guardian Australia: “Turning public destruction into nothing more than your own private thrills is dodgy. You’re getting your buzz from someone’s suffering.”

After my Soviet tour, I certainly felt uncomfortable. Among the mostly young, white and male Western travellers, there was an attitude of bravado and transgression in where we were and what we were doing: exploring hollowed out Pripyat, turning dials in missile base bunkers, and, elsewhere, negotiating with border officials. But thinking about dark tourism entirely at this extreme end is not helpful, says author Maria Tumarkin.

Unfinished Chernobyl cooling towers. Photograph: Jessica Alice

She’s the author of Axiomatic, a collection of essays blending memoir and reportage to explore trauma and grief. I ask whether it’s ethical to visit death sites at all. She says while there’s a difference between tourism and visiting a place to pay respect, the motivations can overlap. People feel an instinctual urge to physically mark sites of tragedy out of respect and to gather there together.

Often “there is no time between the end of trauma and the start of tourism”, she says. For instance, not long after the first world war ended, many people visited the battlefields to see the place where so many lives were lost.

Rik Brinks was one of my fellow travellers on the 2016 Chernobyl trip. These days he runs his own dark tourism company. “There are many prejudices about certain countries,” he says of our fascination with these places. “Especially the more difficult to reach destinations, like Pakistan, North Korea, Iraq or Angola, that have to deal with plenty of negativity. Partly understandable, considering how these countries are portrayed in the media, as they are not always known for their stability and safety, but I have seen the other side of the story. Those countries often have beautiful landscapes and wonderful inhabitants, and large parts of the country are safe to travel.”

Critics of dark tourism often refer to disrespectful behaviour at disaster sites, like those documented by the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa in the film Austerlitz. In the film, visitors to the concentration camp Auschwitz are shown joking, jostling to take photos, or wandering disinterested room-to-room. I recall hearing radiation jokes and the chipper selfies I saw taken on my trip to Chernobyl, but Tumarkin brushes aside my unease at these attitudes: “Unethical behaviour goes on in all contexts.” She says dark tourists’ motivations are more nuanced than pure voyeurism. “There is this curious mixing of mourning, pilgrimage, paying respect and morbid curiosity, and it mixes together in a messy way.”

The problem of dark tourism is that by focusing on the past, it often ignores the ongoing, living culture of places and those who live there. Tumarkin agrees: “The tours that trade on being subversive absolutely shit on the people there by portraying these places as somewhere no one would go, turning a place of family-making into a grotesque circus.”

Too often there is a paternalistic approach to much of the West’s attitude towards travel in general. But any visit to a place should benefit, rather than exploit, local communities. As Young puts it: “You have to treat locals as human beings, not instruments of entertainment. You have to stop and ask questions, understand the context.”

Perhaps all visitors need to ask themselves, why do I want to visit this place at all?