Ute Frevert - The Politics of Humiliation: A Modern History

Fig. 1. Shena Hardin, Cleveland, Ohio, November 2012

In November 2012, Shena Hardin of Cleveland, Ohio was subjected to something more akin to shame and less to humiliation. She stood at the corner of a busy intersection holding a sign that read: Only an idiot would drive on the sidewalk to avoid a school bus. Hardin, indeed, had done it a few times. As if being fined and having her licence suspended was not enough, the judge sentenced Hardin to a so-called shame sanction: a form of public shaming that clearly marked Hardin as an idiot. Such sentences are intended not only to discipline and punish, but also to educate and improve. On Hardin, the effect was one of ambivalence. First, she demonstrated coolness and nonchalance, despite being visibly aggravated by the media attention. After the judge had her lift the sign up higher, she conceded that she had learned her lesson. But the experience, she added, would not break her.

This distinguishes her case from that of 13-year-old Izabel Laxamana. Angered at finding pictures of her on the internet in a sports bra and leggings, the teenagers father filmed himself cutting off her long hair. Shortly afterwards, he put the video online and it went viral. Unable to bear the humiliation in front of her schoolmates, the girl from Tacoma, Washington committed suicide by jumping off a bridge in May 2015.

The case sounded patently medieval to US journalist Amanda Hess. She notes that while ritual public shaming has become obsolescent as a form of criminal punishment, some parents have started using social media to embarrass and shame children in front of their peers. The publicity afforded by Facebook and YouTube make them perfect venues for castigating those who break the rules, with often tragic consequences for the punished. Teenagers with low self-esteem are helpless in the face of such humiliation: they are broken by their ridiculers as much as by the gaze of the public and its often stinging comments.

Why do people feel the need to embarrass others in publiceven their own childrenand where does this need come from? What is the point of shaming someone, and what effects does it have? Why is shaming widespread even in societies that value dignity, recognition, and respect highly? Is it proof that medieval attitudes are still with us? Or has the enlightened modern era set loose its own desire to shame and humiliate with new forms and targets?

Public shaming puts power on display. By bringing people to their knees in front of others, social actors emphatically assert their superior, more powerful position. According to sociologist Max Weber, power is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests. Thus, Izabel Laxamanas father exerted power over her. He forbade her from putting selfies on the internet, and when she did it anyway, he humiliated her and, on top of that, made the act of humiliation public. In doing so, he underscored his own power and Izabels inability to defend herself. This humiliation made her bow her head in shame: she wanted to become invisible and saw no other option than to kill herself.

The awareness that shame is a frighteningly powerful emotion stretches all the way back to ancient times in places as far apart as Greece and Iceland. Shame can be deadly and, even if it does not go that far, can still have a lasting effect on the living. Anyone who has ever been deeply shamed knows that shaking the feeling off is not easy. The presence and witness of others is a crucial aspect of it, although we might also secretly feel ashamed of ourselves for doing or thinking something that contradicts our sense of self or common notions of morality and propriety. We might, for instance, feel ashamed for envying a colleague who just got promoted, or for taking joy in watching the boss tear into a colleague in front of the whole office. Acts of public humiliation are generally seen as intolerable displays of disregard for human dignity, or even as attacks on it; thus, if we openly or tacitly approve of them, we might experience shame.

But what makes such acts so despicable? Is it because we know about the power of the public gaze, a gaze that cannot be avoided, that gets beneath our skin and marks the body of the humiliated? When others witness our individual faults or transgressions, this triggers a feeling of shame, which is all the more intense the more we want to be held in high esteem. A child who steals a candy bar from the store and knows that doing so is not allowed might secretly feel ashamed but not show it. However, if the child gets caught and her parents find out about it, she does not need to be told shame on you! to feel it. Being publicly humiliated makes her blush, and she has just one wish: to get away from the others stares as soon as possible.

For these reasons, psychologists call shame a social or interpersonal emotion. It is generally experienced in the presence of othersindeed, only one out of six respondents say that they think of shame as a private, solitary feeling.