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Thursday, January 08, 2009

Quote of the Evening

From today's criminal law reading. Not sure I agree whole-sale, but it is probably true enough to throw an important wrench in how we think of deterrence and crime:
I have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed and humiliated, disrespected, and ridiculed, and that did not represent the attempt to prevent or undo this "loss of face" -- no matter how severe the punishment, even if it includes death.... [T]hese men mean it literally when they say they would rather kill or mutilate others, be killed or mutilated themselves, than live without pride, dignity, and self-respect.... The emotion of shame is the primary or ultimate cause of all violence.

JAMES GILLIGAN, VIOLENCE 110-111 (1996).
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3 comments:

  1. PG9:37 PM

    I don't agree at all. I think a great deal of spontaneous violence, or planned revenge against someone who has wronged, does indeed come out of shame. But I can't explain the emotion of shame as the primary or ultimate cause of something like this.

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  2. David Schraub9:42 PM

    You don't think so? The shame doesn't have be sparked from the victim for it to be operative. A person who feels like they've been disempowered and is helpless over the forces of their life might make a drastic assertion of power over someone (such as a sustained torture and rape session) in response.

    Obviously, I don't know if that's the case here, but it wouldn't be an outlandish hypothesis, I don't think.

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  3. PG9:57 AM

    A person who feels like they've been disempowered and is helpless over the forces of their life might make a drastic assertion of power over someone (such as a sustained torture and rape session) in response.

    I could believe that if the person did it spontaneously, particularly if there were a relevant element of commonality between the person who victimized the criminal and the person the criminal victimizes. (E.g., Aileen Wuornos's going on a spree of killing her johns after one of them raped her.) However, a sustained torture session, particularly interspersed with conversation with one's victim, doesn't seem to fit the kind of outburst I'm imagining as a response to disempowerment. It's more like the behavior of the kind of serial killers who carefully plan how they will entice and then murder their victims.

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