The Enduring Attraction of Public Shame as Law Enforcement Tool
Shame Parade of Prostitutes
Most developed countries employ a narrow range of punishments for violations of law. For civil violations, you’ve got payment of money and, less often, performing a specific act to make up for your previous bad act/failure to act (in Common Law countries, this is called “specific performance” and is rare). For criminal violations, the most popular punishment is of course prison; other options include probation, a variety of rehabilitation and work programs, and community service.
If you go back a hundred years or so in Western history, you also see public shame as a common punishment for petty crimes. Prisons were not as common (or as profitable) as they are today, so the choice was either execution or shame-and-release. If you know what it means to “put someone in the stocks,” then you understand the idea here. That form of punishment was around for a very long time and was only discontinued quite recently.
Indeed, the concept of public shame has not completely died out in the West. In the U.S., for example, a recent trend has been to publish the names of individuals guilty of solicitation (using the services of a prostitute) in the newspaper. The thinking here is that the possibility of being shamed in public will deter future illegal activity. I’ve never heard that it works, but this form of punishment continues to pop up now and again in certain local communities.
Public shame is even more popular in China. Public apologies are an extremely common form of restitution in civil cases (along with money damages, of course). For criminal matters, there seems to be some disagreement these days over the propriety of public shame.
Just this week, we had a reversal of policy:
China will end the public shaming of prostitutes by parading them through the streets, the People’s Daily reported on Tuesday, following controversy over cases in which sex workers were paraded in public.
Ministry of Public Security has ordered the police to stop parading suspects in public and has called on local departments to enforce laws in a “rational, calm and civilized manner,” the report said.
Respect for individuals has trumped the belief that public shame is a useful deterrent. So are we going to see an end to public apologies and other instances of public humiliation? Not so fast:
A list of debtors who have not paid compensation owed or who are at large was published by the Beijing Higher People’s Court Thursday, Beijing Times reported.
The disclosure including the name, identity number, family address and amount of debt aimed to name and shame the people into paying up.
Nine people and twelve corporations were put on the list and the exposure is to become a routine measure aimed at cracking down on the slick dodgers.
Apparently the court is having some trouble getting folks to pay and thinks that public shame might make a difference. This is a tribute to the belief in the importance of public reputation, I suppose.
If I had to guess, I would say that the prostitution policy reversal was an instance of authorities crossing the line. Parading bound prostitutes through the streets just went too far. However, publishing names in a newspaper is just the right balance.
In other words: public shame is useful, but abject humiliation is bad.
and public revenge as a need for “victims” .. a big deal in the western court/newspaper world … now matter how many years after the event, the relatives are quizzed about how they feel about the sentencing ..
my point is that this mindset is global
I felt a lot of hope when I read about the law in forbidding parading prostitutes because I think it is a sign of growing civil society. And I think parading sex workers is violence against women. And I think prostitution should be legal, especially in China where it is essentially a police regulated business.
As we in China know, when police bust a “venue”, they are not suddenly discovering there was prostitution there. Rather, they are cracking down on a business which they partially own.
Police know 100% of all prostitution locations. And 100% of those businesses pay protection money to the police (I guess some places in some cities are protected by mafia/triads, which in tern work with the police). Except in some areas where the land and venues are owned by the military.
This means that when police bust a place, they are prosecuting the girls for crimes which the police took part of. Everyone knows this. So the hypocrisy of seeing police mistreat women who, essentially, paid rent to the police is a little too much even for Chinese people, who are a little numb to the injustices and hypocrisy in their society.
So when the Ministry of Public Security issued this regulation, they were actually listing to China’s citizens and moving against the incredible hypocrisy of persecuting sex workers.
Disciplining through shame? Ive given this a little thought specifically in regard to growing up in America. When someone cuts in line, drives poorly, or does something outright unacceptable in public…what happens in America? In my experience its usually a group of people performing a mock public shaming on the individual in question.
In China these things happen and again from my own experience…people keep their mouths shut and tend to look the other way. Perhaps there should be more preventative law in China
Last point on the court making people’s names public who havent paid. This exercise is common place throughout the Chinese University system. If a students steps out of place or does something to deserve disciplinary action, their name is usually put onto a public list outside the student’s dorms. Probably not the most effective means of discipline.
Im curious about HK or Taiwan compared to China in this regard. Is it the harsh legal consequences in HK that prohibit people from breaking the law as much or am I missing something. Any thoughts Stan?
I know next to nothing about HK and Taiwan on this subject. Obviously, however, those places have had more time to establish rule of law.
Public shaming remains controversial in many places, with part of the controversy being what is or isn’t public shaming. In Holland for example, ‘old’ media are reacting to (complaining about) a trend of ‘new’ media, like the popular web-site “Geenstijl” (no-style, tacky, bad taste), doing things like putting up photos or video of thieves, vandals, perpetrators of violence and the odd village-idiot, asking the public to find out who they are and inform the police. This highly effective method (most of these low-lives are ‘caught’ within hours) includes people publishing links to facebook pages and various personal details in the comment section below the articles. None of this is illegal, but invariably there are emails or letters from either the criminals themselves or their lawyers, claiming that this is an illegal invasion of their privacy (boohoo) and warning that they’re will be consequences. The only thing that usually happens is that the emails/letters are also put up on the web-site, showing the public that these petty crooks are not just crooks, but schmucks as well.
In effect, this is not so much public shaming as it is a modern form of ‘wanted posters’, having the side-effect of being rather like public shaming. The proponents of this sort of thing argue that if you don’t want the whole country to know you are a thief or a vandal or so, then you might choose to refrain from stealing or vandalizing or beating-up geriatrics, or at least not be dim enough to get caught on camera.
Relating this back to China, I would say that there is no real benefit in shaming the poor girls who are desperate and/or stupid enough to become hookers, nor the poor saps who are desperate and/or stupid enough to avail themselves of these services. The point is, they’ve already been caught. Fine them if you have to, or send them to jail for all I care. If public shaming has been found to be the most effective deterrent (i.e. based on rigorous statistics and so forth) then so be it, but I very much doubt that this is the case, especially w.r.t. hookers and their customers. I agree with Jesse that it should all be legalized (and regulated), since there is ample evidence that that would remove many of the excesses and criminal elements from the ‘business’. Whether those elements are police or triads or martians I don’t know, though I could guess. But that is beside the (my) point.
On the other hand, I think swindlers (using the term loosely) who’ve done a runner should have their picture posted everywhere, not to shame them (I doubt they would care, you need a conscience for that) but to warn the public for possible future scams and/or to catch them (I’m assuming that if they can be found, they can be made to pay what they owe. If they’re known/located but don’t pay anyhow, then the courts should pull their finger out and go collect, or arrange for these sorts of powers if they haven’t been granted already — what does the law say on this point?).
This would be similar to publishing the names of shops that scam, restaurants that are dirty, and so on. Or would the objection then be that it’s unfair to “publicly shame” a restaurant just because it is using its legitimate rights to make more profit at the expense of their customers’ health? I would think not…
Should I take Remedies this fall?
After reading China Hearsay on a regular basis, you should be able to teach Remedies.
Is that an entire class these days? Seems a bit of an overkill after an entire year of Contracts, but perhaps with the complexity of litigation these days, it makes sense.