To Ask “What’s wrong with shame?”

I think we’ve got really good at being victims, the language of victimhood has a lot of currency these days. The Manchester airport incident was immediately painted as racist (the protesters outside the police station were holding BLM signs). These rioting thugs claim they are the victims and are being smeared. Trans rights activists who stalk , harass and threaten women claim they are in fact the victims. Even during the grooming gang trials, many claimed they were victims of racism. There are a bunch of civil servants complaining that a transwoman is coming to work in fetish gear, I guarantee you he’s going to paint himself as the victim of bigots.

I have to say though, these riots are the first time I’ve seen politicians not fall for the victim narrative which is interesting. I imagine as a consequence of identity politics white men don’t get the same soothing noises as the other thugs we have. I wish it was just the standard response to every arsehole. Shut up, stop crying you are going to prison,

I think thats the thing of our times. Do something awful/stupid/dangerous then start crying that you are the victim pretty much immediately, sometimes WHILE you are doing that thing.

I wish I could collect up every arsehole the UK has to offer and dump them on an island somewhere far away from civilised society. So the rest of us could just get on with peaceful lives.

I think shame has an important part of society.

Not seeing your children, shame on you.
Watching porn on the bus, shame on you.

Behaviour that differs from mine but is not hurting anyone/making anyone uncomfortable/illegal, no shame.

You can shame anyone you like, you just have to refer to it as "calling them out" instead, because then you are modern and progressive, rather than the mean and bad people who do "shaming".

What about long-term implications of being publicly humiliated? Every human deserves the right to say “Yes, I did that but now I know better and I understand what I did wrong. I no longer hold these views”. Publicly humiliating someone in front of a school removes this opportunity, ostracises the child and, potentially subjects him to bullying for the rest of his school life. I’d say, it is not teaching the child anything and is likely to turn them into a much nastier human being. Thank god we have gun laws as, I suspect, many of the American teen shooters are familiar with public humiliation.
I haven’t read the thread you refer to but it sounds as though apologising to the person he offended is not a bad solution, providing it is sincere. This is how we resolve conflict as an adult. If we mucked up in the office, there is a private and confidential disciplinary hearing. Comrade’s courts were popular in the USSR and that’s where they should stay.

Here are two concrete examples years of social shame.

Women still feel shame when they are raped or are victims of DV .

Except shame (and guilt sometimes ) is often used to actually harm people.

I don't really understand. At no point did I say anything about shouting at someone and/or removing possessions? Or physical punishment?

I was more thinking of a recent thread where the OP's son had been involved in bullying a girl in his year by calling her a butch lesbian. Punishment and consequences recommended were things like writing her a letter which to my mind is a minor irritant rather than actually hammering home how hurt this girl must have felt (regardless that as a grown woman if I were called a butch lesbian I'd be completely unbothered). Under those circumstances I don't think that being called out publicly at school is bad. Maybe then it hammers home the humiliation they caused and yes, causes them to feel some shame.

Having being married to someone who felt no guilt or shame for how they behaved, I really learnt the value of these emotions, and why we evolved to have them. These are pro-social emotions. They cause you to reflect on the harm you have caused to another and to seek to repair the harm you caused and the relationship you rifted, and then to avoid doing similar again in the future. I found to my deep cost that a relationship cannot survive where at least one of the partners cannot feel guilt or shame.

If that's how you choose to call it. To me shaming is synonymous with belittling someone which we did not do. Yes, she was ashamed of her actions but this was not our primary goal. Our goal was to explain our perspective to her and hope that she will come on board with our way of thinking. This isn't always the case, mind. As a teen, she has a mind of her own and as much as I disapprove of her choices sometimes, she needs to learn to make them independently.

So you did shame your daughter then. You just did it in a more intelligent way.

Things you think are morally wrong are pretty different to shame. Shame is mainly female focused - period shame, walk of shame etc

Bring back the stocks. I wonder how keen people would be to cheat on their spouses or not pick up their dog shit or steal glasses from their pals if the result would be an appropriate amount of time in the stocks having mouldy fruit chucked at them by passerby?

This is very different. Shaming will never be as effective as educating a child as to why their behaviour is inappropriate.
I grew up when physical punishment of children was appropriate and everyone I speak with only had one reaction towards their parent who did that which was “I don’t like you and I don’t trust you”. Oh, and fear.
My kid shared a homophobic video the other day which she thought was funny. We had to have a calm conversation about prejudice, hate speech, making assumption about people on the basis of their looks etc. and also to hear her point of view as to why she thought it was funny and appropriate to share. We didn’t shame her but she did feel shame. But her shame was driven by the new found awareness of the complexities around acceptance and kindness. If I were to shout “shame on you, no phone for a year” it wouldn’t have had quite the same effect.

Sorry I don't agree with you here.

There are countless threads on this forum about children who have behaved appallingly, deliberately hurting someone or bullying or whatever, but consequences that include shaming them for this behaviour is almost always universally shouted down as bad.

Personally I think if you are shamed by someone addressing your behaviour, then good. It at least shows you understand you should be ashamed. It's those that don't ever feel badly about their own behaviour that people need to be wary of.

That behaviour is abhorrent, (sorry you experienced that), and the behaviour should be dealt with. Publicly saying that is unacceptable behaviour is fine. I don’t see calling out that behaviour as shaming. I see that as calling out clearly unacceptable behaviour. ‘Mr X, on this date, said XYZ and that behaviour is abhorrent and unacceptable’ isn’t shaming in itself. They may feel shame but that’s a seperate issue.

Shaming is a deeply embedded social strategy - even pre-human, as some other primates do it. At the most primitive level, it's a threat to survival because it cuts you off from community protection (see 'menstruation huts', for instance).

It isn't going anywhere. I think what you might be talking about is inappropriate shaming, like the person who tried to shame you for your appearance. You said you'd like to name & shame that person - what you're saying here is that they 'shamed' you, so you'd like to retaliate! Fair enough, I reckon.

There is a lot of noise at the moment about shaming; it mostly seems to be generated by people who want to shame others who disapprove of them. Don't kink-shame, they say. Actually, I think a lot of kinks deserve to be shamed. I won't be reverse-shamed into pretending I'm okay with what they do: I'm not ashamed of having an opinion on it.

Fat-shaming's another one. It can seriously harm people's mental health but there are plenty of people with very strong views on physical condition, who aren't ashamed of their position and will justify it to their last breath. To an extent, we have to live with the fact that nobody gets 100% social approval. We will all shame and be shamed some of the time.

Your headline asks what's wrong with shame? Everything if you're the one feeling it: it's an awful sensation. It's supposed to feel horrible, that's the point. But dishing it out and receiving it are basic human behaviours so, in that sense, it's no more wrong than laughter. Just gotta deal with it!

I’m not willing to share the personal details but what I felt shame about, some would agree that it’s shameful, others not. Some still think, for example, that homosexuality is something to be shameful of.

All behaviour has meaning in context - so if any of us think about times we have behaved unreasonably there will be reasons. That doesn’t negate the need to judge certain behaviours as wrong and to require intervention- murder, abuse, etc.

The research suggested that this kind of intervention tends to produce superficial change or cheating/hiding things.

But that’s the desire to shame the person over observable behaviour. The feeling of shame is about who we are as people. Shame = I am a bad/unacceptable person.
Guilt = My behaviour is bad/unacceptable.

Shame can stop people reaching out for help, so in the coke example you give. Shame may actually keep them doing it for longer as they feel they can't ask for help, or talk to people about it. Shame can have a very silencing effect, which I never think is a good thing.

The traffic light system is shaming.
Rewarding well behaved kids isn't.

Your school is very confused.

Interesting. We use a traffic light behaviour system in the school I work in where if a child behaves poorly the move their name from green to amber or em red depending on the behaviour. So fighting, hurting others, bullying, etc are red behaviour and things like repeatedly talking during learning times, being disrespectful to staff, disrupting lessons, deliberately damaging school equipment etc is amber. It has been suggested that children who remain on green all week receive a reward of ‘golden time’ at the end of the week which is basically an hour where they get to choose something fun to do. This was rejected by the head because it would ‘shame’ those have behave poorly. What do people think?