{"id":117334,"date":"2016-01-22T15:29:37","date_gmt":"2016-01-22T15:29:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2016\/01\/22\/medieval-style-shaming-of-children-using-modern\/"},"modified":"2016-01-22T15:29:37","modified_gmt":"2016-01-22T15:29:37","slug":"medieval-style-shaming-of-children-using-modern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2016\/01\/22\/medieval-style-shaming-of-children-using-modern\/","title":{"rendered":"Medieval style shaming of children using modern social media"},"content":{"rendered":"

beautytruthandstrangeness<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

theactualcluegirl<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

karadin<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Last month, 13-year-old Izabel Laxamana put on a sports bra and some leggings, took a picture, and sent it to a boy at school<\/b>. Soon, administrators at Tacoma, Washington\u2019s Giaudrone Middle School, where Izzy was poised to finish her seventh-grade year, heard about the picture. Izzy\u2019s parents were called. As Tacoma police would later report to the News Tribune<\/a>, the Laxamanas expressed concern that their daughter had been sending selfies of any kind. They had warned her against using social media. If she disobeyed, they had told her, they\u2019d cut off her hair.<\/b><\/p>\n

Back at home, Izzy\u2019s father, Jeff, made good on the threat. On May 27, he cut her hair to her shoulders, leaving just one long strand untouched. Then, he started filming. His camera panned from Izzy\u2019s downcast face to the heap of glossy black strands at her feet. \u201cThe consequences of getting messed up. Man, you lost all that beautiful hair,\u201d her father said. \u201cWas it worth it?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d Izzy replied softly.<\/p>\n

The next morning at school, staff members helped weave Izzy\u2019s hair into a French braid in an attempt to hide the damage.<\/b> But a new humiliating social media artifact\u2014her father\u2019s video\u2014was now being passed from phone to phone. School administrators heard about that, too. This time, they called child protective services. <\/b>School counselors were dispatched to aid Izzy. The next day, just before school let out, Izzy wrote eight notes on her iPod to family and friends, passed the device to a friend, headed to a bridge over the highway that separated the school from the mall, and jumped. She died in the hospital the next day.<\/b><\/p>\n

The story would sound medieval if the details weren\u2019t so modern. A young girl is caught flirting. Her father hacks off her hair. The community watches. Consumed by shame, she takes her own life. In Roberta Milliken\u2019s history of hair, Ambiguous Locks<\/a>, she writes about the third-century Christian martyr Christina of Bolsena, whose father chopped her hair off when she denounced his pagan religion. By the Middle Ages, the ritual had been codified into law, and \u201cwhen a woman misbehaved sexually, her basic sexual attribute was taken away from her\u201d in \u201coften very public spectacles\u201d: In the early 13th<\/sup> century, for instance, Germans punished women who became pregnant out of wedlock with the \u201chide and hair\u201d regimen: State-sanctioned torturers stripped the woman\u2019s shirt off, whipped her naked back with sticks, and cut her hair.<\/p>\n

Now, 800 years later, similar displays of ritualistic public shaming are back with a vengeance. <\/b>The factors that lead a girl to suicide are too complex to untangle, but her parents\u2019 behavior is too remarkable to ignore. Over the past several years, countless other grown adults have pulled similar stunts, albeit with less tragic consequences. There was the mother who forced her 11-year-old daughter to stand at a busy intersection and hold <\/b>a sign<\/b> reading, \u201cI was disrespecting my parents by twerking at my school dance.\u201d And the one who caught her 13-year-old daughter posing as a 19-year-old online and forced her to face a camera and admit she still watches the Disney Channel. <\/b>When one father discovered that his daughters had posted a twerking video to Facebook, he put up his own video of himself whipping them with a cable cord <\/b>as they curled their bodies in on themselves and screamed. Another father forced his son to twirl for the camera in his favorite skinny jeans, <\/b>announced that \u201cit look like you stole a midget\u2019s pants,\u201d posted the video on YouTube, set the shaming to music, and snagged a guest appearance on Dr. Phil.<\/b><\/p>\n

What\u2019s going on? It wasn\u2019t too long ago that criminologists speculated that public shaming risked becoming extinct<\/a> in the modern age.<\/b> Michel Foucault\u2019s Discipline & Punish<\/a> charted the \u201cdisappearance of torture as a public spectacle\u201d<\/b> by the early 19th<\/sup>century, as the English pillory was dismantled, the American chain gangs were disbanded, French public executions were closed to spectators, and offenders were removed from the public square and installed behind prison walls. A similar privatization of discipline occurred: By the early 20th<\/sup> century, schools had retired the rod<\/a> and the dunce cap for a trip to the guidance counselor\u2019s office<\/b>. Shaming became a largely family affair: In the home, parents still held tight control of their children, and they exacted punishments behind closed doors.<\/p>\n

Many videos in the parental shaming genre revoke the misbehaving child\u2019s Internet privileges, the modern equivalent of locking the maiden in a tower.<\/p>\n

Now, parents are modeling their most humiliating techniques out in the open. To understand why this kind of ritualistic public shaming is back,<\/b> consider why it left in the first place: In 1996, University of Chicago law professor Dan M. Kahan noted that public shaming had declined<\/a> with \u201cthe loosening of the tight communal bonds that characterized colonial life.\u201d In premodern \u201cshame cultures,\u201d villagers would see the same people in school, church, work, on the street, and in the home. Everyone knew everything about everyone. Back then, \u201cCommunal attachments were so central to individual identity that loss of face could be literally self-destructive.\u201d <\/b>But modernization has fragmented our lives and reputations into far-flung social and professional circles and turned our neighbors into strangers. As \u201cAmerican communities grew and became more impersonal,\u201d Kahan wrote, \u201cthe disgrace of corporal punishment receded.\u201d The sight of some random father disciplining his daughter in public for God-knows-what is more likely to bring shame upon him than upon the kid.<\/b><\/p>\n

But Facebook has made the world small again. Online, your shame can move instantly from your father\u2019s cellphone to every important person from every stage and aspect of your life. And if you try to move on, your offense can be dialed up on Google and replayed for future acquaintances to see. <\/b>In a prescient 1993 essay in the British Journal of Criminology, the Australian criminologist John Braithwaite reasoned<\/a> that modern shame could be even more traumatizing than the medieval form because it represents a sudden and jarring collapse of the walls we\u2019ve constructed around the separate parts of our lives<\/b>. In cases where news of the offense does travel widely\u2014like, say, if it\u2019s posted online\u2014\u201cthe worst side of the offender\u2019s business or professional self is exposed to people to whom he normally presents his churchgoing self, his golf-playing self, his fatherly self,\u201d he writes. Or to translate that into a 13-year-old\u2019s experience: The Internet has enabled the schoolyard bully to crash a family dinner, the parental tyrant to stalk his child through the school halls, and the school administrator to punish a girl for the things she does when she leaves the campus. <\/b>No wonder one Wisconsin judge, who offers offenders the opportunity to stand on the street corner wearing humiliating signs (like \u201cI stole from the dead\u201d) in exchange for shorter jail sentences, has found that most people who cycle through his courtroom\u00a0would rather get locked up than be shamed<\/a>. <\/b>A bout of petty thievery or a victimless DUI might not bear a mention in the newspaper, but wearing a sandwich board confessing to the crime can now make national news<\/a>, dragging down a person\u2019s online reputation forever.<\/p>\n

Worse yet, social media has found a way to integrate total strangers in the shaming process. Digital villagers are no longer relegated to the sidelines; <\/b>online, everybody gets a gavel. Kahan writes that \u201cdegradation ceremonies\u201d used to be \u201cimposed by an agent invested with the moral authority of the community.\u201d But now the dynamics of social media have incentivized individuals to care even more about how many people like them, whether they know them or not.<\/b> Often, the verdict as to whether a person actually deserves to be publicly shamed occurs after the act of shaming has already been completed. The father cuts the hair and films the aftermath, and then strangers click over to the online video and vote it up or down<\/b>. (The video of Izzy has now been assessed more than 4 million<\/a> times.) And unlike in the intimate village, where Braithwaite writes that villagers possessed an understanding of \u201cthe complex totality of their neighbours,\u201d making them \u201cless susceptible to the stereotypical outcasting of deviants,\u201d the only thing that some Internet gawkers know about you now is this one jerky thing you did. Many videos in the parental shaming genre revoke the misbehaving child\u2019s Internet privileges, the modern equivalent of locking the maiden in a tower. When the kid gets booted offline, all that remains of her online reputation is the artifact of her shame: The video of the dad unloading his .45 caliber handgun into his daughter\u2019s laptop<\/a>, or the footage of the father who found sexual material on his daughter\u2019s phone and smashed it to pieces<\/a> with a baseball bat.<\/p>\n

Foucault argued that one reason public shaming fell out of favor was because, as citizens turned against violent and biased modes of punishment, shaming an offender in public required exposing his state-sanctioned persecutor to public ridicule, too. <\/b>Online parental shaming has now taken a similar turn. The fathers who dispensed justice with a cable cord and a handgun both got visits from the cops.<\/b> Commenters have called for Izzy\u2019s father<\/a> to be denounced, imprisoned, even killed. \u201cHe is effectively a murderer,\u201d one Swedish commenter wrote. \u201cNow it is his turn to be shamed.\u201d<\/p>\n

But one irony of shaming\u2019s modern return is that, as the power to shame extends across the globe, those closest to the victims, offenders, and torturers lose their own power to influence the community norms.<\/b> Izabel\u2019s actual friends are not lashing out at her dad or creating awareness campaigns about online bullying. Their friend is gone. What else matters? They have been busy lighting candles at her favorite schoolyard tree and threading flowers at the overpass\u2019s chain-link fence and tweeting about how they\u2019re too tired to go on a field trip but also how summer is coming soon and how maxi skirts never seem to fit right. Some have edited their Twitter and Instagram bios to memorialize their \u201cPrincess Izzy\u201d alongside an umbrella emoji meant to represent the Pacific Northwest. They have waved away the strangers, including me, who have descended on their social media accounts, trawling for a peek at the dead girl\u2019s life. When Izzy\u2019s story made it all the way to Seventeen, a friend tweeted an embarrassed face emoji; another responded with a scared face one. \u201cY’all don\u2019t know what happened,\u201d one friend tweeted out to the faceless mob. \u201cThe only one who knows exactly why is herself.\u201d<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.slate.com\/articles\/technology\/users\/2015\/06\/izabel_laxamana_a_tragic_case_in_the_growing_genre_of_parents_publicly_shaming.2.html<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To this, I\u2019m going to add a link to Monica Lewinsky\u2019s amazing Ted Talk on the topic of Internet shaming and the need for compassion. \u00a0Go and watch it if you haven\u2019t already.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.ted.com\/talks\/monica_lewinsky_the_price_of_shame?language=en<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is really important.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

beautytruthandstrangeness: theactualcluegirl: karadin: Last month, 13-year-old Izabel Laxamana put on a sports bra and some leggings, took a picture, and sent it to a boy at school. Soon, administrators at Tacoma, Washington\u2019s Giaudrone Middle School, where Izzy was poised to finish her seventh-grade year, heard about the picture. Izzy\u2019s parents were called. As Tacoma police … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Medieval style shaming of children using modern social media”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[14201,14200,14199,5133],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117334"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117334\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}