“Every day, young people who are not developmentally equipped to handle [public shaming] are so abused and humiliated that they can’t imagine living to the next day, and some tragically don’t. And there’s nothing virtual about that.” ~ Monica Lewinsky

Public shaming is a vitally dangerous thing.

It is no less than a gun in the hands of a person who has not been trained to understand the consequences of using it.

It is no less than a poison as powerful as arsenic in a different form.

It is no less than a parent simply not knowing how to handle a situation in a constructive manner or worse, a parent dumping his or her own shame onto the child.

Public shaming can kill, like it did Izabel Laxamana.

Back in the day—and I mean way back in the day, like the 500 years ago day—public shaming was used as a method to punish people who had violated rules again society in general. It was an accepted method of punishment that, with the growth of consciousness and compassion and awareness, society thankfully shunned as something that was too dangerous to the very soul of the person who suffered it and too damning to the society who enforced it.

We outgrew public shaming for a reason.

Today, when there is really no one cohesive set of beliefs or one standardized set of rules by which to live, public shaming plays no role in making so-called unwanted behavior fit into the norm. There is no “norm” any more.

Public shaming today is simply a parent’s way of saying to society in general and to the child in particular, “What this child did is not about me—it’s all about her, her, her!” Or, “Him, him, him!” It’s a way for the parent to say something akin to, “You are not mine, what you have done is not of me, and what you have done is so shameful to me that I am casting that shame on you.” It is a way for a parent to desperately grab at what is left of their perceived power over their child without regard for the effect it might ultimately have on that child and is nothing less than an abuse of that power.

Parents using social media to shame a child is in itself childish behavior. It is not parenting. Parents using curbside posters to shame a child, or bulletin boards to shame a child or anything to shame a child amounts to the same thing: childish behavior. It is public name calling of the worst sort and is testimony to the parent’s complete inability to parent in a cohesive, understanding, creative way that responds to the needs of the child and uncovers why the child did what they did in the first place.

My parents used shame as a way of saying, “I am afraid. I am so afraid that if you don’t change your ways you won’t be accepted by people.” But the damage that their shaming did took me five decades to unwind, to uncover, and to identify and heal from—and their shaming wasn’t even public. Sad to say, but their shaming ways get no credit for my learning that forgiveness and understanding are the only ways to grow a child into responsibility and self-respecting adulthood. Sad to say that with whatever it was that drove them to use such tactics, social media in their untrained hands could have very likely become lethal.

I, too, would not have been able to live with the humiliation and shame of it and understand how someone else could not.

In situations where a child is publicly shamed, the parent’s complete inability to parent in a healthy way needs to be responded to. The parent’s root concept of discipline needs to be uncovered and examined. The parent needs understanding and compassion—and the seeds of punishment and shame that are buried in them need to be uncovered and disemboweled from where they reside in their consciousness so that they do not plant that seed in their children.

Public shaming does nobody any good. Nobody.

It is embarrassing for those of us who witness it. It is damning and unspeakably damaging to those who experience it, making of them orphans in their own homes who can no longer trust or rely upon the very people who were meant to keep them safe from harm and from such public disgrace.

Finally, public shaming also reinforces the mistaken, entirely unreasonable concept in the parents who oh-so-mistakenly use it, that it is a form of discipline.

Shaming is not a form of discipline. Shaming is hatred.

Cutting my hair off, throwing it on the floor, filming my shorn head and sending me to school not only expecting me to learn from my mistake but expecting me to grow up into a healthy, self-respecting, confident woman is sheer madness.

Only a parent deeply out of touch with my basic needs as a human being would arrive at that conclusion.

Or someone who themselves needs a great deal of professional intervention.

“It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Relephant Read:

Monica Lewinsky Perfectly Illustrates the Crushing Weight of Shame from Cyber-Bullying.

Author: Carmelene Siani

Editor: Emily Bartran

Photo: YouTube Still