The Shame of A Nation – Dehumanization 101
July 22nd, 2008 by SocProf and tagged Bystander Apathy, Human Rights, Prejudice, Racism, Social Deviance, Social Exclusion, Social Interaction, Social Stigma
This is the photo that puts Italy to shame and rightfully so:
It is hard to imagine the amount of indifference and dehumanization it takes to just go and enjoy an afternoon at the beach with the corpses of two girls nearby.
It is a well-known group mechanism where members of a stigmatized (Erving Goffman again) minority are either mistreated or simply become invisible as non-human entities. As non-human entities, all that is expected from them is to not disturb the context: vacationers at the beach. So their corpses were covered because the sight of drowned human bodies might cut one appetite for picnic food. But otherwise, who cares, really? They’re Roma.
To be fair, lifeguards did try to help when the relatives of the girls notified them that they had disappeared in the waters. When their bodies reappeared, they were already dead. So, the police showed up and arrested the relatives to proceed with identification. And some people simply put towels on the bodies and life just went on.
As if nothing had happened.
Posted in Human Rights, Prejudice, Social Deviance, Social Exclusion, Social Interaction, Social Stigma, Social Theory, Sociology, Symbolic Violence, social marginality | No Comments »
