Sense of shame,
Where's it gone?
Public behaviour indicates young people are losing their sense of shame.By Seah Chiang Nee
Aug 26, 2001

An irate man once invaded the office of the defunct Singapore Monitor, of which I was editor, to look for a photographer so that he could rearrange his face.

He was really, really angry. He had just been convicted and fined for slapping his father over money and the offending cameraman had snapped his picture outside the court house.

At all costs, he made it hysterically clear to us, he must stop his picture from being published.

Among the Chinese, beating up parents is one big bad crime and no miscreant would like his picture published for doing. After a lot of shouting and pushing, police escorted him out.

That was in the early 80s.

Several years earlier, I had accompanied Mr. Lee Kuan Yew (then prime minister) on a visit to (West) Germany where I found myself seated next to a couple of German industrialists.

It was a state banquet and we were talking about unemployment dole. One businessman told me that only one out of two jobless actually collected the benefits.

"The rest are too ashamed to come and queue up in an unemployed line even for the money," he explained.

We were to read more about this powerful sense of shame during the 1997 financial crisis when hundreds or thousands of middle-aged Japanese and Koreans lost their jobs.

Many of them kept it a secret from the families. For months, they pretended they were still working but spent their time outside looking for work.

In some societies, to be jobless was cause for shame. It implied the person was incapable; to line up palm-outstretched for money because of it was humiliation.

But such perceptions, I noticed, was not widespread in countries like Britain and Australia even in those days. Today,they have become weaker among the young generation - anywhere. Changing values are reducing the sense of shame.

A strong work culture in Germany had propelled a war-ravaged country to the status of becing the world's third most powerful economy in a quarter century.

Today the picture is not so rosy. Just how changed the new generation of Germans is from their parents? Read this recent International Herald Tribute article (in part):-

Germany Tackles Abuses by Jobless
Campaign aims at able-bodied but "lazy" recipients of aid.

Bonn - It's an old trick; Chug a beer just before the job interview. That faint whiff of alcohol on your breath all but ensures that the job goes to someone else.

Some Germans routinely undertake such ploys to retain their monthly unemployment benefits while going through the motions of an obligatory job search.

A country that prides itself on industry and discipline has long tolerated the abuse of its well-funded safety net for needy labourers.

But now Germans suddenly seem a lot less generous, and many want to change the old ways. Chancellor Gerhad Schroeder railed last month against what he called the "lazy" but able-bodied welfare recipients.

His comments have ignited an emotional debate about kicking alleged freeloaders off the unemployment rolls."

Shame, if not excessive, is not all bad. It often keeps many of us on the straight and narrow.

In fact, the government has often resorted to its use as a punishment for wrongdoing. The Corrective Work Orders making serious litterbugs wear a humiliating coat to clean roads for up to 12 hours is one form.

The public naming of government scholars who broke their bonds is another.

Several years ago, TV was allowed into the courtrooms to film proceedings in an effort to publicly shame some types of offenders as deterrent to others. However, public reaction was against it and the practice stopped.

Nowhere is the debate more heated than in USA, which has the biggest prison population in the world.

Since 1995, conservative Americans had been demanding criminals to suffer shame with punishment. And it is making a comeback, says Dan Kahan, Assistant Professor in the University of Chicago Law School.

For example, Kahan cites penalties including a contemporary version of the stocks-some communities require offenders to stand in public spaces such as the local courthouse with signs describing their offences. Other shaming punishments have included:

* Ordering convicted burglars to allow their victims to come into their homes and take anything they wanted.

* Requiring offenders to apologise - on their hands and knees in Maryland - for their crimes.

* Requiring parents of children who violate the town curfew to place a bumper sticker on their car that says "My children are not my responsibility. They are yours."

* Publishing the names of offenders in newspapers or on billboards listing the names and the offences - including the offence of soliciting a prostitute.

* Requiring thieves to wear T-shirts or brightly coloured bracelets announcing their crimes. One judge ordered a woman to wear a sign declaring "I am a convicted child molester."

Conventional alternatives are defective because they aren't shameful enough," he says.

(In Gulfport, Mississippi, a circuit judge sentenced a burglar to a three-day sentence, which included standing on a street corner for three hours with a sign that reads: "I'm a convicted thief.")

Others argue against using this weapon to punish because it can cause irreparable emotional harm to a person long after the sentence.

Psychologists say that shamed people can develop poor self-esteem, dysfunctional characteristics or even turned to serious crime. (Some argue the other way around - the more self-esteem, the more the person feels shame.)

One said: "Some are constantly ready to see or point out the weaknesses of others, or often find themselves furious--inwardly or outwardly -- over the slightest perceived affront to themselves or to their dignity."

These refer to more extreme forms of shaming offenders. There is no need to follow suit here since crime is not too threatening.

Singapore has, however, opted for less harsher methods, which should continue because the benefits outdo the harm - even though the result may be less effective.

(Aug 30 - Latest News on shaming: South Korea carried out a controversial plan today to post the names of convicted sex offenders on a government Web site, causing a Web traffic jam in the world's most wired nation. The Commission on Youth Protection posted the names, ages, occupations and addresses of 169 people convicted of crimes including rape and sex with minors - a move which had women's activists cheering and civil rights experts crying foul.)
Seah Chiang Nee