Having received my training in public health, I have been steeped for nearly a decade in the idea that correcting, warning, punishing, and shaming are highly ineffective behavior change strategies that often backfire. We know this in public health because we’ve done a lot of it. From contexts ranging from drug use to handwashing, these types of behavior change approaches have low success rates, cause people to disengage, lead people to hide behavior, and contribute to stigma for people who do change behavior, even though that is the desired goal.

Because of this, I feel a lot of frustration towards political and social justice educators, activists, organizers, influencers, and other actors online and in community spaces who do not seem to act with any awareness of this and instead often act like “doing the work” involves applying these behavior change strategies to individuals in their communities. To push back on this, I wanted to write a position statement here about why I believe the (over) individualization of harm and an (over) reliance on individual punishment and related behavior change approaches is not only ineffective for advancing social change, but it also leads to resentment, disengagement, and in worse cases, significant opposition and radicalization.

I have written elsewhere about my noncarceral values and about what taking accountability for harm should look like, in my opinion. These writings emphasize that individual punishment (a) is largely not helpful for protecting and supporting victims/survivors and (b) does little to prevent harm in the future by changing the social, institutional, or structural conditions that enabled (or directly caused) the harm.

We tend to focus on individual punishment in American society for two reasons, both of which are not ideal from my perspective. First, individualization of harm is deeply ingrained in American carceral systems. It systemically functions to make individuals scapegoats for societal problems that powerful people and corporations do not want to address because they are expensive or they benefit from them. Secondly, on a psychological level, there is nothing that captures human attention quite like harsh criticism, and critiquing individual actors is an accessible way for individuals to gain attention and other forms of social (and financial) capital, especially if those critiqued have a social network who will have a reaction to the criticism. For this reason, particularly on social media, people being critical of one another is heavily rewarded and reinforced, including in educational and activist spaces.

I want to be clear here that I am not saying that we should never discuss individual actors’ behavior, most especially if they are a powerful person and have shown a lack of accountability for their actions repeatedly. However, I also think we need to move beyond the idea that moralizing other people’s individual behavior and correcting, punishing, and shaming people is doing some social good. (It is in fact very often doing a self-serving one.)

So how do we resist this impulse? I think there are four ideas we need to prioritize:

1. We need to emphasize the social and structural conditions that contribute to, enable, and/or cause an individual behavior that is considered harmful. Instead of putting so much energy on correcting, punishing, and shaming an individual for acting in complicity with a system of oppression, can we instead recognize that everyone does this, even marginalized people, to different extents? Our focus therefore should be on harm reduction, disinvestment from these systems, and working to change societal and community norms collectively.
2. We need to acknowledge that if the stated goal of activism, political organizing, and “doing the work” is to change society and the individuals in it, we need to let people change. In fact, ideally, from a behavior change perspective, we would strongly reinforce change. Currently, we often shame individuals for past actions even if they changed, which makes very little sense from a behavior change perspective. We should instead place the focus on what people do to transform themselves and encourage and reinforce that.
3. We should be much more selective with punishment and shaming and save it for actors and situations where people have caused repeated harm and are refusing to engage in processes of repair or transformation. Is canceling someone for saying a slur once, or acting poorly in a relationship, or making a comment that wasn’t aware enough, or doing something else that hurt the community really a good use of resources? It is, in my opinion, an especially bad use of resources when these tactics lead to personal resentment, development of oppositional views towards the community or its members, and radicalization against tolerant views.
4. We need to find a middle ground between centering, listening to, and supporting affected people (e.g., victims, survivors) and deferring rigidly to affected individuals even when they are advocating for carceral approaches, for ineffective behavior change strategies, or for actions that are not aligned with wider community goods. To share a personal example, in the aftermath of sexual violence I experienced, I was not in a place to speak about fair and equitable social responses to sexual violence because I had not yet processed and healed from my own personal experiences. I don’t accept the idea that people who have recently experienced harm or violence and have not fully processed it (let alone healed from it) are always necessarily best-positioned to respond to it equitably or recommend the healthiest social responses. Cycles of harm and violence are real, and healing is often a necessary step to interrupt them. While there are some limited cases where social and structural circumstances may make violence a potentially justified response to harm, this is simply not the case for the vast majority of situations and issues.

I want to start wrapping-up by noting that communities built around individualized notions of harm do not necessarily cause people to act more ethically. While fear can sometimes dissuade people from doing harmful things, it can also lead people to disengage and not do courageous and difficult things where they might make mistakes. The work that we need people to do to transform society is not easy, and many people will make mistakes and cause harm in trying to do it. Making people fearful of being accused of harm in a highly individualized way, that strips them of their context, without an opportunity for repair or transformation leads people to stop acting in constructive ways.

Individualizing harm and punishing individuals accordingly is not a healthy way to build communities, and I am sorry if I sound a little bit frustrated here – because I am. It is happening way too much in so many spaces and in politics, and I am personally very tired of it.

I am tired of it because it is ineffective. And on a personal level, I believe that it contributes to radicalization that further harms marginalized people I care about. I understand marginalized (and multiply marginalized) people doing this in moments of anger and pain and in the process of healing from experiences of harm (and I do not necessarily seek to comment on that). However, what I see most often is educators, activists, and other actors claiming they are doing this for the social good or people with some privilege doing this as part of their political and social action practice, as if this is what we need to be using our privilege for.

I am going to say it plainly here: this behavior is not needed. It is carceral in logic and approach. And it distracts from, and in many cases undermines, real and lasting social change.

One final thought I want to share is that many of the most marginalized people in society are people who have made mistakes and have been incarcerated, socially ostracized, psychiatrized, and/or put through other carceral institutions. Excluding people who have made mistakes (for justified, unjustified, or mixed reasons) from communities, conversations, and spaces isn’t progressive or just. In my view, it is small-minded and prioritizes the comfort of those who have not made these sorts of mistakes, which is very often a reflection of their privilege and/or conservative life choices. Keeping communities safe is a distinct question that often does not require or benefit from labeling and ostracizing individuals, though such actions are very often undertaken in the name of ‘safety’ for families, children, women, or other people considered vulnerable. Some of the people who have contributed most to society are people who have taken risks and made mistakes. On a related note, the people who have the most to teach about healing and transformation are those who have undergone these processes; excluding them talks-over the very people whose lived experiences we most need to center and learn from. To me, it feels extraordinarily hypocritical to only want to learn from people who navigated adversity, marginalization, and other difficult moments in the ways that you personally agree with.