Public Humiliation...A new form of punishment for Teens



 

 

The punishment for stealing from mom? A public shaming. An Indianapolis woman, angry that her son and stepson had stolen a $50 gift card, has punished them by forcing the boys to let the public know that they're "a thief" and an "accomplice to a thief."

 

Unique Caruthers, 11, and Xacherey Scott, 14, had to hold cardboard signs at a busy Indianapolis intersection for more than an hour earlier this month while their stepmom, Natashia Scott, stood nearby with two younger children and two adult family members, explaining the punishment to passersby.

"This is their punishment," Natashia Scott told Fox affiliate WISH-TV, adding that she wants to deter them from stealing.

"I refuse to let them fall victim to the streets," she explained. "I didn't want to beat them, so now they get to ...stand out here on 38th Street and let everybody know what they did."

She had intended to use the gift card, which she earned at work, to pay the family's gas bill. Instead, she says, the boys stole it from on top of her dresser and used it to buy themselves treats at Dairy Queen.

Some drivers stopped to read the boys' signs. "I am a thief. I stole from my mother and family. I can’t be trusted. If you see me on the streets, watch out because I am a thief," Unique's hand-written sign said. He admitted that he had taken the card.

Xacherey's sign read: "I am a [n] accomplice to a thief! I help spend stolen money from my step mom. Don’t trust me! If you see me on the streets go the other way because I will help get you."

A $50 gift card goes a long way in Scott's blended family. She and her husband have 11 children altogether, including two adult children and some who live with them every other weekend.

While the kids may squirm for a little while, it's the parents who usually end up under the microscope after their punishment draws attention. In 2012, Tommy Jordan videoed himself shooting holes in his 15-year-old daughter's laptop computer with his handgun after she wrote a disrespectful post on Facebook. He posted his video on Facebook in response and it went viral, opening Jordan up to both kudos and criticism.

"Do I regret doing it? No," he wrote in a follow-up post. "Do I regret keeping it on Facebook long enough to cause this stir? Yes."

“I wasn’t even thinking about what the public was going to think,” Renee Nickell told the Northwest Florida Daily News in March after photos of her 13-year-old daughter's public punishment were circulated on social media. The Crestview, Florida, girl had been forced to stand on a street corner holding a sign labeling her as disrespectful and lazy after she earned Ds in school. ."

The kids, for the most part, say that they get the point. After having to stand outside his South Florida school with a sign saying he'd been disrespectful to his teacher, 12-year-old Errol Faustin told local news crews that he'd learned his lesson.

"I learned that I won't call a teacher or any adults or staff out by that name again," he said, sounding contrite. "Because it's disrespectful."

Signs don't always have to be part of the punishment. A fed-up stepmom in Utah recently taught her fiance's 10-year-old stepdaughter a lesson by making her wear ugly outfits to school, setting her up to endure the type of teasing she had been dishing out herself. And in January, a Reddit user posted a photo of their sullen-looking teen wearing a T-shirt with his scowling face and the words "Try Me!" written on it.

But one has to wonder whether the public shaming has any long-term effect on the child. Will he or she really think twice before mouthing off again? Or does standing in public with a sign — or having your parents post goofy pictures of themselves on your Facebook page -- simply become less embarrassing over time?

"Punishing a kid with public humiliation not only makes the parent appear immature, it reflects a genuine mean streak," Fran Walfish, a child psychotherapist in Beverly Hills, California, told Yahoo! Shine earlier this year. "When a parent goes this far, they completely break the trust that's so crucial in adolescence. Of course no one wants their child to misbehave but when parents use public shame it's a sign that they've really lost control over their kids."

In this instance, however, Unique and Xacherey said that the public humiliation hit home.

"It's fair," Unique told The Indianapolis Star. "Because we did something bad, so we deserve the punishment."

“I don’t want to be out here again, for the same reason, or another reason," he told WISH-TV. "I want to do better."

“Yeah I learned my lesson," Xacherey said. "Standing out here for a long time, then I gotta hold this… everybody just looking at me weird. I don’t want to do that again."

 

 

When I was growing up, there was a form of discipline that every child I knew dreaded. It trumped being grounded, yelled at or even spanked. It was the threat of being hit by your parents in front of your peers. Long after the pain stopped stinging and bruises healed, the story of said child getting hit and dragged down a crowded school hallway would last and last – shared amid laughs, giggles and pointed fingers for weeks. The extra layer of humiliation and embarrassment made those kinds of punishments infinitely more dreadful, especially to children who value acceptance from their peers.

Parents are tapping into that fear of embarrassment with a new form of punishment: public humiliation. In the age of social media, it’s remarkably easy to punish children on a platform that exposes them to their peers, other adults and even strangers.

After author Reshonda Tate Billingsley’s daughter posted a picture of herself holding her father’s bottle of liquor along with the caption: “Wish I could drink this Vodka,” her punishment was public humiliation. The crying daughter was photographed holding a sign that read: “Since I want to post photos of me holding liquor, I am obviously not ready for social media and will be taking a hiatus until I learn what I should and should not post. Bye-Bye.” Her mother then published that picture on her Facebook page. It went viral.

Demetria Lucas claims the phenomenon is becoming increasingly popular among African-American parents on “Billingsley isn’t alone among African-American parents. A slideshow on the Chron news site depicts various children with brown hands holding signs announcing they were rude to their teachers, had participated in bullying, had stolen from family members and more. Some of the images had been posted on social media, while others were photographs of the children in public settings.”

While public humiliation may be effective, there are other ways to punish children without turning them into a spectacle.

Public humiliation is scarring, especially in cases when images go viral. It may stop children from repeating bad behavior, but the shame also plagues them long after they’ve learned their lesson and the family has moved on from the incident. To other adults and children who’ve witnessed the punishment, the offending child is labeled for years, especially in  small towns.

It’s also callous. What if adult transgressions — infidelity, poor money management, drug abuse to name a few — were plastered for everyone to see? Imagine the degradation and shame that we would feel, and how much harder it would be to better ourselves with the world watching and judging. That’s the kind of ordeal that publicly humiliated children go through at the most impressionable time in their lives. I’m sure the kids who were ridiculed in front of thousands of strangers would take a spanking over shame any day.