Why does society need a scapegoat

In many scapegoating situations, the anger and aggression of the dominant person or group is displaced, or projected, onto the victim. Really the frustration lies within the person doing the scapegoating. Scapegoating never truly solves any problems, it merely deflects attention away from the person or group who most needs help. Gilmore, Norbert, and Margaret A. Hafsi, Mohamed. Staub, Ervin. The Scapegoat Society. Further Reading Allport, G. The Nature of Prejudice.

Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, But who had done something wrong, who had aroused the wrath of the gods? Rather than trailing off into an endless loop of mutual recriminations, in such situations the community will soon single out a small number of individuals, project on to those people the sole blame for the crisis, and punish them. The victim now not only propitiates the gods, but also reconciles the group itself. The universality of these rituals is shown by the fact that human sacrifice can be found among all ancient peoples.

Thanks to the three best-preserved skulls, we know that the children died violent deaths. A plausible interpretation is that these are human sacrifices. In Europe, the practice of ritual killings only came to an end two to three hundred years ago.

While the Enlightenment, based on the Judeo-Christian religion, put an end the ritual sacrificing of human beings, the underlying mechanism still continues to govern human co-existence. These days, however, it is quite subtle in most cases and ends in psychological violence — ostracism or public humiliation, for example.

We may simply be shocked by the scapegoat mechanism when it leads to physical violence, as in the incident mentioned above.

He proposed a Gypsy law to make trespass criminal; pointing to a similar measure in the Irish Republic which he said had worked. It had. Irish Travellers came here instead, looking for a place to live, and some settled at Dale Farm. Media rhetoric amplified those proposed measures.

In this way racist invective by the press infects society in a widespread way. The same pattern repeated itself in , with the Conservatives seeking to criminalise trespass — and of course this is on the cards again now, so you can expect a similar ramping up next year.

By the time we reached the Dale Farm eviction in October — online comments in some newspapers were filled with hostility.

One online comment I read called for Travellers to be gassed to death. Similarly, in both France and Italy at around the same time, Roma populations were targeted and even expelled in large numbers. Attacks against Roma camps continue across Europe, with a number in France in particular.

But why are such groups targeted? The obvious answer in the UK — the justification if you like — has been that some British nomads have indeed settled on land for which they do not have planning permission and that the law should apply equally to all.

That is undoubtedly true, and good relations are important. But we are talking about a small group of people who are unintentionally homeless and whose right to camp has been increasingly restricted — over centuries — as common land has been reduced.

In addition, I think, just as with disability hate crime, that sticky stereotypes adhere to the communities that many in the settled population who do not know them, as Rachel Morris said, expect the worst and articulate it. The communities are useful. Crimes can be blamed on them — such as fly-tipping — and incursions into the green belt by the communities — resisted, although when developers do the same, resistance is often useless. They become a lightning rod for the discontents of a society jostling for space on a small island.

The impact of being seen in this kind of way, to be systematically dehumanized, is devastating. Racism has a pretty good go at destroying the humanity of those targeted. I am reminded of that whenever I read what Noah Burton told me, when I visited him and his family at another site threatened with eviction in the West Midlands called Meriden.

The families were subjected to violent threats on social media and racist graffiti and their camp was called an invasion. They were promptly blamed for local fly tipping, although local police found it was nothing to do with them.

One of the group was picked out in particular by some people opposed to the settlement, for both her disability and her ethnicity. Burton told me that he had passed for a white British man until Meriden became a story. His work then fell off once he was known. But, there were also villagers who wanted to get to know the group. One, Barbara Cookes, invited the young women in the group to help her with a charity open day. She was plagued for years after with silent nuisance calls and shunned by some people in the village.

This seems an apt moment at which to turn to honour violence, a form of scapegoating that affects both men and women, though mostly women, who step out of line. One of the key mechanisms is the separating off of those deemed sinners and therefore excluded — a horrible form of shunning. Where this talk has mostly been about how general society scapegoats minority groups, honour violence works inside communities, functioning by taking particular people and using what happens to them as a cautionary tale to others who might want to step out of line.

In the summer of Diana Kader graduated from university in Manchester, with a degree in Human Sciences. She was the first in her family to gain a degree and her proud parents, neither of whom can read or write but who desperately wanted their five daughters and one son to have the education they never had growing up in rural Yemen, decided to take them back to their country of origin.

The suitor even phoned her father and told him what he had done before relenting and bringing her to a hospital. She spent four months in intensive care and around two years in orthopedics and rehab. When she got out of hospital, instead of being supported by community members, she was subjected by some to a campaign of violence. It had started earlier, when her parents insisted that she and her sisters get qualifications. In fact the family was targeted over an year period. Since the accidence Diana has had her tyres slashed, her petrol tank contaminated, she has been attacked in the community, including attempts to run her over and her family suffered an arson attack.

When I investigated, police admitted that there had been nearly 20 serious crimes recorded against Diana and her family. Only one was recorded as honour based violence. The man who ran Diana over in Yemen and nearly cost her her life has never been prosecuted, even though Diana returned to Yemen in to seek justice. Diana cannot stand for long, has to take medication and is often in pain. When she has asked former friends in the community why she and her family still face harassment, they explain that her decisions — to refuse marriage, to want to work, have cost her and her family their place in the community.

Often their killers go free, as communities close ranks. When Diana lay on the desert road in Yemen, with her attacker smiling down at her, she decided she would live and tell her tale, for the sake of her family, for the sake of other women in her community.

Around four years after the attack Diana went back to university. She now works as a forensic scientist. Valentina Iribigaza, who survived the Rwandan genocide, moved abroad, went to university and now has a family of her own. The title every society needs a scapegoat contains within itself the idea of insiders and outsiders — social beings and outcasts.