Bully's Act of Humiliation: A Taunt Equals a Tattooed Number

lets talk about mobbing

• Gang bullying or group bullying is often called mobbing and usually involves scapegoating and victimization.

The purpose of mobbing is to punish, isolate, and exile the target. It can have serious outcomes, causing victims to lose their jobs (or residences in the housing context) and to suffer significant medical and psychological health problems resulting from stress.

The word mobbing is preferred to bullying in continental Europe and in those situations where a target is selected and bullied (mobbed) by a group of people rather than by one individual. However, every group has a ringleader. If this ringleader is an extrovert it will be obvious who is coercing group members into mobbing the selected target. If the ringleader is an introvert type, he or she is likely to be in the background coercing and manipulating group members into mobbing the selected target; introvert ringleaders are much more dangerous than extrovert ringleaders.

Throughout the mobbing experience, the target is deceived into fighting, blaming and trying to hold accountable the minor bullies of the mobbing group rather than the chief bully. The main reason a psychopathic chief bully gets away with his (or her) behavior repeatedly is that no-one wants to believe that s/he could be the monster s/he is. This is also the reason that many pedophiles and wife-batterers evade accountability and sanction for years, often decades. They appear so charming and plausible to naive, unenlightened and inexperienced people - usually those who haven't experienced bullying themselves. Psychopathic chief bullies are very likely to have everyone in human resources and management in their pocket, who are then manipulated into further mobbing, victimizing and persecuting the target.

What makes mobbing so dangerous is that it's so subtle, so hard to prove. But the effects are devastating.

Victims may suffer stress-induced ailments, including headaches, stomach aches, high blood pressure and psychological problems.

In extreme cases, mobbing can even be life-threatening. Some mobbing victims contemplate suicide.

Group harassment can have tragic consequences for all involved as in the 1999 case of former OC Transpo employee Pierre Lebrun, who shot and killed four people at the company in Ottawa and then himself. The coroner's inquest indicated that Mr. Lebrun had been ridiculed and ostracized, and recommended new laws and company policies to prevent hostile behaviour from getting out of control.

bullycide humiliation and guilt

Dharun Ravi  by VINCE JOY

the muselmanner, the drowned

photo by Eric Schwab



They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me:  an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen.

Primo Levi
Survival in Auschwitz

Primo Levi curse

You who live safe

In your warm houses,

You who find, returning in the evening,

Hot Food and friendly faces:

Consider if this a man

Who works in the mud

Who does not know peace

Who fights for a scrap of bread

Who dies because of a yes or a no.

Consider if this is a woman,

Without hair and without name

With no more strength to remember,

Her eyes empty and her womb cold

Like a frog in winter.

Meditate that this came about:

I commend these words to you.

Carve them in your hearts

At home, in the street,

Going to bed, rising:

Repeat them to your children,

Or may your house fall apart,

May illness impede you,

May your children turn their faces from you.

from Survival in Auschwitz

Primo Levi

mobbing and bullying and tenants rights

Bullying is typically perpetrated by one person although others in a workplace may join in, for example by operating legitimate procedures in an inappropriate manner, at the behest of the bully, having an adverse effect on the target. "Bullying" is still an appropriate term to describe what is done to the target.

"Mobbing" involves a group of people whose size is constrained by the social setting in which it is formed, such as a workplace. It might seem to the target as if many people are involved but in reality the group might be small. The group members directly interact with a target in an adversarial way that undermines or harms them in measurable, definable ways.

HUD proposes rule against harassment

On October 21, 2015, HUD has proposed a rule that would formalise and define harassment under the Fair Housing Act. While the rule only clarifies existing law and regulations, the impact may be significant and help to prevent harassment in private as well as subsidized residences.

"A home should be a refuge where every woman and man deserves to live without the threat of violence or harassment. The rule HUD is proposing is designed to better protect victims of harassment by offering greater clarity for how to handle a claim against an abuser," said HUD Secretary Julián Castro. (4)

The rule addresses two kinds of harassment: quid pro quo or "this-for-that," where the housing provider demands sexual favors or other unwanted actions in exchange for providing housing and rights of a tenant; and hostile environment, where the victim is unable to enjoy their home and may be forced to leave because of intolerable harassment. Such an environment is comparable to mobbing. (2)

Finally, in a very important clarification of the responsibilities of the provider of housing, the rule would eliminate the possibility that any provider or their agents could escape legal liability for harassment based on discrimination. (5)

bullying humiliation bullying power bullying decency bullying bulling bullying

“It [humiliation] is based on the fact that the perpetrator–especially the institutional humiliator–has power over the victim he assails. It crucially involves the sense of utter helplessness that the bully gives the victim.” (Margalit 1998, 122

“Sometimes directed efforts are made to bring the victims of aggression to a state where they can be seen as nonhuman, [...] A humiliating look thus does not consist in seeing the other as a thing or a machine but in seeing the other as subhuman“ (Margalit 1998, 100-101)

“That all men are human is, if a tautology, a useful one, serving as a reminder that those who belong anatomically to the species homo sapiens, and can speak a language, [...] are also alike in certain respects more likely to be forgotten. These respects are notably the capacity to feel pain, [...], to feel affection for others, [...]. The assertion that men are alike in the possession of the characteristics is, while indisputable and (it may be) even necessarily true, not trivial. For it is certain that there are political and social arrangements that systemically neglect these characteristics in the case of some groups of men, while being fully awareof them in the case of others [...]” (Williams 1973, 232)

“My central claim is that humiliation typically presupposes the humanity of the humiliated. Humiliating behavior rejects the other as nonhuman, but the act of rejection presupposes that it is a person that is being rejected.“ (Margalit 1998, 109)

 “Seeing a human being as human means seeing the body as expressing the soul, as Wittgenstein put it. In other words, it means seeing the human body and its parts in the mental terms they nonliterally exemplify [...] We see persons as human when we see their expressions in human terms: this person has a friendly or a thoughtful face, a worried or a happy expression.“ (Margalit 1998, 94)

Margalit defines humiliation as “[...] any sort of behavior or condition that constitutes a sound reason for a person to consider his or her self-respect injured” (Margalit 1998, 9).

: “Overlooking human beings means, among other things, not paying attention to them: looking without seeing. Seeing humans as ground rather than figure is a way of ignoring them.“ (Margalit 1998, 101) “Overlooking humans thus does not strictly mean seeing them as things, but rather not seeing them fully or precisely” (Margalit 1998, 103). But not only can people ignore others, they often see them as subhuman. They see them “as stigmatized – that is, to see some physical ’anomaly’ of theirs as a sign of a defect in their humanity” (Margalit 1998, 103).

“That other human beings have souls – that is are subjects of psychological predicates – is not a hypothesis but the provision of a framework for representing human beings as such“ (Margalit 1998, 109).

“A human way of seeing means seeing the other under the descriptions of human psychology. It means seeing the human body, especially the face and the eyes, as expressing psychological states.“ (Margalit 1998, 100-101


“Sometimes directed efforts are made to bring the victims of aggression to a state where they can be seen as nonhuman, [...] A humiliating look thus does not consist in seeing the other as a thing or a machine but in seeing the other as subhuman“ (Margalit 1998, 100-101)

“It [humiliation] is based on the fact that the perpetrator–especially the institutional humiliator–has power over the victim he assails. It crucially involves the sense of utter helplessness that the bully gives the victim.” (Margalit 1998, 122)

“Treating someone in a way that denies her capacity to be free is rejecting her as a human being.“ Margalit (1998, 118)

Margalit, A. (1998), The Decent Society, Harvard University Press.

Williams, B. (1973), Problems of the Self, Cambridge University Press.

Le Monde en face : Harcèlement à l'école - France 5 (BA) ( NOTE:THIS IS MOBBING)

THIS IS MOBBING

Shame A Bully

Bully Pay Attention To This

Your soul looks like this:

Holocaust Survivors' Reparations and the Anlage (constitution)

     The word Anlage, deployed by Gregor Mandel in 1865 for hereditary factors, was already well established as a term of art among asylum doctors and other physicians. In relation to humans, the word could refer to a talent or trait, though in medical writings it seems always to be about potentiality, something in the constitution that might, or must, develop into some character, most often a defect of the constitution. In 1844, in the first issue of a new journal for German asylum directors, Ernst Albert von Zeller, head of the asylum of Winnenthal in Wurttemberg, placed erbiche Anlage as lead entry in a table of remote and proximate causes of mental disturbance. 

by Theodore M. Porter
in Heredity Explored: Between Public Domain and Experimental Science, 1850-1930
MIT Press 2016

     In 1954 the West German Government enacted legislation designed to make possible reparations to those who suffered during the Holocaust. To qualify for those payments, however, survivors had to undergo extensive medical and psychiatric evaluations, usually by German-born physicians. The burden of proof rested on the survivors, who had to establish a causal connection between their present symptoms and previous persecutions at the hands of the Nazis. The West German indemnification office (Entschadigungsamter) often denied applicants' claims because of a neatly imposed self-absolution created by the German medical community: the symptoms of survivors were attributed to a faulty Anlage (constitution). These doctors proclaimed that survivors would not have developed problems had it not been for their infantile neuroses, which made them excessively vulnerable to stress. William Niederland objected vehemently:

The etiology of these conditions has all too frequently been attributed to the "Anlage," the constitution, to other events, indigenous factors...to something which went on between the survivors and their parents during the first and second year of life. It seems hard to believe that the four or five years in Auschwitz, with total or almost total family loss, the complete degradation to the point of dehumanization , the chronic starvation and deprivation of everything human, are considered incidental factors, so to speak, in fully stated medical opinions for the courts. 

by Aaron Hass
in The Aftermath 
Living With The Holocaust
Cambridge University Press 1995

jerome zonder