Definition of Social Condemnation

lilen gomez
Professor in Philosophy

In common language, we understand by "social condemnation" a set of socio-historical forms through which rituals of application of justice without the mediation of institutional courts, through punitive practices or infamy through opinion public.

In many cases, social condemnation is articulated where the application of the laws is null or insufficient in fact; However, there are cases in which mechanisms of social condemnation are put into operation that do not respond to the implementation of some form of justice, but to situations of stigmatization against certain actors social.

The genealogy of social condemnation

Following the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984), social condemnation is consolidated within Western societies of the late Middle Ages as one of the main punishment strategies, whose main characteristic is its dimension as spectacle, to the extent that it consists of an application of a punishment or sanction that is based on the exhibition before sight public. In this sense, public condemnation would be linked to the

Already in Modernity, according to the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas (1929), social condemnation takes the form par excellence of public opinion in the space opened by the mass media, which is constituted as a paradigmatic field of the practices of defamation. This space has now been extended to social networks in general. According to Habermas, there is a transfer relationship between public opinion and the institutional legal order, which turns the former into a para-judicial disciplinary ritual.

Social condemnation and Human Rights

There are, however, historical experiences in which non-linear processes of social condemnation take place, in which it appears in the form of procedures practices of justice production, which involve a practice policy neighborhood and community This is the case of the figure of the "popular escrache", which developed in Argentina (and, similarly, in Chile) in the context of the last post-dictatorship, as a response to a "forgiveness policy" by state institutions —once the democracy— towards those who had committed crimes of It hurts humanity during the Military Dictatorship that took place between 1976 and 1983. Said policy was marked by the Laws of Due Obedience and Full Stop, which granted pardons to former repressors.

Under the slogan "without justice there is escrache", during the nineties, different rituals of social condemnation emerged in the urban space, organized mainly by organisms of Human Rights —made up of relatives of detainees, disappeared, tortured and exiled during the military government. The objective of the escraches was not a mere punitive practice, which would replace state justice, but was directed towards the construction of a territorial collective memory. These consisted of exercises to mark the places where ex-genocidal, civilian accomplices and of former clandestine detention centers, where the victims of the terrorism of state; through which the residents of the area traveled daily. The escraches implied a political mobilization, but, in turn, also an artistic dimension, involved in signaling work through posters, mapping actions, actions performances, etc.

Social condemnation in current feminist agendas

In Latin America, the processes of social condemnation carried out by Human Rights organizations have become a model for public complaints carried out by victims of gender violence. Throughout the last decade, social networks have served as a space for denouncing and making visible different types of non-classified aggressions. as crimes or whose approach in the context of institutional justice is, in many cases, insufficient and revictimizing for people aggrieved The practice of escrache in social networks or "funas" for men has, however, been widely discussed within the motion feminist, to the extent that its punitive character would not be enough to account for the complexity of the phenomena that concern the patriarchal configuration of society.