Monetary compensation without apology fails victims seeking recognition

Evidence

One aspect of this potential roadmap engages the issues of forgiveness, forgetting, and reconciliation. Forgiveness has come to enjoy such approbation that often times the burden inflicted on the victims who are expected to forgive is overlooked (see Hewstone et al., this volume, Chapter 11). Yet it is perhaps not too much to postulate that forgiveness is more likely when the consequences of the original crime have been addressed. How do we know though that the consequences have been truly tackled? Since we are dealing with horrendous crimes involving mass violence, the language of accommodation is an important component, but recognition that the crimes were never really addressed might be a precondition to an honest examination of what is an acceptable acknowledgment. Here the apology might become central and crucial. For example, the former sex slaves in East Asia refused to accept monetary compensation because the Japanese refused to accompany it with an apology (Barkan, 2000). In this case, the consequences have largely vanished, or as much as such crimes can “vanish.” The memory of the suffering remained in most cases privately experienced shame, as the social stigma involved in having been a sex slave made most victims hide the very fact that they had been victimized several decades earlier. Yet the pain of the lack of recognition did not vanish, and on the contrary became the sine non quo of the existence of the group: to gain acknowledgment. — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt, 2089

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Apologies feel more appropriate than money for repairing irreplaceable historical harms — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 1105; Devaluing victims enables harm without guilt or remorse; Any awarded reparations will fall short of the actual loss sustained (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Unacknowledged losses can linger until named and forgiven. #expands (0.78) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 940
• Devaluing victims enables harm without guilt or remorse #corroborates (0.75)
• Devaluing victims as weak targets suppresses guilt in wrongdoers. #corroborates (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1411
• Any awarded reparations will fall short of the actual loss sustained #qualifies (0.72)