Dear Lea. I wanted to reply to your scaoegoatin threaad but did not find the reply clik so I am putting int here.
Scapegoating is a hostile social - psychological discrediting routine by which people move blame and responsibility away from themselves and towards a target person or group. It is also a practice by which angry feelings and feelings of hostility may be projected, via inappropriate accusation, towards others. The target feels wrongly persecuted and receives misplaced vilification, blame and criticism; he is likely to suffer rejection from those who the perpetrator seeks to influence. Scapegoating has a wide range of focus: from "approved" enemies of very large groups of people down to the scapegoating of individuals by other individuals. Distortion is always a feature.
http://www.scapegoat.demon.co.uk/index.htmThis page is for scapegoaters' targets - people eager to have resolution of a scapegoating. If you are a target taking a stand for undoing scapegoating, then although this is written mainly for you, some other people involved may also be helped by these notes.
I do not think that evils can be cured by blind hatred of their perpetrators. This will only lead us to become like them. Although the effort is not easy, one should attempt....to understand the circumstances that turn men into fiends, and to realise that it is not by blind rage that evils will be prevented. Bertrand Russell, 1951
Truth and reconciliation processes recently have been much discussed as ways to increase possibilities for restorative justice. For some scapegoat targets the main restoration is that of reputation, character and standing. Scapegoat targets tend to feel this form of justice is a right. A right to such justice is denied by anyone involved in a scapegoating who prefers to look away, leaving the target in the prison that scapegoating so often is.
Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph. Haile Selassie
It is a mistake to think that you can move healthily into the future without having strategies to defuse with the past. An undoing process is not simply a naive one of forgetting [how do we simply forget?] but of remembering and changing. For simplicity, we use the pronoun `he' throughout in what follows.
http://www.scapegoat.demon.co.uk/undoing.htm
