When people talk about stigma, they often describe it as a tool through which society protects itself.
This is one of the ways in which stigma has traditionally been understood.
It serves to identify what is considered dangerous, deviant, or undesirable.
It serves to draw the boundary between what is acceptable and what is not.
But when we look at it more closely, a paradox emerges.
Stigma rarely focuses on the perpetrator of an abuse.
Much more often, it focuses on the person who has suffered that abuse, is suffering it, or reports it.
It is a phenomenon that cuts across very different contexts.
It happens when a woman reports sexual violence and the discussion quickly shifts to her private life: what she was wearing, how many sexual partners she has had, why she reported the abuse only months or years later, or whether her account contains inconsistencies.
It happens when a person reports domestic violence and attention focuses on why they remained in the relationship, why they did not leave their partner earlier, or why they continued living with them.
It happens when a whistleblower reports wrongdoing within an organization and the conversation suddenly turns to their character, loyalty, ambitions, or psychological stability instead of focusing on the conduct they have exposed.
It happens when a person reports racial discrimination or religious hatred and the first reaction is to ask whether they may have misunderstood, whether they are being too sensitive, or whether they are exaggerating an isolated incident.
For a long time, the same pattern was evident in the field of mental health. People suffering from depression, trauma, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder were often regarded as less rational and, for that very reason, less credible, even when they reported violence or abuse.
The social categories, the contexts, and the language change.
The mechanism remains the same.
The question stigma research rarely asks
For a long time, research on stigma has focused primarily on its consequences for those who experience it.
Erving Goffman showed how certain socially discrediting attributes transform a person from “normal” into “discredited,” forcing them to continuously manage their identity before others and producing exclusion, shame, isolation, and loss of opportunities.
Bruce Link and Jo Phelan subsequently expanded this perspective by describing stigma as a social process that combines labeling, stereotyping, separation, status loss, and discrimination, made possible by power relations and unable to exist without a social structure that makes those labels effective.
Existing theories explain how stigma harms victims. But they leave another question unexplored: does anyone benefit from stigma?
How stigma can protect violence
Whether the issue is racial discrimination, religious hatred, or institutional abuse, the mechanism appears to follow a recurring sequence: making the target vulnerable through stigmatization, protecting those who attack them by redirecting public scrutiny toward the victim, and ultimately fostering impunity for those who have abused them.
Stigmatize in order to make people more vulnerable
Stigma does not necessarily originate with the abuse. It often precedes it and helps create the conditions that make it possible or tolerable.
Through stereotypes, labels, and social representations, some people are portrayed as less trustworthy, less rational, emotionally fragile, morally questionable, inherently dangerous, or simply “problematic.”
Pierre Bourdieu described analogous processes through the concept of symbolic violence: forms of social classification that come to be perceived as natural and legitimate even by those who suffer their effects. Stigma operates in a similar way by naturalizing these social representations.
Over time, these representations cease to be mere descriptions and contribute to redefining the social position of stigmatized people, weakening their ability to defend themselves and exposing them more heavily to abuse.
Turning the stigmatized Into the scrutinized to deflect scrutiny
Howard Becker observed that deviance is not an intrinsic quality of individuals but the result of a process of social labeling. Once a person or an entire category has been labeled as “deviant,” subsequent behavior tends to be interpreted through that label. The same behavior can therefore be perceived and judged differently depending on who engages in it. Stigma therefore does not merely describe reality; it helps determine the way that reality is interpreted.
When a stigmatized person suffers or reports abuse, that pre-existing stigma can be used as informal evidence against them. Even before the facts have been established, attention shifts from what happened to the victim’s identity, morality, and credibility. When the victim becomes the primary object of scrutiny, stigma can become the social infrastructure that makes the denial, minimization, and justification of that abuse more credible and more acceptable.
It therefore does not necessarily protect the perpetrator by proving their innocence, but by altering the conditions under which their conduct is evaluated.
The DARVO model
Jennifer Freyd described a complementary dynamic through the DARVO model—Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender—a recurring sequence in which perpetrators deny the facts, attack the person reporting them, and ultimately reverse the roles by presenting themselves as the real victims.
DARVO describes the behavior of the perpetrator. Stigma, by contrast, helps explain why this reversal can become socially credible. When the person reporting the abuse is already portrayed as unstable, unreliable, dangerous, or morally questionable, the attack on their credibility does not start from scratch; it relies on categories and stereotypes that are already available.
Stigma thus becomes the ground on which the DARVO strategy can operate. It does not prove that the allegation is false, but it makes the attempt to transform the person reporting the abuse from victim into suspect—and the accused from perpetrator into victim—more plausible.
From individual to institutional accountability
Recognizing a victim means recognizing at least one perpetrator. But it may also mean having to recognize the responsibility of the system within which that conduct occurred.
This is where reputation can come into tension with fact-finding.
Here, discrediting the person who reports the abuse not only reduces their personal credibility but also reduces the pressure placed on the institution called upon to answer for the reported facts. Because being held accountable carries costs: it may mean compensation, disciplinary sanctions, civil or criminal liability, reputational damage, loss of public support, organizational reforms, or institutional change.
Making fact-finding less urgent therefore means not only reducing the likelihood that these consequences will occur, but also protecting reputations, preserving established power structures, and making it less likely that individual complaints will develop into a broader critical reflection on the functioning of the systems that made them possible.
This pattern emerges with particular clarity in institutional scandals.
Although they examine different phenomena, Stanley Cohen, the literature on reputation management, Jennifer Freyd’s work on institutional betrayal, the research on organizational cover-ups, whistleblowing, and organizational wrongdoing all converge in identifying recurring strategies. When a complaint threatens the reputation, legitimacy, or position of an individual or an institution, the first response is not always to establish the facts.
More frequently, one observes attempts to buy time, redefine the meaning of what happened, minimize its seriousness, distribute responsibility, discourage further reporting, or call into question the credibility of the person making the complaint. Attention thus gradually shifts from the alleged conduct to the person who made it public. The alleged abuse no longer occupies the center of the debate; instead, the focus becomes the complainant’s alleged credibility, motives, or character. In this process, defamation does not replace stigma; it contributes to constructing it, reinforcing it, and making it more socially credible.
As Mark Bovens observes, accountability implies that individuals and institutions are required to explain, justify, and, when necessary, answer for their actions. If stigma contributes to reducing the pressure for this process to take place, then it does not merely produce social exclusion; it also contributes to reducing the level of accountability.
From this perspective, stigma can be interpreted as an informal technology of accountability management.
Semantic frauds
According to the Treccani Encyclopedia, the term “Semite” refers to the ancient and modern Semitic peoples, while “Semitic” refers to what relates to the Semitic peoples and languages, including Akkadian, Phoenician, Ethiopic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. The Semitic peoples include the Akkadians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Arameans, Hebrews, and Arabs.
In his article on “semantic frauds,” published this past July 25, the Italian reporter and author Alessandro Di Battista describes how the choice of words can alter and shape the public perception of substantially similar events.
The literature on cover-ups and reputation management has examined how the choice of terminology can constitute one of the instruments through which strategies of concealment and reputation protection are implemented.
Violence is not necessarily denied; it is renamed.
By renaming it, the perceived seriousness of the phenomenon changes, the level of public concern changes, and the pressure to establish responsibility changes.
Thus, hatred is called “phobia.” And antisemitism against Arabs and Muslims “Islamophobia.”
The choice of words does not merely describe reality; it also contributes to defining its public meaning.
It is difficult to examine the alarming level of antisemitism against Arabs and Muslims, and its daily consequences for individuals and Muslim communities around the world, without questioning the role played by sophisticated pre-emptive stigmatization and semantic frauds in constructing their social vulnerability.
It is difficult to examine the socially legitimized antisemitism against Arabs and Muslims without looking at the last decades of dehumanizing narratives, practices of stigmatization, incitement to hatred, and incitement to violence against Muslims. All of which have been reinforced through semantic frauds that have contributed to normalizing hatred, reducing the perceived seriousness of violence, and lowering the pressure to establish accountability.
