The primary question I face as a U.S. criminologist is: Why are we so punitive in our wars on crime, and how can we transform that punitiveness into peacemaking? Shame is my prime suspect for what makes us punitive. Democracy transforms shame into anger that gets openly directed at those who personally hurt and scare you, instead of being projected onto politically convenient targets like low level-crack and marijuana dealers. I propose that in criminology, we make our primary dependent variable how democratic and open human relations become, rather than purporting to measure trends in crime and criminality.

Bill Chambliss (1999) has just published an extended analysis of crime data, concluding that we U.S. inhabitants do not appreciate just how safe we are, that political, media and corporate propaganda wildly exaggerates the danger we face, to say nothing of making false claims that wars on crime work. I used to subscribe to this view, as in the first of ten "myths" that Paul Jesilow and I discussed (Pepinsky and Jesilow, 1984): At the time, we were being told that crime had been dramatically increasing since the late 1950s. In one study, Bill Selke and I (Selke and Pepinsky, 1982) even found that yes indeed, even police-recorded murder rates could be seriously manipulated. In the nineties the prevailing claim in large cities across the country became that aggressive policing is dramatically reducing crime, including murder. Chambliss (1999: 43) observes:

Just as the police and prosecutor can escalate charges brought against suspects, they can also downgrade them. Burglary can become trespass; aggravated assault, simple assault; and even murder can be classified as "accidental death." Roland Chilton has shown that in New York during the years that Giuliani was taking credit for lowering the murder rate, deaths classified by the police as suicides went up by 40 percent at the same time that deaths reported by the police as homicides declined (Chambliss and Chilton, 1998).

On television I recently saw New York's chief of policing telling the "Investigative Reports" producer that if a newly appointed precinct commander does not get crime figures down in the five weeks, the commander is replaced. Analogizing himself to a chief operating officer, he tells the producer that he demands results. His model of management has been adopted by large city departments across the country. By police fiat, we are safer.

After my last field study of crime measurement, in Sheffield, England, I concluded that we ought to call a moratorium on crime counting (Pepinsky, 1987). Crime and criminality trends, I argued, tell us more about the behavior of crime recorders (be they police or victim or self-report surveyors) than about how much people are violating the law. Chambliss only reinforces that argument.

Eight years ago I began meeting and supporting people who call themselves "protective parents" and on the whole and formally see their opponents as supporters of "fathers' rights." They see themselves (and I generally see them too) as trying to protect children who they are believe are being abusedl-typically sexually assaulted--while visiting or in custody of the other parent. These issues arise in the context of marital and partner separation, and divorce. I have testified in several such cases, for no fee, qualifying as an expert on "peacemaking"-in this case on how a judge can go about enhancing the ability of the children to build safe loving relations in the long run with both parents. On one occasion the judge permitted me to evaluate a psychological evaluation of the best interests of a child.

Several protective parents helped me organize a recurring seminar on "children's rights and safety beginning the fall of 1993. As students hear survivors, students often disclose that they, too, have been sexually assaulted and otherwise abused by people they know and are close to-from recent rape to molestation early in childhood.

Protective parents introduced me to adult survivors of incest and of ritual abuse, and their therapists and other supporters, who in turn also introduced me to survivors of government-sponsored mind control programming, and to those who train and specialize in law enforcement response to organized violence against children. They led me into long-term psychotherapy, which as for Fellman (1998), has considerably informed my understanding of the social world beyond myself. I have discovered and visited sites of apparent ritual violence, and reviewed many piles of documentation in individual cases. I continue to be referred to mounds of reading on violence against children and on healing from the violence, much of which I use in college teaching. Altogether this experience leads me to reject the proposition that we are far safer than law enforcement and others would have us believe.

I am now inclined to believe that we are victimized, structurally and personally, far beyond what any police officer, or victim or self-report surveyor, can hope to tap. My personal experience in North America and Europe with survivors, therapists and evaluators, and litigants especially in custody battles (Rosen and Etlin, 1996), confirms what other researchers, healers and survivors report. There is a lot of what we politely call incest in the finest homes. It is only as children move out of violent homes with battered and protective parents that children are beginning to feel safe enough to talk about being hurt, and adults around them freed enough from personal denial to consider evidence of violence rather than dismissing it. Reportedly, massive amounts of funding underlie efforts like that of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation to discredit several groups at once: children who report abuse, adults who perhaps years later recall what Freyd (1996) calls "betrayal trauma," and other adults who believe either children or adult survivors. On the whole, the grosser the legal violence reported, the greater the skepticism and blatant denial with which evidence is addressed.

I recognize my own leap of faith. I have recommended a moratorium on crime counting, and yet I purport to find that even literal rape and hidden homicide probably takes place in a number of the finest homes and community centers in your town or countryside and mine. More than that, survivors keep reminding me and my students, and indeed my students themselves commonly say, that gross as some of the violence we are hearing about is, we know in our own lives and those of our friends how much more common and still devastating emotional abuse can be, legal or physical or not. Physical ambiguity is abundant among clients of therapists I know, so that simple withholding of physical warmth and comfort can cause the same kind of shame and fear of intimacy that overt incest causes. So beyond illegal pedophilia, there is (as I have found in my own psychotherapeutic process) a great reservoir of pain and anger and fear we almost all probably carry over into adult neuroses and psychoses. Add in a good dose of structural uncertainty (will I have a job, a house and a family?), and I am now led to suspect that most of live lives of profound personal fear and desperation.

As Gilligan (1996) points out, "shame" means being forced to keep secrets about what has hurt and scared us, most of all about how people we have depended on to keep us safe, have betrayed our trust. Awhile ago, a lot of popular psychology literature appeared about the impostor phenomenon--the fear that if you really knew me, you wouldn't like me or want to be with me. That, to me, is "shame" in a nutshell. I am now sensitized (whether overly sensitized, who knows?) to believing that in my workplace and neighborhood, and among my friends, few of us have had the luxury of even beginning to share the shame we most deeply suffer. Some argue that sexual assault by adult custodians is especially traumatizing. It is certainly true for the grossest violence that perpetrators take pains to scare their victims into silence and the pretense that all is lovey-dovey between them, among other things by making victims think they asked for it or deserved the abuse. Be these particulars of shame we carry what they may, I think I and others I know tend to bury what most concerns us at the moment, let alone the memory a moment may trigger. I have called this condition "ultimate nomadry," "ultimate" because among us nomads any intragenerational or intergenerational dyad may literally move out on us anytime (Pepinsky, 2000). In fact, we virtually all have many reasons, both present and past, to fear being hurt and scared, again and again, and feel too scared, or ashamed and socially insignificant, to say so, to anyone.

This would amount to massive repression of the things about others that scare and trigger us in our everyday lives (Miller, 1990 [1983]). I now suppose that people really are afraid of one another, and repress deepseated anger at having had to pretend that violence has been love.

This new impression I have happens to coincide with other explanations of punitiveness and of acceptance of life in a police state. Becker (1968: 327-46) and Fromm (Anderson and Quinney, 2000) arrive at the same conclusion as DeMause (1984) and Miller (1990 [1983]) more recently: We are vulnerable to public invitations to project the shame and anger we feel onto whatever public enemies or criminal elements the political mainstream feeds us. We are open to demagoguery because we are forced to dissociate from the violence we have truly suffered, and allowed only certain socially acceptable or survivable ways of projecting that anger. Now our punitiveness makes sense to me. We don't need to have been hurt by a particular "offender," let alone to have known or cared about the lives of the victims, to affirm that we feel unsafe (we really do!) and want someone to answer for it.

I have been struck by how non-vengeful many survivors, adults as well as children, have become as they have shared their own, often gruesome stories. Many have never had a chance to confront their violators directly, but importantly, they have had time to share their pain, fear and anger, with those who cared and had time to listen. This suggests to me the direction that would lead us to be less liable to demagoguery, less punitive.

I have a comparable experience almost every semester that I teach. There are students who begin writing openly punitive rebuttles to my ideas about "peacemaking." They want offenders to pay for their crimes. Then, after we have begun to hear survivors tell their own stories of rape or childhood assault and recovery, the students disclose their own victimization by someone they know, and perhaps have loved. Often, they then begin to talk about letting go of anger and hate, and begin to talk about "working with" offenders.

I hope and believe that, as wide and deep--far beyond most criminologists' wildest imagination--as pervasive as personal, including criminal, violence is among us, it is not the violence that is increasing, but the sharing of stories and evidence of violence that ends secrets, enables more of us than ever to let go of the shame (Potter-Efron and Potter-Efron, 1989). In parlance common among those who work in shelters for women and offer rape crisis support, it is by sharing that we learn our shame is not our fault, in which we become survivors rather than victims.

Letting go of shame requires trust--trust that you can tell something bad about yourself without being rejected entirely, without having others insist that you ought to feel or have done differently, without in fact having others insist you do what they think you should to atone. As in the apocryphal story of George Washington telling his father that George had chopped down the cherry tree, letting go of shame requires that you not be hurt for sharing a secret truth. This is true not only at the micro-level, as between two people, but at the macro-level, as among factions or nations.

As this essay is written, one political struggle is in progress which illustrates the macro-dynamics of shame and shaming. In Austria, a new party has just joined the government. The Freedom Party reminds people strongly of World War II Nazism. In fact, the leader of the party, J(rg Haider, is the son of a WWII Nazi, has been an apologist for Austrians who collaborated with the Nazis, as by being in the SS. Freedom Party campaign posters were said to evoke images of blond, blue-eyed national purity, as did party anti-immigration rhetoric.

When Haider and his party were named part of the ruling coalition, other European Union nations reacted with censure and condemnation. Protest against having let this third-biggest vote-getter into government ranged from the streets of Vienna to world capitals. The concern was that not merely Haider and his party, but his constituency, represented the survival and resurrection of Nazism in post-War Austria. It is believed that the core of his support comes from other descendants of Austrian Nazis. When Haider apologized for offensive remarks like those about how some SS figures were decent men, his apology was taken as insincere and untrustworthy. In the view of protestors, there was no legitimate room for Haider and his followers in government at all.

In view of those who protest the coalition and sanction Austrians for creating it, the problem is that Austrians do not yet feel deeply enough ashamed of their Nazi past, of their Nazi parents and grandparents and their associates. The Austrians have not yet acknowledged how shameful it is to be Austrian. Those who speak of pride in being Austrian should be cast out of government as surely as criminals should be cast out of law-abiding communities.

If as supposed here punishment worsens shame and the violence that stems from shame, the feelings that got such a large vote for the Freedom Party will not be changed if the party is driven out of government. The shame and repressed anger at being misunderstood and excluded will only deepen. It will be driven underground where it cannot be engaged, instead of having a channel for expression as when the party is in the government.

I do not mean to idolize the Austrian government. Democracy also to me puts a premium on having the weakest, least heard victims speak first. My own primary emphasis is in this direction. So, if I imagined myself a coalition partner with Haider, I might seek out for instance immigrant women of color to present testimony in government hearings. My criticism of reaction to inclusion of Haider in the Austrian government is not equivalent to acceptance of the legitimacy of the government. My criticism is of the reaction to inclusion of that voice. From a peacemaking perspective, it would be more constructive to support and respond to those who would speak in public, from among the most structurally and personally brutalized.

I've tried to think of a way to glamorize this truth I accept, but I must say it has no greater authority than its ring of truth when my therapist tells it to me: The more honestly we can name the people who most directly hurt and betrayed us, not necessarily at the perps personally but to someone who listens, the more rapidly we let go of desire to make this or that public offender pay for the wounds that s/he has caused.

What gets in the way of personal and social security most of all, is the prospect that someone will make you pay for any shame you acknowledge, beyond what you have already suffered. Making someone pay is the attitude I call "warmaking." Letting out one's own personal grievances and suffering, and taking time out to listen to and be guided by others who do likewise, is an attitude I call "peacemaking." We all live in both attitudes, in what Fellman (1998) calls, ideally, a balance between adversariality and mutuality. Whenever we can take time out to thank people for sharing shame with us, we have an opportunity to help others to empathize, instead of focusing on getting to their own personal objectives. Insofar as we let go of proving anything to anyone else, we may gain the security offered by the listening that democracy requires. As we gain security by being able to share the structural and personal violence that actually impinges on us, we become less punitive, and more inclined to "work with" people we would otherwise simplify vilify. The process of sharing the pain we have been forced to repress and hide in shame is peacemaking in action, is democracy itself, lifts us out of punitiveness. As far as I can see, nothing else works. We certainly do not become and feel safer just because police and other experts tell us crime has gone down.