ABSTRACT
The contemporary politics of crime control places a strong emphasis on public protection, risk management and preventive governance as part of the ‘new penology’ ‘risk society’ or ‘the new regulatory state’. In modern thinking about restorative justice, such approaches routinely comprise the three central actors of the victim, the offender and the community. The concept of restorative justice owes much to Braithwaite’s notion of ‘reintegrative shaming’. Braithwaite defines shaming as ‘all social processes of expressing disapproval which have the intention or effect of invoking remorse in the person being shamed and/or condemnation by others who become aware of the shaming. The use of disintegrative shaming mechanisms is not new. History is littered with examples of the public spectacle of punishment where shaming and public humiliation were used in order to exact punishment for an offence. Disintegrative shaming practices are also evidenced at a more basic level in the media and public response to sexual offending.
