Because collective punishment operates by collapsing individual dignity into group guilt, the resulting humiliation is both public and unearned—especially for children who already carry visible or invisible difference, whose bodies, identities, or disabilities make them more easily targeted and more deeply injured by the insinuation that punishment must have been deserved; this is particularly painful when a child has worked hard to comply or is already navigating exclusion, which transforms the experience of being punished for others’ actions into a betrayal of their efforts and a rupture of relational trust.
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