The compliance economy

In their article Of Sinners and Scapegoats: The Economics of Collective Punishment, J. Shahar Dillbary and Thomas J. Miceli argue that collective punishment emerges not merely as a failure of precision or fairness, but as a deliberate mechanism for preserving internal group cohesion.

The scapegoat, must be non-random, visible, and different, and their suffering must be legible to the group as resolution. This framework, designed for economic and legal systems, maps chillingly well onto the lived reality of mothers navigating the British Columbia public school system—especially those advocating for disabled children within a culture of procedural performance, moral panic, and institutional fragility.

The proxy trap

When a mother steps into the school meeting, she is often doing so as a procedural proxy for the very system that abandoned her child. She comes equipped with timelines, diagnosis reports, legal references, communications logs, and accommodation histories—documentation that might otherwise have been generated by the system itself. But instead of being recognised as an expert partner or a record-keeper of institutional gaps, she becomes the procedural scapegoat—blamed for her tone, her knowledge, her insistence on consequence.

The compliance labour she performs is invisible in official scripts, yet absolutely foundational to the functioning of the British Columbia public school bureaucracy. She absorbs the system’s disorganisation, stabilises its memory, and simulates professionalism on its behalf. She is asked to submit drafts, wait for minutes, follow up, correct errors, document harm, and do so with an affect that flatters the system’s self-image. This is what Dillbary and Miceli describe: the scapegoat becomes essential because of her difference, and punishable because of her visibility.

Shadow work for a system that forgets

This is a form of coerced proceduralism: a demand to perform participation without power. It is a form of shadow work—unpaid, unacknowledged, and expected—performed by the parent, not as a volunteer, but as a hostage of the institution’s selective incompetence. Her labour fills the cracks between policy and practice, allowing the school system to maintain the illusion of function while offloading its logistical memory to the person most harmed by its failures.

When the child’s IEP disappears, the parent is asked to resend it. When a meeting is cancelled, she is expected to facilitate rescheduling. When support is withdrawn, she must request clarification and track escalation. And when she does so clearly and consistently, she is faulted for her clarity. The labour that sustains the system becomes the evidence against her.

Hypercompetence as threat

Dillbary and Miceli note that the scapegoat must be “sufficiently different” from the group to preserve internal harmony. The hypercompetent mother—the one who remembers the last four years of staffing changes, who knows the difference between policy and practice, who follows up in writing—is too different to be trusted. Her fluency reveals institutional contradiction. Her memory interrupts amnesia. Her refusal to euphemise makes harm undeniable.

Rather than revise the system, the system revises her. She is recast as hostile, rigid, excessive. The problem is not the unstaffed classroom, but the mother who dares to name it as harm. The discomfort is not caused by the child’s exclusion, but by the parent’s tone in describing it. And so, like Dillbary and Miceli’s scapegoat, she becomes the repository of guilt that the collective cannot hold.

The compliance economy

What emerges is a compliance economy—an extractive system that harvests the labour of parents to maintain its procedural image, while punishing any breach of deference as aggression. In British Columbia schools, this is often masked by equity policies and inclusive language, but the structure remains intact. The mother becomes both labourer and liability. She is made responsible for remembering, coordinating, reminding, and repairing—but disqualified from authority, decision-making, or public legitimacy.

This is not simply burnout. This is not overinvolvement.

This is institutional parasitism—an economy that consumes parent labour while reserving authority for those whose power is protected by distance, title, or feigned neutrality.

Just a parent

It is a moral economy, too: one that rewards deference, punishes clarity, and calls emotional regulation a virtue only when wielded as silence. And it is a predictable outcome of a school system that still frames advocacy as disruption rather than survival.

A new vocabulary for grief

To name this as compliance labour is to refuse euphemism. To call it coerced proceduralism is to reject the idea that participation always implies empowerment.

To name the mother as a procedural proxy is to expose how the public education system in British Columbia relies on her unpaid labour, even as it treats her as threat.

Just a Parent

Dillbary and Miceli do not write about schools. But their description of how collective punishment disciplines the group through selective suffering echoes precisely what so many parents have endured: their grief metabolised as disruption, their difference used to re-cement group harmony, and their advocacy transformed into the justification for their own exclusion.

The scapegoat is made necessary. So is the mother.

But she is not random. She is chosen. Because she knows too much. Because she says it out loud. Because her labour makes the system visible.