Photo – AFP
(This English Column is the ISP’s translation of the original Burmese version published on July 01, 2025. Read the original Burmese Column here.)
Achieving justice and facilitating physical and psychological healing are paramount in addressing violence and violations. Specifically, in a survivor-centered approach to justice, the survivor’s desires, needs, healing, safety, and dignity must be the highest priorities.
In Myanmar’s context, where the entire judicial system has collapsed, organizations and responsible authorities are often unable, unskilled, afraid, or unwilling to handle violations effectively. Alternatively, when violations are adjudicated through traditional customs, survivors often suffer repeatedly. In such a landscape, where formal mechanisms cannot be relied upon, people resort to social punishment.
The essence of social punishment is to:
- Deter perpetrators from reoffending, ensuring they would not want or dare not offend again.
- Prevent perpetrators from continuing with business as usual while survivors struggle to rebuild themselves physically and mentally.
- Allow perpetrators to reflect on their actions and have a chance for restitution and corrective actions (not to ostracize them from society permanently).
- Ensure the community stands by the survivor to guarantee their physical and mental safety and to demonstrate that such violations are unacceptable.
Similarly, legal justice, social justice, and survivor-centered approaches must all aim for justice and healing for both the survivor and the perpetrator (the accused). Preserving the privacy and human dignity of all involved parties is essential.
However, looking back at events in Myanmar over the past few years, every attempt to solve a problem has been met with mob outbursts that fail to resolve the original issue and instead spawn new ones.
Responses to those accused of violence, including sexual misconduct, are often indistinguishable between social punishment, social media punishment, or social media shaming. The actual penalty and its limits are rarely clear, and the mob’s reaction is often unchecked. Such responses do not amount to solutions; they undermine the very idea of social punishment.
On top of this, some join out of personal grudges. Rather than standing with the survivor or seeking justice for both sides, they use the moment to settle scores. This trivialises social punishment, reducing it to personal gratification rather than a process intended to benefit those directly involved. It also mocks and devalues justice itself, making something that should be held sacred appear cheap.
The Poisonous Seeds of Mob Culture and Mob Trials
There must be no impunity for any violation, including sexual offenses. However, if social punishment becomes:
- Undefined/boundless social media punishment,
- A shaming campaign on social media,
- An impulsive mob trial where a crowd erupts in anger,
then no one will receive justice. No one will receive healing. Instead, it will likely only serve to trigger trauma, directly or indirectly, repeatedly.
An angry mob can turn into witch-hunters overnight, becoming toxic to the entire concept of justice. They will turn against justice itself. We must heed adages like “The mob is the ‘mother’ of tyrants” and “Fascism is very much a mob movement.” (Note: The term “mother” in the adage is gender-insensitive in modern contexts.)
Similarly, in a culture of mob trials and privacy-violating social media practices, problems of racial profiling—where an individual’s actions are linked to their community—will proliferate, becoming one unmanageable issue after another.
Privacy and Personal Information
In a survivor-centered approach, including justice and healing, simply punishing the perpetrator to one’s satisfaction is not enough. The punishment must be proportionate to the crime. It also depends on whether it is a first offense or a repeated one.
Likewise, in seeking justice, we must consider distributive justice (fairness in outcome), procedural justice (transparent, unbiased, consistent, and solid processes), restorative justice (accountability, reconciliation, and healing), and retributive justice (punishment). Punishment should not be about destroying someone so they can never reenter society; it should be about giving them a chance to correct their mistakes.
The mechanisms and processes of investigation, decision-making, and sentencing must themselves be reliable, dignified, and subject to due process. Even in civil society investigations, the principles of an independent judiciary and a fair trial, as recognized in legal systems, are required. Without these, truth and justice cannot exist; justice will merely be used as a political weapon, where “might makes right.”
In a context where the judicial system cannot be trusted, social punishment has its place. But when social punishment is replaced by social-media punishment, shaming campaigns and mob witch-hunts, the core of a survivor-centred approach is destroyed.
One element of due process is the ethical obligation to maintain privacy. While balancing the need to inform relevant parties for accountability with the preservation of the perpetrator’s privacy, using social media as a punishment platform is akin to asking a bloodthirsty mob to hunt witches. It is akin to asking a mob to execute a sentence before the authorized decision-maker has made a final ruling.
Currently, issues explode on social media instantly, but society fails to provide practical justice, healing, or effective alternative protection for either the victim or the accused. Personal information leaked on social media in the heat of the moment will make long-term resolution even more difficult. (Rules prohibiting disclosures before a resolution is final and ethical standards regarding privacy exist for a reason.)
Even in cases of repeat sexual offenders, instead of broadcasting all details to the whole world, information should be managed methodically according to the nature of the case to alert people to avoid danger.
The Social Media Stimulant
According to neuroscientific research, the human brain relies on reason and logic in only about five percent of actions; the remaining 95 percent are driven by emotion and impulse, without deep thought. In the age of technology, social media encourages emotional, erroneous reactions over reasoned analysis.
Furthermore, social media platforms like Facebook activate the brain’s neural networks in the same way cocaine or gambling does. It creates an addiction, an eagerness to repeat the action, similar to drug or gambling addiction. It provides endless stimulation that makes users want to engage again and again (in other words, the brain network activated by drug use is the same as the one for social media addiction).
Due to this endless stimulation from social media, a mob addicted to it—like drug users or gamblers—reacts easily and impulsively based on their feelings, rather than seeking reasoning, justice, or practical healing solutions for the perpetrator and the victim.
Therefore, social media, which feeds the mob trial and witch-hunt culture like a stimulant drug, drives outcomes in the opposite direction of providing justice to the involved parties.In a context where the judicial system cannot be trusted, social punishment has its place. But when social punishment is replaced by social-media punishment, shaming campaigns and mob witch-hunts, the core of a survivor-centred approach is destroyed. Instead of practical justice and healing for both sides, and instead of benefiting those involved and society at large, a mob culture driven by the search for emotional gratification, one that violates privacy, dignity and safety, takes hold.
If that happens, the original problems will remain unsolved. New problems will only multiply.
Dr. Sai Latt is an external researcher at the Department of Asian Studies, Brock University, Canada, and Chiang Mai University. He studies authoritarian culture, conflict behavior, and regional relations through the lenses of political psychology and neuropolitics.