Dignity restoration is a form of reparations that provides material compensation to dispossessed individuals and communities through processes that affirm their humanity and reinforce their agency.
[1] Atuahene viewed dignity taking as when a state directly or indirectly destroys or confiscates property rights from people, resulting in dehumanization or infantilization.
[6] In another example, legal scholar Eva Pils described how China’s forced evictions of rural homeowners to create space for its rapidly expanding cities qualified as a dignity taking.
[9] Anthropologist Justin Richland is credited with updating the definition of a dignity restoration to: a remedy that seeks to provide dispossessed individuals and communities with material compensation through processes that affirm their humanity and reinforce their agency,[2] whereas the original definition included the purpose of dignity restoration as to “rehabilitate dispossessed populations and reintegrate them into the fabric of society through an emphasis on process.”[1] Richland viewed the separation of Hopi people from their tribal lands centuries ago, and the continued degradation of these lands by the U.S. Forest Service, as an instance where dignity restoration can embrace more separation and autonomy as opposed to reintegration.
[11] Dutch legal scholar Wouter Veraart viewed the multiple rounds of compensation offered to Jews in France and the Netherlands following the Holocaust as an example of this.
[18] At face, the Freedmen’s Bureau spurred dignity restoration during Reconstruction because it was the federal agency charged with assisting African Americans as they transitioned from being slaves to free people.
[24] Hisotrian Andrew Baer established Chicago’s police torture scandal, perpetrated from 1972 and 1991 by Jon Burge and a coterie of white detectives, as a clear-cut example of a dignity taking.
[25] As part of the remedy, social movement organizers built opportunities for victims and their descendents to restore their dignity by actively participating in the fight for justice and reparations.
[25] Eventually, in 2015, the organizers secured dignity restoration through the Chicago Police Torture Reparations Ordinance, a city law that distributed nearly $100,000 for each of the 57 named victims, psychological counseling, healthcare, vocational training, an apology, public memorial, community center, public school curriculum to educate youth about the scandal, and free tuition to city’s colleges for survivors and their families.
[28] Legal scholar Andrew Kahrl suggests that full dignity restoration requires punishment of the perpetrators as well as measures to allay the predatory practices that enabled the unjust dispossession.
[27] According to legal scholar Anthony Diala, the customary law in southern Nigeria that governs the unequal division of matrimonial property following divorce is, in effect, a dignity taking.
[29] To remedy this harm, the Nigerian government created the Social Welfare Department, an agency that orders men to divide matrimonial property and/or pay compensation to women.
According to legal scholars Laura B. Nielsen, Ellen C. Berrey, and Robert L. Nelson, the risk of workplace retaliation and termination, which arises from the official filing of a discrimination claim, may exacerbate the dignity taking.
[34] Colombian legal scholar Diane Guzman applied the dignity takings framework to the associated deprivation of land, housing, and other property, which involved dehumanization and infantilization.