Wednesday, June 26, 2013
2.21 (Binnengasthuis)
Sterilization policies were implemented by many Western countries in the course of the 20th century. These policies grew out of the idea to “defend” society against the detrimental effects of those categorized as deviant, unproductive, unfit, or otherwise abnormal and to different degrees covered the practice of involuntary sterilization. Yet, this matter has rarely been addressed by the memory and historic justice research. The paper examines how governments and society in three European countries, Germany, Norway and the Czech Republic, have responded to sterilization victims’ claims to reparation and apology. It argues that involuntary sterilization is a double injury: a physical and a moral one. It physically marks a person as being of inferior worth to society and thereby inflicts a stigma upon her or him. Understanding this stigma, the paper argues, is critical for understanding both victims’ struggles for reparations and apology as governments’ reluctance to respond to these struggles. The reverse process to stigmatization would be moral rehabilitation; or vice versa: through providing moral rehabilitation to victims, governments can in principle reverse the stigma. They can do so through properly drafted political reparations and/or an official apology. However, it seems to take governments a big effort to provide moral rehabilitation to sterilization victims. The reason, as this paper argues, is that, for a long time at least, governments did not consider the policy rationale behind sterilization policy to be incompatible with the basic norms and values of the present state.
The paper shows, that governments in these three countries have responded differently to victims’ claims. It concludes that governments, if they provided moral rehabilitation at all, they did so only after vital public debate and pressure from civil society and only at a time when and to the extent that the policy rationale behind the policy at stake was deemed incompatible with the fundamental norms and values of the present state.
