Introduction

In Chapter 1 we noted that a major motive for social scientists studying stigmatization is to find ways to prevent or reduce it. Although this interest, as shown in the present chapter, has resulted in the development of several useful intervention strategies, it may have undesirable consequences if not accompanied with a thorough reflection on the nature of stigmatization and its relation to other types of social control. Especially troublesome is the strong tendency among students of stigmatization to see most negative responses to deviance as undesirable, stigmatizing, and requiring intervention, thereby running the risk of intervening in useful social control processes; to implicitly assume that the ultimate goal of interventions should be something like unconditional acceptance of, or even love for, individuals associated with deviant conditions, thereby ignoring other desirable ultimate intervention goals; and that stigmatization and its reduction are primarily based on general psychological mechanisms in the head of “stigmatizers” that are relatively independent of the particular nature of the deviant condition. These tendencies among social scientists are complemented by the activity of a wide variety of advocacy groups for people associated with deviance, protesting against a stigmatizing and discriminating society and attempting to realize legal change and policy implementation through protest, political mobilization, lobbying, and empowerment.

We believe that the theoretical perspective that we have developed and illustrated in this book may help to sharpen our thinking on the usefulness and effectiveness of interventions to prevent or reduce stigmatization.