HUMANITY FILES

Collection

Public Humiliation & Mob Violence

Cases documenting collective and extrajudicial punishment — public humiliation, mob violence, and organized purges — carried out with little or no due process, often with open or tacit state sanction.

1 file in this collection

FILE HF-0003

Women Shaved in Liberated France

France (nationwide), France · Summer 1944 – 1945

As Allied forces liberated France in 1944, local crowds and Resistance committees publicly shaved the heads of an estimated 20,000 women accused of "collaboration horizontale" — relationships with German occupying soldiers — and paraded many of them through the streets, often marked with paint or swastikas, without formal trial or legal process.

Public Humiliation & Mob Violence
moderate