Scholars have identified at least TEN WAYS of treating persons as mere things. THIS SERIES discusses each.
OBJECTIFICATION IS the seeing and/or treating of a human being as an object—especially women, girls, and pregnant people.1 A human being is not an object (a mere thing). Hence, when a person is objectified, then that person is seen and/or treated in a way that is fundamentally inaccurate. When a person is treated as a mere thing, that person is treated in the same ways that we would treat things, but not human beings.
OBJECTIFICATION IS “a particular form of dehumanization.”2 It not only reduces a person to a thing, it also strips away a person's humanity.3 Objectification reduces the degree to which a person is perceived as possessing the characteristics that separate human beings from objects.4 In other words, objectified persons are perceived as less than fully human.
OBJECTIFICATION IS a catalyst for violence.5 “The objectification of individuals or groups has, historically and cross-culturally, resulted in increased rates of violence and abuse towards those individuals or groups, sometimes of the most horrifying variety. When people are no longer thought of as fully human, they are no longer treated with the respect that such humanity warrants within shared cultural values. This results in an increase in the physical violence they experience.”6
“A human being has a body that is inviolate; and when it is violated, it is abused.”7
HUMANS ARE embodied beings. Your person is your castle and your sanctuary—sacred, with boundaries that demand respect and protection.
The American philosophical and legal tradition places a high value on the inviolability of body and will, person and personality. James Madison, for example, wrote that a person has an inviolable interest in the “safety and liberty” of one’s person.8 An 1861 tort law treatise states that a person “owns” their “body and limbs more unquestionably and unqualifiedly than [their] stocks in trade or [their] farm. While the latter may be the subjects of mere qualified ownership, and involved in complicated and conflicting claims of title; the former belongs absolutely to the individual; and to him alone.”9 One can find “references across a number of substantive areas of law… in support of rights to bodily integrity and decisional autonomy, to the ‘sacred’ right to control one's person, and to the sanctity and the ‘inviolability of the person’ or the body, as well as to the ‘inviolate personality.’”10
Crucially, “the value of inviolability for human beings is in having the moral status that one ‘may not be violated… [S]uch treatment is inadmissible, and if it occurs, the person has been wronged.’”11
Violable
a) capable of being broken, transgressed, breached, penetrated, or ignored
b) capable of being hurt, injured, or having their rights, physical integrity, or boundaries broken or disrespected
Unfortunately, the American legal tradition also includes the objectification of people groups (women, Black and Indigenous people, immigrants), placing members of those groups outside the normal protections of the law.
OBJECTIFICATION ERODES personhood, devalues consent, and justifies exploitation, engendering systemic biases in the enforcement or application of law and protections meant to secure the inviolability of body and will, person and personality. Law enforcement, legislatures, and judicial systems fail to protect or actively harm objectified groups whose suffering is normalized or dismissed. — Put simply, objectifying human beings “facilitates an entitlement to treat them as violable.”12
Violability
The objectifier treats the object as lacking in boundary-integrity, as something that it is permissible to break, smash, break into
RAPE IS ONE OF THE most obvious illustrations of objectification via Violability—“the perpetrator physically penetrates the other’s body.”13
Whereas “no right is held more sacred, or is more carefully guarded by the common law, than the right of every individual to the possession and control of [one’s] own person,”14 the act of rape strips a person of that control and treats that person as a thing that may be violated by others.
When a human being is objectified as a violable object, they are seen and treated as a thing whose rights, boundaries, dignity, body, or psyche can be penetrated, broken, disregarded, disrespected, or destroyed.15161718
Perceiving a person as a violable object is a foundational mechanism and psychological precursor to sexual violence and rape.192021 Furthermore, objectification via Violability acts as a psychological justification for abuse, physical aggression, and violence.22 In other words, objectifying human beings “facilitates violating them.”23
A RAPIST TELLS his victim, with brutal efficiency, that she is violable: that he can use her body for whatever he wants and abuse her body whenever he wants; that her body is not hers; and that what she wants simply does not matter.
WHEN RAPE RESULTS IN pregnancy, the survivor may be subjected to additional objectification──especially where abortion is banned.
Researchers note that “pregnant people, and especially women, may experience a specific form of sexual objectification grounded in reproductive function, namely reproductive objectification. As a form of sexual objectification, reproductive objectification reduces pregnant women to their bodies while denying their personhood and deprioritizing their autonomy, subjectivity, and voice; it is tied to using women… for sexual reproduction” while “prioritizing others’ interests (e.g., fetuses, medical providers, and society) over women’s interests” and wellbeing.24
The act of rape strips a person of the sacred right to the possession and control of their own body and treats that person as a thing that may be violated by others. An abortion ban “further take control and power away from the survivor right at the moment when they need that power and control over their lives to begin healing.”25
State violence often isn’t recognized for what it is: violence. Framing abortion bans as justified or necessary under the pretext of “protecting life” obscures the violence inherent in using and abusing a person as if they were merely a violable object.
When the State reaches its tentacles into the interior of your body to clutch and control your organs and override your will, that is violence—the violence of objectification via Violability.
“Forcing someone to continue a pregnancy and undergo the slew of associated medical procedures represents violability both because of the violation of boundary integrity as well the literal tearing [or slicing] open of the body either by way of cesarean section or vaginal birth,”26 in addition to the other violences of pregnancy.
“It is barbaric to force a person who doesn’t proactively want to do it to go through the gestation and birthing process. It is unconscionable to force a person who didn’t want to get pregnant in the first place or whose pregnancy is the result of a violent crime to do this. No government should have the authority to do that; no government should even be able to muster the gall to ask.”27
A RAPIST TELLS his victim, with brutal efficiency, that she is violable: that he can use her body for whatever he wants and abuse her body whenever he wants; that her body is not hers; and that what she wants simply does not matter.
AN ABORTION BAN TELLS that victim, with brutal efficiency, that her government agrees with her rapist.
FORCING A SURVIVOR of rape to continue a pregnancy is uniquely dangerous for people facing intimate partner violence, people with disabilities, people with preexisting health conditions, and children.