Collective punishment
Collective punishment is a punishment or sanction imposed on a group or whole community for acts allegedly perpetrated by a member or some members of that group or area, which could be an ethnic or political group, or just the family, friends and neighbors of the perpetrator, as well as entire cities and communities where the perpetrator allegedly committed the crime. Because individuals who are not responsible for the acts are targeted, collective punishment is not compatible with the basic principle of individual responsibility. The punished group may often have no direct association with the perpetrator other than living in the same area and can not be assumed to exercise control over the perpetrator's actions. Collective punishment is prohibited by treaty in both international and/or non-international armed conflicts, more specifically Common Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 4 of the Additional Protocol II.
Hague Conventions
The Hague Conventions are often cited for guidelines concerning the limits and privileges of an occupier's rights with respect to the local property. One of the restrictions on the occupier's use of natural resources is the Article 50 prohibition against collective punishment protecting private property.Geneva Conventions
According to Médecins Sans Frontières:International law posits that no protected person may be punished for acts that he or she did not commit. It ensures that the collective punishment of a group of persons for a crime committed by an individual is forbidden...This is one of the fundamental guarantees established by the Geneva Conventions and their protocols. This guarantee is applicable not only to protected persons but to all individuals, no matter what their status, or to what category of persons they belong...
Overview
Collective responsibility
Modern legal systems usually limit criminal liability to individuals. An example of this is the prohibition on "Corruption of Blood" in the Treason Clause of the United States Constitution. Moral philosophers will usually use notions of intention or knowledge to establish individual moral responsibility. This agency based theory from Kantian ethics may not be the only way to assess responsibility. Ruth Gavison wanted the Israeli legal system to be based on the moral compass of Jewish heritage:"I hope that in another generation, when the Jewish children of today are sitting on the bench of the Supreme Court, they will know how to express Kant's Categorical Imperative in the 'Jewish' language of Hillel the Elder. When they want to strike down collective punishment, I hope they will be able to invoke the Jewish maxim: 'Each by his own sin will die'. not just universal literature on the subject."
Deterrence
Collective liability may be effective as a deterrent, if it creates the incentive for the group to monitor the activities of other members. When collective fines are imposed on select groups of elites it can create an incentive for them to identify perpetrators but the effectiveness declines with an increase in the size of the group and their relative wealth.Richard Posner and others consider collective fines to be the most effective type of collective punishment for deterring bad behavior when they are sufficiently costly and target those in a position to identify perpetrators.
Family punishment
Historically, punishment of family members was employed most often in the context of political crimes. In late Medieval Florence family groups could be punished collectively for treason, but not for other crimes. To preserve the Lombard law's historic mitigating impact on blood feuds an exception was made recognizing a collective responsibility for vendettas, in which case father, son and kinsmen were all held responsible. During the Qin dynasty of China treason was punishable by what is known as nine familial exterminations – the execution of the perpetrator's entire families as well as the perpetrators themselves.Jeremy Bentham wrote of the cruelty of Corruption of Blood:
A cruel fiction of the lawyers to disguise the injustice of confiscation. The innocent grandson cannot inherit from the innocent grandfather, because his rights are corrupted and destroyed in passing through the blood of a guilty father. This corruption of blood is a fantastic idea; but there is a corruption too real in the understandings and the hearts of those who dishonor themselves by such sophisms.
Types
Collective fines
A collective fine like the weregild may create incentives for a group to identify perpetrators where they might not do so otherwise. Richard Posner and others consider collective fines to be the most effective type of collective punishment.The frankpledge system of enforcement was by the 12th century established throughout much of the English realm. Cnut had organized the conquered peoples of England into "hundreds" and tithings, "within a hundred and under surety". Scholars do not know if the surety of Cnut's time was a collective or individual liability, or whether collective punishment was a feature of Anglo-Saxon law, before the Norman Conquest and the 12th century frankpledge system applied collective punishment to the whole tithing. The 13th century Statute of Winchester stipulated "the whole hundred ... shall be answerable" for any theft or robbery.
Destruction of houses
According to W. R. Connor "the importance of the oikos in ancient Greece, an importance that goes far beyond the needs for physical shelter and comfort, is well known". The destruction of homes is then "especially awesome and charged with symbolic as well as practical meaning."The practice of the kataskaphai of houses is attested to by several ancient Greek sources. According to Plutarch's account of the murder of Hesiod the house of the murderers was razed. When the Corinthians kill Cypselus they "razed the houses of the tyrants and confiscated their property", according to Nicholas of Damascus. Sources are inconsistent as to the razing of the Alcamaeonid houses. Of the many sources on the Cylonian conspiracy, only Isocrates mentions kataskaphe.
There have been a large number of home demolitions in Israel since 1967. The legal arguments center on Regulation 119 of the Defense Emergency Regulations, an emergency law that dates to the British occupation under the Mandate for Palestine, by which Israel claims the legal authority for home demolitions by the Israeli Defense Force. In Alamarin v. IDF Commander in Gaza Strip the Israeli High Court of Justice held that the homes of Palestinians who have committed violent acts may be demolished under the Defence Regulations, even if the residence has other inhabitants who are unconnected to the crime. The counterargument against the validity of the regulation is two-fold: firstly, that it should have been properly revoked by 1967 as an institution of the former colonial rule; secondly, that it is incompatible with Israel's modern treaty obligations.
Targeting women
Some scholars consider the rape of German women by the Red Army during the Russian advance into Germany in 1945 towards the end of World War II as a form of collective punishment. Women were also targeted as a collective punishment for collaboration in Vichy France where photographs were taken of women stripped and paraded through the streets of Paris. A prostitute accused of serving the Germans was kicked to death.Responding to the 2014 murder of three Israeli teenagers kidnapped near the settlement of Alon Shvut, Israeli professor Mordechai Kedar said:
"The only thing that can deter terrorists, like those who kidnapped the children and killed them, is the knowledge that their sister or their mother will be raped. It sounds very bad, but that's the Middle East."
Women are frequently targeted in the Kashmir conflict "to punish and humiliate the entire community". Even in well publicized cases like the Kunan Poshpora mass rape no action has been taken against perpetrators.
Schools and education
Collective punishment is frequently employed in school environments under the guise of classroom management or behaviour control. Common examples include revoking recess for an entire class due to one student’s behaviour, cancelling group outings after a disruption, or withholding privileges until all students comply. These practices are intended to build peer accountability, but critics argue they have negative consequences for children’s mental health and moral development.Unlike in legal or military settings, collective punishment in schools is typically informal, undocumented, and lacks oversight. Trauma-informed education researchers note that punitive group sanctions can increase student resentment, anxiety, and disengagement, especially for innocent bystanders. Such practices also undermine trust between students and educators—even dissuading children from reporting misconduct for fear of group reprisal.
Children with disabilities are especially vulnerable. Sometimes entire classrooms face withdrawn programming or supports when an individual student’s needs disrupt routines—resulting in punishment by association. Disability advocates describe this as systemic discrimination based on others’ access needs rather than individual conduct.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child prohibits degrading treatment and affirms the right of every child to be treated as an individual. Educational and disability rights organisations have called for trauma-informed, inclusive approaches that reject group punishment in favour of relational, rights-based practices.
History
18th century
The Intolerable Acts were seen as a collective punishment of the Massachusetts Colony for the Boston Tea Party. Frederick North and the British Parliament supported collective punishment to deter any further challenges to their imperial authority by undermining support for what they saw as a quarrelsome minority in Massachusetts.Collective fines were imposed on Edinburgh as punishment for the Porteous riots during which Captain John Porteous was lynched.