Collective punishment

Collective punishment is a form of retaliation whereby a suspected perpetrator's family members, friends, acquaintances, sect, neighbors or entire ethnic group is targeted. The punished group may often have no direct association with the other individuals or groups, or direct control over their actions. In times of war and armed conflict, collective punishment has resulted in atrocities, and is a violation of the laws of war and the Geneva Conventions. Historically, occupying powers have used collective punishment to retaliate against and deter attacks on their forces by Resistance movements (such as destroying entire towns and villages which were believed to have harboured or aided such resistance movements). During the Qin Dynasty of China (221–207 BC), emperor Qin Shi Huang upheld his rule by enforcing strict laws, with the most serious of crimes, such as treason, punishable by what is known as nine familial exterminations – this involved the execution of the perpetrator's entire families as well as the perpetrators themselves, where the members are categorized into nine groups. The process of familial extermination was carried on by subsequent Chinese dynasties for serious crimes, with a significant number of recorded sentences during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), until the punishment was officially repealed by the government of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) in 1905. In the Tithing, groups of ten men swearing the Frankpledge, the compulsory sharing of responsibility and punishment, was in use at least since the time of Alfred the Great in the 9th century. The Statute of Winchester of 1285 provided that 'the whole hundred … shall be answerable' for any theft or robbery. During the Ming dynasty of China, 16 palace women attempted to assassinate the Jiajing Emperor. All were sentenced to death by slow slicing. Ten members of the women's families were also beheaded, while a further 20 were enslaved and gifted to ministers. The Intolerable Acts were seen as a collective punishment of Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party. The principle of collective punishment was laid out by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman in his Special Field Order 120, November 9, 1864, which laid out the rules for his 'March to the sea' in the American Civil War: British forces in the Boer Wars and the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War justified such actions as being in accord with the laws of war then in force. In 1906, 167 black U.S. soldiers stationed in Brownsville, Texas, were dishonorably discharged on orders of President Theodore Roosevelt in response to the shooting of two white citizens in the middle of the night of August 13, 1906. One man was killed and the other, a police lieutenant, was injured and it was never discovered who the shooter(s) were, though they were presumed to have been members of the nearby Fort Brown. The soldiers of Companies Bravo, Charlie, and Delta of the 25th infantry regiment, many of whom served in the Philippines and Cuba during America's war with Spain, were punished for the crime collectively and were denied army pensions.