Shame is how they get away with it. Shame is the weapon they use. Shame is the weapon you use on yourself that makes you feel so useless. And those who are shamed most often and most deeply, made to feel ashamed for so much of their life, are the poorest among us.

When others say that they are disappointed in you, they are trying to inflict shame on you. They are attempting to make you contrite and silent. To force shame upon you. The poor are the most common targets of shaming because the rich are not ashamed of how they became rich and use shame as a weapon to control those they most harm.

Shame beats you down. Shame is an ancient form of control. Shame is the mechanism used to control behaviour. Most of us are capable of feeling shame for our own actions without anyone else having to shame us. However, those who play the specific and cruel ‘shame game’ outlined in this book – a public and prolific shaming that targets the poorest among us and a mechanism that has been used with incredible effectiveness to ‘keep the poor in their place’ – are rarely ever ashamed of themselves.

In this book, Mary O’Hara shows why the ‘shame game’ being played out against poorer people in the US and the UK is so destructive and effective. She dissects how it works to help keep the poor, poor – through blaming and shaming. She outlines why, for people who have lived in poverty, the impact of being shamed can be devastating, and how those who do the shaming do so by turning a blind eye to the experiences and the voices of the poor.

For the players of the shame game – the rich and the powerful who consolidate their power and vast wealth at the expense of others – shaming people is a way of affirming how great they are. And, they constantly need to feed that affirmation. They tell us they are ‘wealth creators’ while ignoring the role of inherited fortunes or that it is in fact workers, often paid a pittance, who generate wealth. They claim they are successful because of their own talents and efforts, rather than having benefited from evergrowing social and economic inequities – divisions they created.