Demanding Proof Is Part of the Harm

In Fantasmas, Julio Torres’s satirical “Proof of Existence” card gets at something disturbing: dignity has become conditional, gated behind layers of paperwork.1 Border agents, caseworkers and police use proof to decide who crosses a border and who is detained, who receives support and who is scrutinized, who is believed and who is ignored. It’s marketed as a neutral arbiter of fairness. In practice it’s used to exclude and control people, and private contractors profit from the people who can’t produce it.

At borders, proof decides who is deemed worthy of safety. In welfare systems, it humiliates the poor, forcing them to plead for dignity. In policing, it demands impossible evidence from victims while shielding perpetrators of systemic violence. For neurodivergent folks, proof becomes an unrelenting demand to justify their needs, validate their diagnoses, or secure accommodations. Proof does more than confirm facts. Whoever demands it gains power over whoever must produce it, and the people with money, records and stable lives produce it most easily. What I call proof-based harm is the damage that demand does to everyone else.

Proof isn’t inherently oppressive. Used ethically, it can safeguard fairness, uphold accountability, and drive systemic progress. Today’s proof systems, though, are designed to punish and exclude rather than support or affirm. They enforce hierarchies, commodify pain, and sustain industries of harm, and they could be turned around to hold systems, rather than individuals, to account.

Borders sort people by their papers

Officials use proof requirements to decide whose claims count and whose are dismissed, and those decisions follow existing hierarchies.

Diagram

An asylum claim that needs what the flight took

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%% title: An asylum claim that needs what the flight took
%% caption: To be believed, an autistic asylum seeker has to recount what happened as a linear story and back it with composure, money and papers that trauma, poverty and flight have already taken. An applicant with money, records and a stable life gets through the same gate.
flowchart TD
  classDef actor stroke-width:1.6px;
  classDef system stroke-width:1.2px;
  classDef gate stroke-width:1.6px;
  classDef binding stroke-width:3px,font-weight:bold;
  classDef status stroke-dasharray:4 3;
  classDef burden stroke-width:2px;
  classDef repair stroke-width:2.4px,font-weight:bold;
  classDef failure stroke-width:2.2px,stroke-dasharray:6 3;

  P(["Autistic asylum seeker<br/>fleeing persecution"]):::actor --> G{"Asylum claim:<br/>prove it"}:::gate

  subgraph CircularTrap["The catch-22: proof needs what flight took"]
    direction TB
    G -- "wants a linear story<br/>and documents" --> D["Recount the trauma in order,<br/>produce the papers"]:::burden
    D --> E{"That takes:"}:::gate
    E --> R1["Composure to tell it<br/>in sequence"]:::system
    R1 --> R2["Money and legal help"]:::system
    R2 --> R3["Identity papers<br/>kept through flight"]:::system
    R3 -. "taken by trauma,<br/>poverty, displacement" .-> F(["Story judged<br/>inconsistent"]):::failure
  end

  F ==> X(["Wrongly rejected<br/>as incoherent"]):::failure
  G == "money, records,<br/>a stable life" ==> B[["Claim believed,<br/>protection granted"]]:::binding

Borders are bureaucratic enforcers of inequality. Border controls sort people into those judged deserving of entry and protection and those who can be detained, deported or left at sea.

The demand for proof at borders originated in colonial practices. In British India, caste censuses locked fluid identities into rigid hierarchies to maintain imperial control. Apartheid South Africa’s passbooks criminalized Black mobility, making freedom contingent on bureaucratic compliance. Modern borders operate with similar logics, criminalizing survival for those without documents. In Assam, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) left out about 1.9 million people in 2019, Hindus and Muslims alike, and put them at risk of statelessness. Many of them couldn’t produce decades-old documents. Those left out could appeal to Foreigners’ Tribunals, and anyone a tribunal declared a foreigner could be held in one of Assam’s detention camps, away from their family.

In the Mediterranean, thousands of migrants are left to drown, not because undocumented status voids the duty to rescue people in distress at sea (it does not) but because border policies put deterrence ahead of rescue. These deaths are bureaucratically sanctioned disappearances.

Neurodivergent migrants face additional obstacles. Systems often misread atypical communication styles or behaviors as dishonesty and dismiss asylum claims as incoherent or inconsistent. The people fleeing war and persecution are asked for proof, and the systems that forced them to flee are asked for none.

The line doesn’t have to run along a frontier. Israel’s permit regime governs almost every part of daily life for Palestinians under occupation. Movement, work and even family ties are privileges handed out by a hostile bureaucracy, and getting through checkpoints to visit family or go to work takes daily endurance. India’s Aadhaar biometric ID has cut people off from food, housing and welfare. U.S. voter ID laws put the burden of proof on voters who lack ID, disproportionately the poor, the elderly and minority groups. Each works as a border, and each turns a right into a privilege earned through compliance and documentation.

All three come with a respectable rationale: the permit regime is a security measure, Aadhaar reduces welfare fraud, voter ID protects election integrity. Whether voter ID lowers turnout is disputed: critics argue it does, and a nationwide panel study of elections from 2008 to 2018 by Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons finds no measurable effect. The burden lands on the same people either way. The rationales cover what the systems do. They exclude, and they leave the people they sort with a standing that stays conditional on the next document check.

Welfare and policing start from suspicion

Welfare systems claim to serve the vulnerable, but in Britain, Australia and the U.S. they have surveilled, shamed, and criminalized poverty. Proof turns survival into a moral test and demands documentation that’s often impossible to provide. In 19th-century Britain, the Poor Laws institutionalized the idea that poverty was a moral failing. Inspectors intruded into homes, judging who was “deserving” of aid.

Today’s welfare systems operate under similar logics. Australia’s Robodebt scheme falsely raised debts against hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients, driving many into financial despair or suicide. In the U.S., welfare fraud investigations disproportionately target Black families and keep racialized myths alive while corporations get billions in subsidies without scrutiny.

Neurodivergent people face constant scrutiny in welfare systems. Diagnostic criteria often force them to “perform” disability to access support. They penalize those who can’t conform to rigid expectations. The welfare system’s demand for proof assumes dishonesty and takes an emotional toll on people already struggling.

Proof in policing is presented as a tool for justice, but it often erases the voices of survivors while shielding institutional violence. In Canada, the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women shows how proof systems erase lives. Police often dismiss cases citing a “lack of evidence,” which lets systemic violence go on unchecked. Technologies like predictive policing and body cameras, marketed as tools of accountability, are instead weaponized against marginalized communities. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, surveillance technologies targeted activists rather than holding law enforcement accountable for brutality.

What disbelief costs, and who it pays

These systems also extract. Proof retraumatizes people by forcing them to expose their most intimate vulnerabilities to skeptical systems. LGBTQ+ refugees must submit photos and personal letters that reveal intimate detail to prove their identities, and those who don’t conform to Western stereotypes of queerness are rejected outright. Women fleeing domestic violence are interrogated about why they stayed, why they didn’t “fight back,” and why they didn’t leave sooner. These systems commodify pain, turning lived experience into evidence for bureaucratic approval.

Entire industries profit from proof systems. Companies like GEO Group run detention centers where undocumented migrants suffer under inhumane conditions. Predictive policing tools, sold by companies like Palantir, target marginalized communities and fuel the prison-industrial complex. Their business is monetizing exclusion and criminalizing survival.

Once food, work or movement depends on compliance, as under Aadhaar and the permit regime, the requirement creates a shortage for anyone who can’t comply. People come to believe that scarcity is natural and exclusion can’t be helped. Capitalism and colonialism use artificial scarcity the same way, to turn basic needs into commodities and make communities compete to survive. Survival becomes a zero-sum game, and people worn down by forms and qualifications have little left for the solidarity it would take to challenge the system.

Putting the burden on institutions

Unconditional programs eliminate invasive proof requirements by treating care as a right. Finland’s Housing First model, for example, has sharply reduced homelessness by giving people housing without preconditions.

Proof must put human stories ahead of bureaucratic data points. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission emphasized survivor testimonies, building accountability through relational truth rather than rigid documentation.

Instead of demanding proof from individuals, systems should be required to prove their value to society. Participatory budgeting began in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989 (the city suspended it in 2017) and has spread to many other cities. It lets communities allocate public funds directly, which shifts accountability onto the system and makes spending transparent.

Torres’s card invites a stronger conclusion, the limit case of moving the burden from people to institutions. No one should have to prove their right to exist, so dignity needs no proof at all. For the most basic rights (a vote, a bed, medical care) the institution can carry all of it and the person none, as Housing First does with housing.

Above that floor, the aim is proof systems that affirm humanity rather than question it, where proof becomes a tool of care and solidarity that makes systems show they serve the people they claim to protect.2