Thanks for the reply. It seems you've thought things out a bit more. I'd like to share how I see it, which is a little more complex and hopefully not too technical.
- I think a lot of times we perceive that a person does not feel shame when nothing could be farther from the truth. They feel intense shame, so intense that they have to defend against it in a variety of ways which disavow the shame. If this is the case, more shame will certainly not ever provoke them to take ownership of it. It might provoke them to invoke an even more primitive defense, which could be dangerous.
- Shame and guilt are different. Shame is more primitive and is the way young'ns learn to modulate their behavior based on fear conditioning before they have a well-developed sense of who they are, right and wrong, and much of a sense of ability to appreciate the outside world and act within it. Because it relates to a time where a person hasn't developed independent agency or morality, their experience of it is simply stimulus/response conditioning. Of course a serial groper is not ashamed that he groped the women, he's ashamed that everybody knows he groped them. As healthy people develop, they learn to internalize the reactions they get from the outside world and take them on as parts of themselves. So a healthy person is able to be ashamed of themselves because they've incorporated the response from others into themselves. An unhealthy person may have serious deficits here, and chances are a serial rapist isn't a very mentally healthy person when it comes to shame.
- I believe what you would like offenders to experience is guilt. Guilt develops after shame and comes from a time where someone has learned to control their basic impulses, learned to appreciate that their minds operate independently from those around them, learned to have some degree of a cohesive sense of self, learned to separate reality from fantasy, and learned to understand right from wrong. A person who experiences guilt has hope of appreciating the intense wrongness of their actions without it threatening their hold on their sense of integrity, autonomy, and reality.
I don't believe society has made shame taboo. I believe society is actually promoting shame more than ever. I think they are trying to make it taboo, however, to shame people who are innocent. Of course, one of the primary mechanisms this is done is by shaming the people who are guilty.
I think the basic behavior is splitting. We tend to identify one victim and one perpetrator. In that split, the victim is all good and bears no responsibility for what happened and the perpetrator is all bad and bears all responsibility for what happened. This is not to say that we should blame victims or let offenders off the hook. The danger of such a harsh split is reinforcing the notion that a victim bears no responsibility for escaping their victimhood and that the perpetrator has no hope of maintaining humanity.
Unfortunately, something about human nature is that a lot of people who are perpetrators are unable to see themselves as anything other than victims. And a lot of people who are victims are unable to see themselves as anything other than perpetrators. If society doesn't help people feel like it's OK to be a bit of both at the same time, then bad people who don't think they're bad will never get their due, and neither will good people who don't think they're good.