The Confusion of Dehumanization and Violence

When we talk about are they dehumanizing their victims? It depends on whether we mean are they thinking of them as unhuman or are they intentionally trying to make them feel unhuman. The confusing thing is that verbal acts of dehumanization, like referring to groups of people as vermin, rats or snakes or brutes or animals, things like that. That looks like dehumanization. But the reason that people want to do that is because they believe that the targets of those, of that language, can suffer and will find it humiliating and degrading to be called vermin.