Short answers, pulled from the story.
Dignity is the right of a person to be valued and respected for their own sake and to be treated ethically. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 enshrined this in Article 1, which states that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
Human dignity can be violated through four main categories: humiliation (diminishing a person's self-worth), instrumentalization or objectification (treating a person as a means to an end), degradation (acts that diminish the value of human beings broadly), and dehumanization (stripping a person or group of their human characteristics, as occurred in the Holocaust and in Rwanda).
Kant held that dignity belongs to things that are ends in themselves rather than objects of relative value. He wrote that "Morality, and humanity as capable of it, is that which alone has dignity." He tied human dignity to free will and human agency, the ability of humans to choose their own actions.
Article 1, paragraph 1 of the German constitution declares human dignity inviolable and places it before even the right to life. This principle has been used to strike down life imprisonment without parole (in a 1977 ruling), to ban a provision allowing the military to shoot down hijacked airliners, and to shape laws on abortion, video game content, and peep shows.
Both absolute and relative poverty are recognized violations of human dignity. Absolute poverty involves overt exploitation and humiliation, such as being forced to eat food from others' garbage. Relative poverty causes subtle humiliation, social rejection, and marginalization through the cumulative experience of being unable to afford the same goods, education, and social participation as others in the same society.
The English word dignity is attested from the early 13th century. It derives from the Latin dignitas, variously translated as "worthiness" or "prestige", arriving into English by way of French dignite.