#apologist arguments

[scripttorture]

Do you have any thoughts on the realism of characters being tortured to ‘heal’ them of addiction or mental disorders by a government-funded group? I was thinking about the Troubled Teen Industry in the U.S, with founders/workers of Straight Inc claiming they ‘had to torture the children to cure them’. Or a recent ranch being disrupted by police for abusing children they claimed to help (children with fetal alcohol syndrome or behavioral problems). Would torture as false ‘healing’ be realistic? 1

2 (‘Healing’ torture anon) My story would be modern and set in the U.S. Obviously the torture (abuse?) wouldn’t work either on it’s own or as ‘healing’. But I’m not sure if the torturers should believe they are helping/healing and that the characters ‘deserve’ it because they are addicts, or if they should only claim that to outsiders. The first option might align more with torturers insisting torture ‘works’. What do you think? It will not include scientists or counselors, but random employees.

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That’s an interesting question. I’m going to start by saying I don’t know much at all about the ‘troubled teen’ industry in the USA. At one point while I was a child there were a couple of UK reality TV programs that followed people in camps that were attempting to ‘fix’ troubled children.

 I remember having conversations with a few of my teachers about them. As a child I found the idea disturbing because it seemed as though the teenagers were primarily picked for not conforming to society rather then because they had genuine problems that could be addressed.

 It doesn’t surprise me that torture might take place in these sorts of camps. Especially considering the cultural attitudes to teenagers in the United States. From the outside it seems as though American culture treats all teenagers as potential criminals and pressures them to constantly assure society they are law abiding.

 But let’s step back from the particular setting of this story (since I don’t know much about it) and look at these questions in a broader global context.

 A lot of different cultures have, at various times, used torturous practices in an attempt to heal. This isn’t unusual. I can think of examples from all over the Old World and if I knew more about Native American and Aboriginal cultures I could probably point to some examples there too.

 Humans are really terrible at doing nothing in a bad situation. Which means that when someone we care about is seriously ill we are often willing to try anything even if it’s painful and we’re not sure it will work.

 I’ve- actually got a lot of sympathy for the people who performed and underwent these sorts of ‘torturous healing procedures’ historically. I can empathise with the pain and fear an unknown condition must have caused and desperation to find something that helped.

 I can also sympathise with people in remote areas with no proper access to modern medicine turning to these methods now.

 And for a lot of conditions there probably is some improvement due to the placebo effect. Studies of placebos suggest that the more invasive a procedure the stronger the placebo effect seems to be. So practices such as ritual scarring to treat particular diseases might have seemed successful in a some cases.

 There is an especially long history globally of people using torture to try and ‘cure’ mental illness.

 All of this means I think it’s perfectly possible to have your torturer characters genuinely believe they’re ‘treating’ their victims. This wouldn’t be the normal case for torturers but it’s possible and plausible. It’s analogous to some of the justifications teachers and parents occasionally use for abuse: that it’s ‘discipline’ and for the child’s own good. Despite a lot of evidence that things like spanking cause lasting harm.

 If you have torturers in other contexts, such as police officers or soldiers- then this internal ‘justification’ wouldn’t work. But within the setting you’ve described it does.

 Regardless of the particular context torture takes place in arguing that victims ‘deserve it’ is a very common tactic for torturers.

 The general argument that victims are troublemakers, somehow lesser or morally lacking is a very common apologist argument. Using it in your setting would be realistic.

 Generally I think you’ve got a pretty solid scenario here.

 And I think if you wanted to you could include counsellors and scientists as torturers in this context. You don’t seem to be suggesting anything particularly unusual or high tech.

 And- scientists are just as prone to bias as everyone else. You do get scientists who are unaware of the relevant studies, deny the evidence, fail to connect what they’re doing with abuse cases they’ve read about or just- are straight up awful people who don’t care.

 So long as the abuse isn’t some kind of study or experiment (which I don’t think would fit with the setting you’ve outlined) I think you’ll be fine.

 I hope that helps. :)

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[scripttorture]

Hi! So my character joined a criminal organization and is charged with torturing people. Some say we shouldn’t include torture in stories because, as far as getting info goes, it has been shown not to work. Is there any way to acknowledge this without dropping it completely? And any reasons someone would be tortured other than for information?

This ask is ringing some major alarm bells for me and I’m not surewhether that’s because of a language or cultural barrier or because of whatyou’re asking.

 The way I’m reading this sounds a lot like ‘I want to write torture asan effective interrogation technique and use my fiction to support torture.Please give me a pass to do this.’

 That’s not what I’m here for.

 Torturedoes not result in accurate information. Fictionalworks showing torture resulting in accurate information have inspired and beenused to justify real life torture.

 If that is what you want to do with your story then I flat out will nothelp you. A big part of what I’m trying to do with this blog is raise awarenessof what torture is actually like among writers so that we can cut off a majorsource of support for real life torturers.

 There is no way torealistically depict torture getting accurate information. It does not work.

 If your story relies onaccurate information coming from torture then, deliberately or not, your storysupports torture.

 That doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways to write torture accurately,with respect for victims and survivors and without supporting torturers.

 The simplest thing to do if you’re utterly determined to have charactersuse torture as an interrogation technique is to show it failing.

 Because it does fail. In a lot of different ways. The first postI’ve linked you too discusses the ways torture fails and why it can not work asan interrogation technique.

 Ifyou want more information on how torture fails my Sources page provides linksto S O’Mara’s Why Torture Doesn’t Work:The Neuroscience of Interrogation and D Rejali’s Torture and Democracy which cover the subject in depth over severalhundred pages.

 I’m going to leave that portion of the discussion there and move on towhat torture is used for.

 I’ve actually written quite a lot about this. Oneof the first posts I created summarises motivations for torture from theperspective of writing it in stories. The four categories I suggested were ToTerrorise, ToHumiliate, ToMark and Maim, and ToForce Confessions. Each of those are discussed in more depth with afocus on specific real world incidents if you follow the links.

 I’vealso got a post over here on the way Rejali analyses torture in democracies.This analytical approach doesn’treally work when applied to dictatorships but it does shed light on some of thecommon stated motivations for torture.

 Youmight also find reading over my response to this ask here on why torture happens useful.

 Torture happens because it makes people in authority feel powerful in the short term. And becausesociety is prepared to look the other way.

 It happens because weencourage it when we write torture as a cure-all to our problems.

 It happens because of lack of oversight and lack of training and lack ofbasic empathy for other human beings.

 There are plenty ofmotivations you could use in a story that don’t involve excusing or justifyingreal world torture. And they are morerealistic motivations.

 Off the top of my head those motivations can include:

Hatred

Anger

Forcing a confession

Humiliating a victim

Giving a victim a     permanently disabling injury

Inflicting fear

Trying to cover something up

Trying to impress voters by     showing them that ‘something is being done’ (even though it’s useless)

Dehumanising a victim

‘Punishing’ a victim

‘Punishing’ a victim’s     family, friends or other close contacts

 That’s not an exhaustive list.

 Generally though if you’re thinking about using torture in your story I’dsuggest you consider what it adds. Istorture actually giving your story depth? Is it having a lasting impact on allthe characters, not just the victim or the torturer? Is it giving you chancesto show the readers essential things about your characters?

 Because if torture isn’thaving a lasting effect in your story, if you’re trying to use it as a cheapfix for a hole in your plot or a lack of emotional depth in your characters,then it’s not a good idea to use torture in your story.

 Think about what it adds. Think about whether it is necessary.

And if it isn’t cut it out.

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[scripttorture]

I understand that interrogation torture being ineffective is not a common knowledge and media doesn't really help with reinforcing the contrary among regular people, but what's been bugging me: don't torturers know that? I remember you saying that a lot of torturers justify doing this to themselves as necessary, but it just seems odd that none of them would notice the overarching pattern? Especially if it's an organisation where it's a long standing practice.

Good question. There’sactually a book due out later in September that I’m hoping could shed a littlemore light on these sorts of questions. (It’s by F Sironi who is a psychologist, has been a keyplayer in numerous big human rights abuse trials and spent hundreds of hoursinterviewing torturers).

The truth is at the momentwe don’t actually know an awful lot about torturers’ mind sets.

We know from bothinterviews and experiments involving pain and empathy with ordinary people thattorturers develop profound mental health problems. And we know that broadlyspeaking they have similar symptom patterns to victims.

Most of the rest isbasically what we can guess from interviews and trial notes.

I’m not a psychologistso while I can describe behaviour patterns I’ve seen across multiple interviewsand works that analyse this kind of thing….be aware that my guesses as to why this might be the case are just that.I’m drawing from Fanon’s two interviews with torturers (and his interview witha torturer’s daughter), Rejali’s analysis of why torture continues, Cobain’sanalysis of British torturers and Alleg’s account of his torturers. Some ofthese can show up together, some of them can’t.

1)     It becomes a point of pride that the group tortures,connected with their masculinity and ‘toughness’. Suggesting it doesn’t work isan attack on the close-knit group of torturers and risks being ostracisedsocially or physically attacked.

2)     Admitting torture doesn’t work means admitting thegroup/individual did something wrong,immoral and dangerous. This can be very difficult for people to do. It meansessentially admitting they are theBad Guy. I think this response sounds very similar to the sort of mentalgymnastics sexual predators seem to go through to convince themselves that they personally aren’t rapists.

3)     Many torturers don’t seem to care about information. They seetheir victims as essentially bad people who deserveto be tortured. This seems especially prevalent when the attacks are againstminorities or vulnerable people.

4)     Some torturers seem to see torture as a means of revenge forcrimes, real or imagined. An example would be many of the American soldiers responsible for abusesin jails in Iraq brought up 9/11. The logic appeared to be that the victimswere ‘close enough’ to the perpetrators that the attacks were justified.

5)     Some torturers appear to defend their actions simply becauseif they didn’t they might be out of a job.

6)     Genuine delusion about tortures effectiveness may play apart. Rejali quotes an example of a torturer who swore that this technique‘worked every time’….as quoted by a victim who said nothing. The torturer didnot appear bothered by this.

7)     One of the men responsible for the widespread torture byFrench troops during the Franco-Algerian war later said that torture underminedthe French cause and produced no positive results. But he didn’t want to hold his troops back at the time because he felt that would be betraying them.

Essentially torturersform incredibly close knit mini-communities within larger structures, such asthe police or army. They usually become ostracised from the rest of the community and much of theiridentity seems to rest on willingness to torture. In these cases rejectingtorture means rejecting both the group and individual identity.

Torturers also tend tosee themselves as acting to ‘defend’ their broader community/race/religion etc.They often see themselves as just, good, people punishing wicked people.

And they always have a vested interest in torturecontinuing and being accepted. If it doesn’t they may lose their jobs or worsebe put on trial and end up in prison.

The woman whose book Iam waiting for said that the torturers she’s interviewed over the years seemuniformly unwilling to confront what they did. They don’t want to do the hard work of looking at their actions and acceptingthey were in the wrong. Because that sort of therapy is intense and painful and hard.

So I don’t think it’snecessarily that they don’t notice the pattern. I think that the effect torturehas on them means that after awhile…they just don’t care.

If that seems difficultto understand think of how emotive and emotional arguments over whether torturefor information is ‘right’ in newspapers get. Have you ever seen an argumenthalf as emotive about whether dusting for fingerprints is a valid way ofconfirming someone’s presence at a crime scene?

If information was thepoint the ‘debate’ would not be so heated. If information was the point then wewould simply use the methods that seem to produce results.

But it’s not aboutinformation. It’s not about finding the truth or protecting people or creatingeffective organisational structures.

It’s about fear andanger and ideas of ‘punishment’. It’s about our tendency to lash out. It’sabout the fact that ultimately we often respond to perceived insults by wishingviolence on other people.

We imagine it would besatisfying.

And we imagine that thepeople we see as our enemies are not people. We focus on the terrible thingsthey’ve done (real or imagined) and tell ourselves they’re not really people.

They are people. All ofthem. Even the ones who have done terrible things. Even the ones we hate themost.

Even the torturers.

I’ve seen apologistsrail against the idea of talking to a mass murderer over a cup of tea. Theevidence strongly suggests it’s a good way to get accurate information. Butthat doesn’t account for human beings hating and wanting revenge.

Yes there is a pattern.And the pattern says that torture for information does not and can never work.But ultimately? I believe torturers do not want to see it.

Edit: There have been some good additions to this discussion and the recommendation of J Conroy’s book in particular is a good one. It’s not a book I’ve read yet but it’s recommended by a lot of people in the field. 

Edit 2: Damn there were a lot of typos in this.

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[scripttorture]

Torture in Fiction: Captain America, The Winter Soldier

With its superb fight scenes and stand out performances by a talented cast, this movie is a fan favourite and cornerstone of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

 I don’t think you’re going to like what I have to say about it.

 So I’m going to start with the little disclaimer I have for this series as a quick reminder.

 Once again I’m rating the depiction and use of torture, not the movie itself. I’m trying to take into account realism (regardless of fantasy or sci fi elements), presence of any apologist arguments, stereotypes and the narrative treatment of victims and torturers.

 If you are in any way upset by my analysis of this movie or its characters I advise you to consider both the impact fictional depictions of torture have in real life and Rule 6 before you respond.

 On to the movie-

 The relevant plot details are, well, most of the film. I’ll try to be as brief as I can.

 Steve Roger’s (aka Captain America) boss at SHIELD (Nick Fury) is assassinated by a mysterious man known as ‘The Winter Soldier’. Before dying Nick tells Steve that SHIELD itself has been compromised and gives him a usb.

 On refusing to hand over the usb Steve is attacked by a large group of his former colleges in a lift.

 He escapes and teams up with Natasha Romanov aka the Black Widow. Together they discover that SHIELD has been infiltrated by Hydra, a Nazi organisation who are particularly interested in SHIELD’s latest weapons project which they could use to kill millions.

 The Winter Soldier, a character who is heavily coded as mentally ill, is ordered to assassinate them by Hydra.

 Steve and Natasha track down a SHIELD/Hydra agent and threaten him with death or grievous bodily harm unless he gives them information. They get the information they want.

 They clash with the Winter Soldier and during the scuffle he is unmasked and revealed as Steve’s long lost wartime friend Bucky Barnes. Steve, Natasha and their friend Sam are all captured by Hydra.

 The audience is told that Bucky, apparently now a super-soldier, was captured by Hydra, tortured and brainwashed. He has been their best assassin for decades. A scene of his memory being ‘wiped’ follows with props that are heavily reminiscent of ECT machines.

 Steve, Natasha and Sam stage an assault on SHIELD HQ in an effort to stop the launch of the new weapons. In the process Steve takes over the comm system and announces Hydra’s plan to the entire base.

 Two sympathetic characters are shown resisting Hydra demands when threatened with death. One of them dies for his trouble.

 Steve and Bucky fight until the last weapon is disarmed. With the threat of civilian casualties gone Steve refuses to fight Bucky and tries instead to appeal to his humanity, asking him to remember their friendship. Bucky beats him unconscious but stops short of killing him.

 I’m giving it 0/10

 The Good

 And well that really is the problem: with regards to torture I cannot think of more than one good thing about this film. Usually I’d throw the movie at least one point for a single good scene, but in this case I think the scene is part of a larger entirely negative trend in the narrative.

 1)      The scene I’m thinking of is the attack on Steve in the lift. About eight or nine people, all armed in various ways, attack Steve at once. His arms are pinned by several people each while he’s repeatedly shocked with a device a bit like a cattle prod. This basic set up is extremely true to life for many cases of police brutality, although a Taser would have been a more likely weapon.

 The Bad

 Where to begin?

 1)      Every major ‘good’ character in this movie engages in torture.

 Our heroes Steve, Sam and Natasha torture a Hydra agent for information by threatening to kill him, then throwing him off a building (Sam catches him before he falls to his death).

 This is not just portrayed as good and reasonable but it is played for laughs. The scene is used to extend a joke about Steve’s dating life.

 2)      The ‘good guys’ obtain accurate, timely, relevant information through torture. This never happens in real life. Torture cannot force someone to give accurate, timely or relevant information. And it’s a stereotype in fiction that I particularly despise because it has been linked to the justification of and practice of torture in real life.

 3)      The ‘bad guy’ they torture does not resist once they have tortured him. This is extremely unlikely. The data we have at the moment suggests that torture makes people far more likely to resist.

 4)      This stands in contrast to the way ‘good’ characters act when threatened with death or torture. The film consistently shows ‘good’ people resisting torture and ‘bad’ (or in Bucky’s case mentally ill) people complying under torture. This is not only wrong; it’s frankly sickening and perpetuates extremely harmful stereotypes about victims and torture.

 5)      Brainwashing does not work and is a central, important plot device in the film. The story simply does not work unless violence, torture and pain can ‘force’ a victim to change sides.

 6)      Torture cannot change hearts and minds. It cannot force someone to support or work for a cause they are strongly against.

 7)      Memory really does not work in the way the film suggests. Anything that could remove old, strongly held memories, such as those of childhood or the victim’s name, would also have removed their memory of how to drive a car, fight hand to hand, use a gun or virtually anything else Bucky does in the film.

 8)      Even accounting for the sci-fi idea of removing specific memories, torture and pain would not force a victim to comply with their captors. In fact it makes resistance more likely. A Bucky Barnes without the memory of his friends or the war would still almost certainly resist Hydra simply because they caused him pain.

 9)      There has never been a recorded case of ECT machines being used to torture. They have been used as a form of abuse in some hospitals but they have never been used by military or terrorist organisations such as Hydra. This is another inaccurate stereotype: the idea that torture is ‘scientific’ or ‘high-tech’.

 10)  The film assumes that a victim of systematic abuse over decades would be physically and mentally capable of complex assassinations. Instead the sort of damage to both physical and mental health this would inflict means that Bucky and Natasha should both be noticeably less capable than their colleagues. Instead they are more capable than their colleagues, implying that abuse made them ‘better’ at committing wanton acts of violence.

 11)  Both this film and other Marvel films state that Natasha has both suffered and committed abuse, yet she shows no severe symptoms. This seems to be narratively linked to the idea that she is ‘strong’. And I detest the notion that a basic, bodily reaction to trauma makes victims weak.

 Overview

 I think the word for this movie’s use of torture is ‘dire’.

 It’s not just consistently wrong.

 It’s not just based around an impossible, trope laden premise.

 It’s not just running through a check list of every harmful stereotype that regularly turns up in fiction.

 The movie supports the notion that the torture of ‘bad people’ does not ‘count’.

 It shows ‘heroes’, particularly individuals that the audience is supposed to think are morally above reproach, engaging in torture and the plot supports and justifies their doing so. It tells us that really ‘good’, ‘pure’ characters, such as the titular hero, threaten ‘bad guys’ with torture and then stand back to watch their friends do the torturing.

 It shows victims (ie Bucky) as dangerous and violent and without other symptoms. It shows torturers like Natasha as without symptoms. It shows torture as a successful interrogation tactic and shows torture fundamentally changing hearts and minds.

 Even accounting for sci-fi elements, the movie’s attitude to and treatment of torture is consistently false, dangerous and fundamentally against the basic principles of human rights.

 Human rights are not for ‘good people’. They are for everyone. Whatever their race, gender, creed, politics, or crime. Torture is never justified.

 And for that reason this movie’s treatment of torture is quite possibly the worst I’ve ever seen. It is a shining example of how much torture apologia pervades popular culture.

 This, readers, is how not to write torture.

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[scripttorture]

Hello I just found this blog. I m sorry if this is a question been asked before but could you please define torture apologia or apologist? Is it someone who thinks torture is okay? Is writing torture detailed bad, is it a fetish? Thank you for this helpful blog, I am sorry for my English.

Hello :)

 Torture apologia issomething that justifies or excuses torture. A torture apologist is someone whothink torture is okay.

 There’s a lot ofmisinformation about torture around and it’s often hard to tell what’s true andwhat isn’t. That means that it’s possible for someone to write torture apologiain their fiction because they genuinely think it’s true rather than because they want to support torture.

 I think it might behelpful for me to give a couple of examples that regularly show up in fiction.So these are some things often used in fiction that are not true about tortureand can be used to justify or excusetorture:

 1)     Showing torture as an effective way to gain information. Thisis not true and I have several posts that detail why. Thisone is a good place to start.

2)     Showing resistance to torture as unusual and linking it to acharacter’s ‘strength’, ‘goodness’, ‘purity’ etc. Resistance to torture isactually very common and has nothing to do with someone’s physical strength orpersonality.

3)     Showing torture as less damaging than it actually is.

4)     Showingtorture survivors with no physical or psychological damage caused by torture.

5)     Showing torture survivors ‘recovering’ in a ridiculouslyshort space of time (ie in days rather than decades).

6)     Showing techniques that aretorture as essentially harmless. This often happenswith solitary confinement and sleep deprivation.

7)     Showing torturers as super-humanly good at detecting lies (inreality no one is very good at telling when someone is lying).

8)     Showing torturers as unaffected by torture. In reality mostof them develop severe mental health problems.

9)     Showing torture as an effective way of changing someone’smind. Torture can not change someone’s strongly held beliefs.

10)  Showingtorture as an effective way of ‘making’ someone join the enemy side. Torture ismore likely to make people more stronglyopposed to the people who torture them.

11)  Showingtorture that leaves scars as ‘worse’ than torture that does not, implying thatonly some kinds of torture techniques are ‘really’ torture. Thisis not true and non-scarring torture techniques like stress positions,waterboarding, torture with Tasers and starvation can all kill or maim victims.

 That’s not a completelist but these are the sorts of things I mean when I say something is tortureapologia: story lines that condone or justify torture by relying on lies about how torture works.

 It’s insulting tovictims and it tendsto encourage torturers in real life.

 So- to address the lastpart of the question- when I say ‘torture apologia’ I don’t mean detailed gorydescriptions of torture or any sort of kink.

 Consensual kink is nottorture and is outside the scope of this blog.

 I don’t think detaileddescriptions of torture are necessarilybad. I think the story should dictate the level of detail that’s appropriate.

 A very detailed gorydescription of torture would probably be inappropriate in a children’s story.But a description showing the character was in pain afterwards would beappropriate.

 A detailed descriptionof torture might be appropriate in anaction story but it would depend on the context of the story. Anacknowledgement that torture took place and it was terrible would be appropriate here.

 A detailed descriptionof torture would probably beappropriate in a crime story where the focus is gathering evidence andprosecuting the torturer. Because in that sort of story the characters wouldneed to know as much detail as possible to catch the villain and send them tojail.

 I hope that helps. Ifyou’d like some more examples of torture writtenwell and torture written badly I have a series of reviewsof popular fiction which you might like to take a look at (at the bottom,the ‘Torture in Fiction’ series).

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[scripttorture]

so i’ve read many of your posts on why torture doesn’t work and i understand your points, but i can’t quite wrap my head around how if someone is in pain and the way to stop it is to say a single name or place, they still wouldn’t do it. you said yourself people will say anything to make the pain stop, so why not that? i get that torture likely wouldn’t work to obtain a lot of detailed info but it really seems like in that particular situation torture would have to work.

Does this have anything to do with writing? The focusof this blog is fiction and helpingpeople with fiction.

 Secondly I do have arule on my Before YouAsk page (Rule 6) that is designed to prevent exactly this sort ofdiscussion on the blog.

 This blog isn’t fordebating ethics. I simply do not have the emotional energy to deal with repeatedlyrefuting apologist arguments.

 I think you’re askingin good faith which is why I’ve responded with more than the link to my BeforeYou Ask page. That does not make this any easier to deal with when I havevariants on the same question so often.

 Torture does not work.

 It doesn’t work for asingle name or place any more than it does for detail.

 This is not becausepeople won’t ‘say anything’ but because they will. ‘Anything’ usually means a long rambling screed that ismostly what the victim thinks the torturer wants to hear or whatever delirious response comes into their head rather than the truth.And because torturers, just like everyoneelse, are not good at telling the difference between when someone is lyingand when they aren’t that means they get a lot of misinformation.

Being in pain also causes people to forget large chunks of information making them physically incapable of giving accurate information. I am unsure how you missed this point since it is prominently mentioned on every post I’ve made about why torture does not and can never ‘work’.

 If you’d like to knowmore mySources page contains links to books by S O’Mara and D Rejali that providedetailed explanations of why torture never works.

 They both provide reallife examples of exactly the sort of situation you describe failing. O’Maradetails the effects of torture on victims’ brains in pretty straightforwardlanguage. Rejali covers just about everything else. I’d suggest starting with O’Mara.

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[scripttorture]

is it bad/problematic to portray torture unrealistically? like torture rarely ever works in life but we depict it working in fiction. is there a specific reason to portraying it as realistically as possible?

The specific reason to portraytorture as realistically as possible is that torturers and torture apologists use fictional unrealistic depictionsof torture to justify real world torture.

Ihave a post on that here.

If you chose to portray torture unrealistically you aresupporting real world torture. That is not anexaggeration. Torturers in the real world point to fiction as the source that ‘proves’ torture is effective.

When we write torture ‘working’or write that it is effective we give the people who condone, enable, encourageand practice torture our support and we give them ‘justification’ to continue.

I could go on but it isreally that simple. It is not the nebulous damage of offense or insult it isliteral support of one of the worst crimes in the world.

You may alsowish to consult Rule 6.

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[scripttorture]

What's the difference in psychological and mental torture? Aren't both of them the same?

They’re the same in thesense that they’re both inaccurate obsolete terms that are generally used byapologists to suggest some tortures are not really ‘that bad’.

People who use theseterms generally mean ‘torture that does not leave obvious external marks’.Rejali calls these ‘clean’ tortures, O’Mara calls these ‘white’ tortures.

The terms are often used innocently by people whodon’t know any better, but more often they’re used by torture apologists toargue that some types of torture should not ‘count’ as torture.

The apologists usuallytry this argument with starvation, dehydration, sleep deprivation, stresspositions, forced exercise and waterboarding. None of these are purelypsychological techniques; they are the deliberate infliction of pronouncedphysical suffering with measurable physical effects.

Alltorture inflicts psychological suffering but these terms are often used todismiss or belittle both the physical and psychological damage they inflict.

In essence the reasontorture causes psychological suffering is because it causes brain damage. Eventhings like witnessing the torture of others do this and the damage can bedetected and measured by MRI.

If you want to knowmore about how that works my sourcespage has links to O’Mara’s book which is all about the effects torture hason the brain.

Both of these terms ‘psychologicaltorture’ and ‘mental torture’ are unhelpful distinctions. Breaking torture downinto ‘types’ is not a helpful thing to do when we know the psychologicalsymptoms are the same regardless of the method used. The distinction encouragesus to take certain types of injury lessseriously and todismiss the suffering of large groups of victims.

I try to avoid bothterms as a result, though I do talk a lot about the mental health problemstorture causes.

We as a society don’ttake torture seriously enough as it is. Breaking it down into ‘types’ based onwhat seems more awful to us doesn’t help us to take torture more seriously ortreat victims with more respect.

I suggest not usingeither term.

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