#effects of torture

[scripttorture]

What would you expect from the public, including minors, when torturing someone in public is done, especially when it's a public spectacle and people actually come to watch. Is liking to watch torture a thing in this case? My story is a medieval/steampunk fantasy by the way.

Well Anon, this does still happen today. It happens in the country I grew up in and consider my home. So… my first suggestion is to throw out the implication that this is a weird historical thing the world doesn’t have to deal with any more. Because it is still very real. And if you get any kind of success with your story there’s a good chance some of your readers will have experience with this.

 It’s also significantly more complicated then ‘liking’ or ‘disliking’ so let’s unpack this a bit.

 I’ve never actually seen anyone maimed or executed. But as a kid of around 9-10 I knew kids my age who had. We used it as a sort of… pissing contest basically. Kids would brag about it to show how hard they were, in the same way we’d stuff chilis into our mouths and see who could last longest.

 It’s one of those bizarre kinds of ritualised self-harm that you end up performing in order to cope with awful things.

 Because witnessing this kind of stuff is harmful, to adults and children. It can leave people traumatised and displaying some of the symptoms I write about here.

 But, however old the characters, if they grew up somewhere where this is the norm then I absolutely guarantee they understand showing opposition is dangerous. They know their responses to these displays of brutality and power are used as a proxy for their loyalty and worthiness by the state.

 And boy if you are in any way outside the norm, if you are queer or the ‘wrong’ ethnic group or faith, then the pressure to conform here is so much more intense.

 I lived in Saudi, my home town is Dhahran. My parents are from opposite ends of Europe and they tried to raise me Christian. I still spent a lot of my teenage years unpacking stuff I’d absorbed about public executions, amputations, whippings etc.

 From the kids I knew growing up (anecdotal evidence no matter how empassioned) I’d say the ‘normal’ responses to witnessing this kind of state violence are varied. Kids would get nightmares, start showing signs of mild anxiety disorders or depression. They’d become moody, angry and generally unhappy. Which they’d sometimes take out on other people.

 But I can’t remember anyone ever explicitly linking it to what they witnessed. They’d try to hide this stuff. Some of them would double down on justifications for state violence (seemed pretty common.) They would, above all, deny there was a problem.

 Because admitting to mental illness made you ‘weak’ and admitting to doubts about state violence made you a ‘traitor’. Which is a pretty risky thing to label yourself (even by implication) when you live in a state that publicly mutilates and murders people. (Note the author’s bias as a committed pacifist may be showing.)

 As you may have noticed Anon, I still carry a significant amount of anger on this particular subject. This bottled vitriole is not directed at you or your story idea but at the states and politicians who make sure this brutality continues. It’s about the fact that I can remember a nine year old girl matter of factly talking about beheading at a birthday party.

 Stepping back from the personal side of things for a moment we know from studies of PTSD and trauma survivors generally that witnessing violence can lead to lasting psychological symptoms. Including PTSD.

 PTSD specifically is more likely when an individual is directly effected (ie physically hurt). But repeated exposure to traumatic events, including witnessing violence, makes the manifestation of long term symptoms more likely.

 So a character that has seen dozens of these attacks is more likely to develop a long term mental health problem then a character who has seen only one. Regardless of age.

 We can’t predict which individual symptoms an individual witness will develop or indeed when a witness might develop them. We just don’t know enough about how these things happen yet.

 Having said that, the possible symptoms for witnesses are pretty much identical to the possible symptoms for torture survivors (link above.) I’d advise against using chronic pain for witnesses unless you have a clear idea of an underlying cause; it seems (anecdotally) to be more common in people who directly experienced violence.

 If you decide to use insomnia there’s a masterpost on sleep deprivation here.

 For mental health problems like depression, anxiety etc remember there are physical symptoms as well as symptoms related to mood. Characters who are trying to deny they have a mental health problem might focus overly on physical symptoms. Depression can cause nausea, vomiting and tiredness/lack of energy which might be mistaken for disease. Anxiety can cause chest pain and shakes.

 Circling back let’s talk about some of the phrasing in this question for a moment. Because ‘choose to watch’ misunderstands the way states use these public displays of violence.

 Attendance and witnessing of public executions and torture is often enforced. Sometimes overtly and sometimes more tacitly. Because the point of these displays is to hammer home the power of the state. That doesn’t work if people can easily choose not to go.

 Here’s an example of what that overt and tacit enforcement looked like back home.

 Tacit enforcement came from the timing and placement of executions and amputations. They took place on weekends, when almost everyone was off work. They were carried out in major towns and cities, where the population density was higher. The venue was typically on a main thoroughfare close to important sites. Which ensured a high volume of people would be in the area when the execution took place, whether there was due to be an execution or not.

 So picture the town or city this is taking place in, in your story. When are the public holidays? Where are the markets? Where are the most popular religious venues? At what time will the most people be in these areas?

 All of that will tell you where an execution or public torture is likely to take place. Because if you set this shit up in eye sight of the place most people buy food, at the time when the most people are out, you get witnesses.

 Whether they want to be witnesses or not.

 Overt enforcement, on the low end of the scale, means having officials among the crowd pushing people towards the scaffold. At home this seemed to be targetted towards children and people who were judged as ‘other’. Different races to the majority, people who might have been read as a different religion, people who might have been read as queer etc.

 This is because the message is ‘This could be you.’

 I know practices in other countries have sometimes gone beyond this. Police or armed officials will sometimes go out and gather a crowd of witnesses by just… approaching people on the street and demanding they attend.

 This approach requires quite a bit of man power and is not practical or necessary in every setting. In most cases setting things up in the right place and time is enough to ensure a large number of witnesses.

 What I’m trying to illustrate here is that a lot of people will see this stuff without having made a conscious choice to do so.

 And making a conscious choice to see it… well it does say something about the character but not in the way you’re thinking.

 Because these displays are all about the power of the state. Witnessing them, responding to them is performance and it’s a performance of state loyalty. You can’t expect someone to give their true opinion on public displays of violence when criticism or voicing ‘dislike’ could lead to them being targets of violence.

 Basically if you’ve got characters going to see this stuff regularly then it’s worth asking why they feel the need to display their loyalty in this way. Sometimes it’s because they really really believe in the state. But often… they’re compensating for something.

 Wrapping up I think it’s important to note there’s often a difference between what people say about this stuff versus what they actually feel. And that’s because these things are explicitly political and explicitly about the power a state has over it’s subjects.

 The way individuals respond to these things in public and what they say about them in public effects how they are treated. Sometimes it comes with obvious legal sanctions. Even if it doesn’t… these displays are entirely about reminding people the state can kill them.

 And it doesn’t actually discourage crime or civil disobedience but it does create a climate of fear and hostility which permeates daily life.

 Think about why the state is insecure about their power. Think about how your characters live with that background radiation and whether it feeds into cultural ideas around things like martyrdom or nobility of suffering.

 Remember that there is a difference between public and private life. Existing in these kinds of brutal states often means having quite a sharp distinction between them. This can create very strong bonds to those the characters trust. It can also create a big difference between private and public personas.

 If you’re writing a world where public torture and executions are happening there’s more going on then just individual character’s reactions. You are saying something about the world, the ruling class and the politics of the area.

 Take the time make sure you know what you want to say.

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[scripttorture]

Since I’ve seen a few people confused by this I wanted to make a post clarifying some things about the common symptoms of torture (you can find the masterpost I made here.)

 The common symptoms are broad because they’re intended to cover all forms of torture. They’re essentially a list of the mental health problems people can develop when they’re exposed to repeated trauma.

 Unless a source specifies a particular form of torture beware of anything that sounds too specific.

 For instance suspension by the wrists commonly leads to chronic pain in the arms and back. But it is extremely misleading to suggest that chronic pain in the arms is a common symptom of ‘torture’ generally.

 Falaka, beating the soles of the feet with an object, can often lead to chronic pain in the feet or further up the legs (the likelihood varies depending on the object used/other injuries inflicted.)

 But a victim of falaka is unlikely to have chronic pain in the arms and a victim who was suspended by the wrists is unlikely to have chronic pain in their feet.

 Both have chronic pain.

 Similarly some of the common psychological symptoms torture causes have knock on physical effects.

 It is extremely common for people with depression to experience nausea, difficulty eating and disordered eating patterns. It’s also common for people with depression to experience decreased libido and problems having sex.

 This does not mean that nausea, disordered eating or sexual dysfunction are common symptoms of torture generally: they’re possible manifestations of one of the possible symptoms.

 Interrogate what you read. Think about it. Analyse it. Critique it. Look for sources.

 And remember that survivor’s are a diverse group with different symptoms and different manifestations of those symptoms. One person’s experience can not cover the experience of all torture survivors.

 Your story doesn’t have to try and capture all of that diversity but be aware that it exists.

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[scripttorture]

Would you say it’s realistic for a character who witnesses someone else being tortured to be effected psychologically as severely as if they were the one being tortured (or at least close to that)?

Generally? No. However if there are other things going on in the story it could be within the realm of reality.

 Trauma is a complex process and I think it’s fair to say that we don’t fully understand how it works yet. For instance we know the possible symptoms someone can manifest but we don’t really know why different survivors get different symptoms.

 It’s also… very difficult to study which particular symptoms manifest in individual trauma survivors and how ‘severe’ they are in an ethical way. (Ie how do you account for your sample size of traumatised people having different traumatic experiences, being from different backgrounds, having different support networks etc.)

 Based on what we know about PTSD in particular: lasting, severe symptoms are more likely if a person is physically hurt/otherwise physically effected by a traumatic incident.

 A person who sees a nasty car crash might still develop PTSD, but they are less likely to then the person in the passenger seat who was hurt during the crash.

 However PTSD also becomes more likely if the person in question has survived a traumatic event before.

 Essentially if you take two ‘random’ people and put them in this situation where one is the witness and the other is physically hurt, the person who was tortured will have more severe symptoms then the witness. But we know there are factors that feed in to how severe symptoms are for both survivors and witnesses. Which means that witnesses with specific backgrounds, experiences or social status might be effected more severely then ‘normal’.

 If the witness in question has pre-existing mental health problems, has survived multiple traumatic events and is socially isolated then they would probably have more severe symptoms then normal. Recovery would also take longer. They might have symptoms of similar severity to some survivors. Especially if the particular survivor they’re compared to has a lot of protective factors; ie a good support network, access to medical help, they’re only attacked once, they’ve not experienced a traumatic event before etc.

 It’s a guess, but I think you could, possibly see similar severity if you compare the worst case scenario for a witness with the best case scenario for a survivor. As I said, I can’t be sure because this isn’t something that’s easy to study.

 From a writing perspective I think it’s easier to stick to a general pattern of witness characters having less symptoms and less severe symptoms then survivors.

 But if the character you’re thinking of as the witness survived war, torture, genocide, etc and if they’re isolated then it would make sense for them to be more severely effected then a witness who’d never experienced trauma. It’s also worth remembering that some people just have severe mental health problems without having a traumatic event that ‘made’ them that way. In the same way that some people are born with fewer limbs and didn’t need an accident to ‘lose’ a limb.

 I think that in a story if you don’t provide a reason for a witness to be unusually effected you could risk making the survivor’s symptoms seem less important or ‘better’. It might also run the risk of implying the survivor is somehow ‘stronger’ or ‘tougher’ or morally superior instead of just… lucky.

 Overall I think it’s a better idea to stick to writing witnesses as less severely effected then survivors. Writing this stuff is hard. There’s a lot of elements to consider and balance when we write about torture and trauma. Adding in more complexity often makes it easier to fall into some form of torture apologia, whether we intend to or not.

 I can’t tell you what your skill level and comfort level is when it comes to writing this stuff. You are the person who knows best in that regard.

 I would say that if this is your first time writing torture or trauma and you don’t feel confident this probably isn’t a good idea for your first attempt. Balancing all these elements, doing a good job with dark themes, takes practice. And giving yourself too complex a scenario as your first try can sometimes mean you’re setting yourself up for failure.

 If you’ve written a few different stories with dark themes and torture specifically before then you’ll have more practice. And you’ll be better equipped to make a more unusual scenario work well.

 There are still a lot of potential pitfalls when we make these things more complex. It’s really easy to end up with unfortunate implications. Which is why I tend to advise keeping things simple.

 I’d strongly advise you to consider what this adds to your story. Why is it important that the witness is effected as severely as the victim?

 Does this risk taking away from the victim’s experience? Does it imply the witness is ‘better’? Does it imply the victim’s experience ‘wasn’t that bad’? Does it shift the focus away from the victim and on to a witness instead?

 You can still tell a story where a witness is deeply moved and effected by seeing torture, without giving them symptoms as severe as the victim.

 I do this by showing the witness choosing to change after this traumatic experience. I often have them becoming involved in politics, changing their views and acting where before they would have refused.

 I’ve written characters who upend their entire lives because they witnessed torture. And many of those characters don’t actually develop trauma symptoms.

 I’ve had two characters who throw away a decent military career, social security and financial security in order to help someone at risk of torture. Both characters witnessed torture and this led to them breaking someone out of a military prison. Which destroys their careers, leaves them without a source of income and makes them wanted criminals overnight.

 Consequences are possible without symptoms.

 I’d encourage you to think about some of those consequences. Because you might find that things like that, active decisions which effect the characters and plot, have a bigger impact then mental health problems do. They might even help you achieve what you want from this plot more effectively then symptoms would.

 I hope that helps :)

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[scripttorture]

Hey there! I'm writing a scene where my character gets electrocuted as torture, but I don’t know how to describe what's happening because I don't know what he's actually being electrocuted with. What is the "safest" way to electrocute someone? Something that produces a high voltage, but not enough to kill them. Is it better to use a car battery with jumper cables? Electrodes? And where is the best place to put them on the body? The only thing I know is that the current can't cross the heart.

Well nowadays the most common way this is done is by repeated use of a Taser or stun gun. It’s also worth noting that most people use the term ‘electrocuted’ to mean a lethal amount of electricity. You might want to use something like ‘electric shock’ instead to avoid confusion.

 There is still a significant death rate but I can’t really say whether it’s higher or lower then for older electrical tortures (like using a car battery or more commonly a telephone magneto) because there aren’t any statistics on death rates for those older tortures.

 If you’re writing a story set anywhere in the last… I’d say roughly four decades (possibly a bit longer in some countries) then a Taser or stun gun is mostly likely. Older then that, or in particular places, a field telephone magneto could also be possible. And if you’re talking about say early 1900s, World War 2 or the wars in African and Asian countries to secure independence from colonialists: field telephone magnetos.

 This isn’t so much to do with the death rate as it is to do with what’s readily available. Even if a magneto was ‘safer’ you don’t really find them lying around anymore. Whereas a lot of places sell Tasers and stun guns, many police forces issue them as standard equipment.

 A lot of the deaths and serious injuries from Tasers and stun guns come from falling injuries. Basically; the victim is shocked while standing, they fall and because they can’t move to protect themselves they hit their head. Which can cause brain damage and death in worst case scenarios.

 I appreciate what you mean as a writer asking ‘what’s the safest way to do this to my character’ but you do have to accept that torture of any kind is not safe. All of these practices come with a chance of death. That doesn’t mean you have to kill off the character.

 Personally I think that as long as the character surviving doesn’t imply a torture is ‘harmless’ (or much less harmful then it is) then there’s nothing wrong with deciding a character got lucky.

 And while there have been a lot or deaths, far more then people tend to think, many many people have survived electrical torture. There’s nothing wrong with deciding your character is one of them.

 If you’re set on using something with electrodes in your story then uh… think about why the characters have a magneto? I mean even the portable ones are pretty heavy. And they’re huge by today’s standards. And they’re not really useful anymore. Unless you have also experienced the joys of staying somewhere where blowing up the local powerstation is practically a national sport. (Visiting my grandparents was always fun and, as my yaiyai would say, if the power is off go play outside.)

 Even then there isn’t really research I can point to that says shocking particular areas is ‘safer’. Shocks above the heart, whether they’re from a Taser, magneto or anything else, can cause heart attacks. But plenty of people get hit with a Taser in the chest and do not have a heart attack. Conversely there are cases where people have been shocked in the back, in the legs, in the side and ended up dead.

 There isn’t proper research on this: because the experiment would involve killing people.

 My impression from what I’ve read about Taser fatalities is that it is repeated shocks, rather then the specific area, that are more likely to cause death.

 In torture scenarios, most torturers avoid the face and head because it’s more likely to leave obvious marks. Torturers commonly target the genitals, hands and torso, including the chest.

 I’m going to leave you with a couple of links that I suggest you read.

 The first is the masterpost on the common psychological effects of torture. Next is the post on common misconceptions (to be clear there’s nothing in this ask that strikes me as ‘bad’ but it’s better to be aware of the common pitfalls especially if you’ve not written this before.)

 The third is Alleg’s The Question which is an account of his torture by French forces during the Franco-Algerian war. It contains a lot of descriptions of electrical torture using a magneto. It’s an old book and available in a lot of languages fairly cheaply. (If you absolutely can’t access it message me and I’ll copy over some relevant passages I typed up, but I think you’d get a lot from the book.)

 Finally you might want to take a look at Reuter’s piece on Tasers, mostly because it’s relevant, free and shorter then Rejali.

 I hope that helps. :)

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[scripttorture]

hi there, I hope my question is fitting with the blog theme. I am searching for resources about hand caning how it was used in schools, as a more or less harsh punishment for children (that's why I was not sure about asking here). I can't find if the punishment was delivered always on the palms or sometimes on the back of the hands too, and if there are serious risks of bone breaking or nerve damage since I guess it's a delicate area. I imagined my character being hit on the back of his hand with a wooden ruler, so I was wondering if that would be perceived as unusual + how his hands and fingers would feel after that - if there could be bleeding, swelling or similar. We're talking about a young man in his twenties - I know this was usually a punishment for children, it's just a really specific situation in an imaginary setting that resembles the late '800. Thank you for your attention and feel free to discard this ask if it's unfitting!

It might surprise you but by the modern legal definition this is arguably torture, so yes it’s very much in the scope of the blog.

 The definition of torture by the UN essentially amounts to this:

It must be painful

It must be done deliberately

It must be done by (or under the orders of) a public official for one of the following reasons

To obtain a confession

An attempt to gain information (torture can’t do this)

Punishment

Intimidation

 It does not matter if they’re trying to effect the victim or another person. So for instance if someone is tortured to ‘punish’ a relative who hasn’t been arrested, that still counts as torture.

 Class room abuse of school children isn’t what we usually think of when we discuss torture and it isn’t where most of the research is focused. But legally speaking, if it’s a government run school it certainly counts.

 My understanding here is based on modern research on spanking and I think it’s worth discussing the ways in which torture in a class room might differ from torture in a jail cell.

 In many countries and schools (probably most) children do not stay at the school. They have a reprieve. They know when they’ll leave every day and how long classes are. If they’re lucky they’ll be going back to a supportive families.

 They also have the support of their peers in class, something prisoners don’t always get. And they almost always have access to medical help in a way that is not dependant on the school.

 Depending on the context there may also be more effective recourse for children in schools then prisoners.

 What this amounts to is that children in schools are not necessarily subjected to the same long periods of abuse that prisoners are. For example standing stress positions were used against children in western schools for a long time. But if children aren’t sleeping at school then they’re less likely to be kept in those stress positions for 48 hours straight compared to prisoners.

 And all of these differences might effect things like recovery rates and symptom severity.

 I think that having time away from the abusive environment (the school), a supportive family and supportive peers would be protective factors. On the other hand children are incredibly dependant on adults and though the school day might end it takes years to finish school. I think those factors would make things worse.

 We know from research on smacking that even low levels of violence have a pronounced negative effect on children. Children who were hit grow into adults that have lower IQs, are more likely to be mentally ill, more likely to behave aggressively and have worse relationships with their parents (who smacked them.)

 Based on what I know about torture (keep in mind the studies I look at focus on adults) I think it’s likely that the frequency and intensity of the attacks would make a difference to how mentally healthy the character would be as an adult. He’d probably have lower self esteem then he would have done otherwise. He would be more likely to develop anxiety and/or depression.

 Think about how often these attacks are happening, how long each attack takes and how long through the schooling process they continue. This feeds in to what ‘reasonable’ physical and psychological consequences for the character look like. A character who is subjected to attacks of several minutes every day for the entire time he’s in school will look very different to a character who is hit once in every 3-6 weeks for the two year he had that one terrible teacher.

 Hitting the hands was and is a pretty common attack on children globally. My impression is that hitting the backs of the hands was more common but it depended on where you were. I think generally what you’re describing is a fairly ‘typical’ torture used against children in schools.

 The context I’ve heard it in most often is a single hit, during class as the teacher walks past.

 Honestly there are a lot of possible injuries these kinds of attacks can cause. Broken bones are possible but unless it’s a prolonged attack (ie he’s hit a lot of times over the course of a minute or two) they’re less likely with a wooden ruler. Even then I think fractures are more likely then breaks.

 Your instinct is pretty good. I think you’d see visible swelling and you would sometimes get bleeding as the skin across the knuckles cracks.

 I actually get these cracks pretty regularly because the chemicals I use dry out my skin. And I forget to moisturise. Like a terrible mammal.

 They don’t bleed a lot. But they’re also hard to put plasters over, the movement of the hand makes the plaster peel off. You can bandage around the whole hand, but this is very bulky and clumbersome. I personally never bothered. The cuts also re-open often. They often leave small blood stains on sleeves and cuffs. They also sting, especially when washing your hands.

 The actual hits- It’s a sharp pain and it makes a loud noise. The noise itself can be surprising. The joints often ache afterwards and it can take several days, may be up to a week for that ache to vanish. Which makes any repeated blows over the next few days more painful.

 If it’s a single hit that might be the end of the physical injuries, unless he’s really unlucky. But the more often this happens and the more times he’s hit in any attack the more likely more serious injuries are.

 I’m honestly not sure about nerve damage in this case. I will say that it seems unlikely if you’re talking about a single blow every month or so. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an adult survivor of this particular practice describe symptoms similar to nerve damage.

 Overall it sounds like a perfectly plausible scenario. I hope this helps :)

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[scripttorture]

I am writing historical fiction about Charles-Henri Sanson with as much reaserch as possible. My blank is: what would be the recovery time of a thirteen year old boy watching his father legally kill someone, watching a flogging, being forced to tie someone and being caned all in the same day?

Beyond what I could google I have no idea who this person is so keep that in mind as you read my answer. Also keep in mind that I am a pacifist and as such opposed to the death penalty. Which means my first instinct when I googled this guy and found he was France’s longest serving executioner was ‘Why?’ XD

 But I’m not here to dictate my personal taste or tell you what you should write in your stories. I’m here to help you portray torture and human rights abuses more realistically and respectfully. And hopefully give everyone a deeper understanding of these difficult topics as we go.

 The truth is that you’re unlikely to find one set recovery time for something like this because there is a lot of individual variance. Some children might be able to go through this one day without having lasting mental health problems. Others could develop PTSD in the same scenario. A third set might develop other serious mental health problems that are obvious to those around them and a fourth set might develop serious mental health problems that other people don’t notice or understand as mental illness.

 You might have seen me talk before about how torture survivors are a varied group and we don’t really understand why they develop different symptoms. We know the symptoms they could develop in quite a bit of detail but we don’t understand why particular individuals get particular symptoms from that list.

 That statement holds true for trauma survivors generally.

 Sometimes in a specific scenario you can say ‘this symptom is more likely’ but nothing is guaranteed. And as writers that gives us leeway to choose the symptoms that fit the character and story.

 Generally speaking trauma symptoms are more likely when someone is hurt or otherwise physically involved then when someone watches something traumatic. But witnesses can still develop trauma symptoms, including PTSD.

 Trauma symptoms are also more likely when someone has gone through multiple traumatic experiences. So this set of several different things happening in a day makes it a bigger overall risk.

 There’s a mounting body of evidence that says even low levels of violence against children have a profound negative effect. Most of the research I can link to focuses on younger children, especially toddlers. But the essential upshot is that a child who is hit will be less intelligent, less healthy, more prone to mental illness (including addiction) and less happy as an adult. This is compared to children who are never hit.

 And stuff like this makes it difficult to discuss things like recovery times. Because in one sense the recovery time is ‘never’: this child is beaten by his parents, therefore the damage is already done and he will be effected for his entire life.

 It’s probably important to discuss historical and cultural context in this scenario as well.

 There is no evidence that the legality of a punishment effects trauma responses in any way. Knowing that this is legal, even feeling that it is ‘right’, will not stop someone developing mental health problems when exposed to violence.

 But it may well effect how people express themselves and what these mental health problems look like.

 Thinking about this scenario I keep remembering the way torturers insist that their ‘work’ is important, essential. Even when they acknowledge that their health problems come from torturing others. They talk about how ‘hard’ what they do is and how isolated and unappreciated they feel. It’s a bizarre, self-obsessed sort of regret; they refuse to acknowledge the effect their actions have had on others while obsessing over their own pain.

 And stuck in a lifetime of the kinds of scenarios you’re picturing? I think that’s a likely outcome. I think severe mental health problems, and possibly given the era physical health problems, are likely.

 With that background, with this sort of thing happening all the time around a child, it’s almost impossible to estimate the effect of one day, one incident. Because these things are cumulative.

 I think that a child who’d never been exposed to violence before and is not exposed to violence again for the rest of their life could still come out of the scenario you’ve put forward with life long mental health problems. Although a minority could be lucky and make a complete recovery.

 But we’re not talking about one incident here. We’re talking about a family whose profession is violence.

 Which means that overall, over this character’s life, I’d expect mental health problems similar to those seen in torturers. Which you can read about here.

 And that makes me hesitant to give a recovery time. Because even if this character could recovery in a month, six months, a year- that wouldn’t matter if he’s exposed to more violence during that time.

 I think the best way to treat this is to pick 1-3 long term symptoms from the list I’ve linked you to and show this character developing those symptoms over time.

 We tend to have a rather extreme view of trauma survivors, painting them as either completely incapacitated by what they survived or superhumanly unaffected and resistant. The truth is somewhere in between.

 Recovery doesn’t mean that mental health problems vanish or that they have no effect on someone’s life. But people do improve. They learn to live with their conditions and they can go on to achieve incredible things.

 That recovery depends on being in a safe, supportive environment. It means being away from further sources of trauma.

 And based on everything you’ve said, based on the history and setting, I don’t think your character would get that.

 Which means that I think he would decline over time, gradually and without recovery. Not because of one day or one incident, but because these incidents would never stop.

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[scripttorture]

1 Thanks for your response about faking torture. A few things didn't get mentioned that seem important. The victim is never tortured. The fake torturer is the only person assumed to do so. The others are only kidnappers and got what they thought was person with a reputation for torture to get information. He isn't a torturer at all, but the victim's friend pretending. So he could enter the kidnapper's lair, visit his friend and stage a rescue. Also, I should mention the victim already has a few

2. cuts and bruises simply by fighting the kidnappers before they took him down. No actual torture ever happens. The kidnappers only need to hear sounds of torture and the victim appearing (mentally exhausted if not physical) a little worse for wear. There is also no doctor or lawyer to fool.

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Sorry it took so long to get back to this one.

 This question is following on from an earlier ask, here.

 I appreciate the additional details but my answer hasn’t changed much. I think you should read more about torture apologia and clean torture before you go forward with this (O’Mara’s Why Torture Doesn’t Work:The Neuroscience of Interrogation is a great starting point.)

 I don’t think this scenario is torture apologia but while writing it you will brush up against concepts and pre-conceptions that are common in torture apologia. Things like the assumption torture always leads to obvious external marks and the assumption that torture survivors without these marks are lying.

 You’ll find it a lot easier to navigate around those if you familiarise yourself with these tropes and their implications first.

 If you can’t access O’Mara, because it’s too expensive or unsafe, then take a look through my tags on ‘clean torture’ and ‘torture apologia’. It will probably be a longer, choppier process but it should help you get an over view.

 This post is designed as a starting point. There’s an old post on clean tortures specifically over here.

 In this kind of short term scenario around people who’ve never seen survivors before torture is pretty easy to fake. The vast majority of torture today is ‘clean’, which means it leaves no obvious external marks. The majority of these clean torture techniques have been used for hundreds, if not thousands of years. So even though scarring tortures and clean tortures were used side by side historically this sort of thing is still plausible in a historical setting.

 Tasers and stun guns, used according to instructions, sometimes leave a slightly red patch of skin, similar to a pinch or a bug bite. Waterboarding can make people throw up but aside from that the only immediately obvious sign is being wet, tired and distressed. Clean beatings might leave some slight redness but they don’t always.

 If there aren’t any experts to fool, or any close observation then this scenario is perfectly possible.

 My worry is that this sort of plot could end up implying that there are a lot of malicious torture accusations and that the majority of survivors could be ‘lying’ about their experiences.

 Because this character, who is acting tiredness, pain and distress? That’s how most torture survivors today would look immediately afterwards. The immediate aftermath is often easy to act.

 The life long disabilities, the memory problems and the effect on communities, on generations is not something that people can consistently fake.

 I guess what I keep circling back to is this: if torture isn’t going to have a lasting impact on this story why is it coming up at all? Is there really no other way to break this character out? A way that doesn’t risk implying that the most vulnerable people on our planet are liars.

 I approach the blog and the questions here with the assumption that the majority of us writers have not been tortured. We are writing about other people. People who are more vulnerable then us. People who are routinely dismissed, talked over and neglected throughout our global society.

 We owe it to them to do the best job we can. And I think sometimes that means not writing about them.

 Sometimes it means letting go of a plot we thought was neat or clever because it’s too difficult to navigate without risking harm to someone more vulnerable then we are.

 Ask yourself if you are really sure you can write this without propping up arguments that support torture today. I can not answer that for you. You know your story and your own abilities far better then I do.

 If you’re confident you can handle it I still think you need to do the reading. And if you’re even a tiny bit unsure then I think it might be better if you try and think of another method of escape.

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[scripttorture]

I want my book to be very anti-torture, but the people who decide torture is wrong are actually the bad guys. They’re protagonists, but they are also criminals who have been kidnapped by government workers. I’m worried people will assume they are wrong because they are bad guys, or use ‘but they’re criminals! Who have killed people!’ to justify ignoring the anti-torture stance. Do you have any advice on how I should handle it? There are many people who passively or actively support torture.

Well I think the first thing you need to do is accept that you can’t reach everyone.

 I know that’s hard, but it’s better to pour your energy into doing the best job you can do then it is to try and achieve the impossible. Incidentally this is why I don’t typically engage with other blogs on this topic, there are people who won’t budge in their views and I’m here to inform not waste my energy debating on the internet.

 But the good news is that most of the time torture apologia really does just come from ignorance rather then people wanting to justify torture. My experience is that most of the time when you explain to people what torture actual does, how it actually functions, they change their minds. They’re often shocked, sure. And they sometimes ask questions that can seem a little silly. But they don’t really want to hang on to these ideas.

 That does make it a little easier then trying to discuss a lot of other forms of structural violence or inequality. We really have made a lot of cultural progress on this issue at a global level.

 As for actually writing it: I think in this sort of fictional scenario you’ll get a lot of mileage by stressing the practical reasons not to use torture. Because yes, if you have criminal characters trying take the moral high ground a lot of readers are going to question that. But if you show these characters as competent at what they do and make rejecting torture a sign of that competence I think that will be much harder to ignore.

 Here some practical reasons that criminals might have for rejecting torture:

‘We’re on the clock here, don’t waste time.’ Torture, especially ‘clean’ (non scarring) tortures can take hours or days.

‘You want me to waste money and resources on what?’ Torture typically means holding someone prisoner and keeping them alive. It means putting a basic amount of time and space aside to keep someone alive.

‘We’re never gonna get anything useful out of this so why bother?’ Torture doesn’t lead to accurate information, if your criminal character know that they’d rightly see it as a waste of energy.

‘Right so you want us to spend weeks chasing up lies- Anyone got a sensible suggestion?’ Highlight the fact that torture produces lies, which this group doesn’t have the time to chase up.

‘Are you crazy? If word gets out our informants will be scared of us! Then where are we gonna get information from?’ Torture makes informants less likely to come forward and this can effect organised criminal groups just as much as police departments.

 I read a story by a regular follower several months ago who dealt with this problem by having the criminals talk about it and explicitly reference their own experiences as an anti-torture argument. It went a little like this:

 ‘R: I’m so mad, I want to beat the crap out of them! Then I bet they’d tell us what we want to know.’ L: Don’t be dumb, you know that doesn’t work. R: Yeah according to your fancy books.

L: According to experience R! When’s the last time you told a cop about our jobs because they tased you? Get over yourself and get your head back in the game.’

 I’m paraphrasing, but I thought it was an incredibly effective exchange acknowledging that the research exists and that these characters had their own experiences to draw from which aligned with what they’d read. It also leant into the character’s personalities with R being much more emotional (and acknowledging his urge is driven by a desire for revenge) while L was much more calculating and acted as the planner.

 Focusing on the idea of torture as a waste of resources could also work really well. If the criminal characters have the knowledge to know it doesn’t work then that could easily be how they see it: a drain on time, money and energy with no pay off.

 From that perspective why would they bother? Framed like that the idea seems ridiculous. They’re criminals after all, they’re after an ‘easy’ buck. Why waste more effort on something that doesn’t work?

 You could bring up that point of view by having a potential-victim character assume that they’ll be tortured. And have the criminals respond by laughingly dismissing the idea and outlining just how stupid it is.

 You could also link a decision not to use torture to this criminal group being better informed then other groups (legal or not) who do use torture. Because ordinary people volunteer more information to groups that don’t torture (especially if they’re paying).

 That’s all I can think of at the moment, I hope it helps :)

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