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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