The International Day in Support of Victims of Torture (26 June) does not receive much coverage in the media. Like most of us, their readers, they would prefer to ignore it. The pained question that the eyes of a person tortured ask of their torturer is: ‘Why are you hurting me?’ The question that they put to all of us who share a common humanity is: ‘Why do you encourage, excuse, allow or tolerate them hurting me?’ It is not a question with which we sit comfortably. But our evasion of it would also be a wound to our common humanity.
Torture today has become more commonly practised, and is often seen as normal. In war it is used routinely by military to try to extract unreliable information. Initially we thought it was confined to our enemies, but Guantanamo Bay proved otherwise. Now there are reports of it in Ukraine, Gaza, Afghanistan and Syria and many other nations. It is also commonly used by the security forces of totalitarian regimes to quell dissent and in prisons to subdue and intimidate prisoners, including children. Publicity, public revulsion, inquiries and recommendations come and go, but with lessening conviction. The practice does not change.
ANNIHILATION OF THE SOUL
The reason why torture is so evil is that it aims to annihilate the soul as well as the body. It works by destroying people’s sense of self, their self-worth, and both their own and their torturers’ recognition of a common humanity. Apart from inflicting pain it also strips away the bodily rituals and decencies that enshrine self-worth. Torturers make people go naked, deprive them of human company, remove their privacy, prevent bodily cleanliness, multiply arbitrary and harsh rules and punishments, deprive them of sleep and light. Torture is designed to make people feel worthless, isolate them from human society, disorientate them and make them cower at the prospect of unending pain. It is aimed at destroying any sense of a shared humanity, trust in a moral order, sense of self-worth, and hope for decency. Those who survive it live lastingly with its effects.
A WIDER EFFECT
The use of torture also affects those who order and inflict it. It offers justification for the war that they wage and the punitive rule they impose by seeming to prove that those against whom they fight are worthless, are less than human, and deserve the cruelties of war and of torture.
In fact, torturers are also victims of torture. Their humanity is trashed. In Pol Pot’s Cambodia people were commonly not accused of specific crimes but were tortured until they hit on the crimes and details that they were supposed to have committed. Then they were tried and executed. Like AI, torture can create as well as reveal the ‘truth’.
The Day in Support of the Victims of Torture invites to recognise and honour them. For most of us our support may lead us to open our ears and our hearts to the persons who suffer torture more often than to open our wallets or homes to them. The day invites us to attend to reports of the use of torture, to imagine the suffering of the victims and be outraged by it and by people who defend it, especially if it is inflicted in Australian prisons and institutions and in those of nations we consider to be our allies.