Content note: descriptions of torture and sexual violence.
Torture has a long, long history as a social, political, and religious tool.
In every human era from the misty prehistoric through self-proclaimed modern civilizations, people in power have noted our aversion to severe pain and severe punishment, and used it to control, constrain, and coerce others.
Happening right now: Police officers in Mexico beat and sexually assault women accused of being gang members or part of drug or human trafficking circles. UN peacekeepers in the Central African Republic violate the residents and refugees they’re paid to protect.
Torture allows people with power to exploit the links between body, mind, and social group. So a government employee repeatedly drowns a person, hoping that the person’s fear of death motivates them to share useful information. Religious leaders and party-line enforcers use mechanical devices, knives, or fire to edge alleged heretics and traitors toward repentance, to foreshadow capital sentences, or to prelude hell.
This is real life, and it’s been real life for as long as there have been scribes to record it. There are so many possible permutations, as many permutations as we have used our imagination to dream and our will to manifest, and every permutation is revolting to me.
This is what we’ve done with our power of creativity.
I wrote that torture enables people with power because the legal definition of torture focuses exclusively on the public sphere and those who rule and maintain it. It focuses on the use of torture by public officials or by others with the knowledge or sanction of public officials. Public officials are people in power, not merely people with power.
I’ve been mulling over Jesse Williams’ comments at the BET Awards this weekend (read transcript | watch video). Williams, who received the network’s 2016 Humanitarian Award for his activism on police brutality and social change activism, listed five people killed in interactions with the police over the last two years: Tamir Rice (Ohio), Rekia Boyd (Illinois), Eric Garner (New York), Sandra Bland (Texas), and Darrien Hunt (Utah).
I walked the streets after Garner’s death in New York, and participated in remembrances for QPOC killed by police in 2015. I’ve typed names and shared stories of trans and gender non-conforming people whose assaults and murders are so rarely solved cases. And I can’t help but think of all the contexts out of the public sphere where people experience severe pain and severe punishment, where harms are emotional, verbal, and psychological as well as physical, and where because the abuser is not a public official or the torture occurs at church or home, resolution and restitution never happen.
Today I wonder about how TV and film has come to make explicit torture scenes an expected plot device. In the Bond franchise, in the Taken franchise, in network series like 24, Scandal, and Marco Polo, torture stands for this bad guy is really bad or this good guy is really badass or this morally grey person is really morally grey or, most banal, this realistic historical drama is really realistic and historical.
News organizations so publicize government-authorized torture that we now know more about it than any of us have ever needed to: simulated drowning (waterboarding), sensory deprivation, and the exploitation of empathy—torturing both a person and the people witnessing that torture without the power to intervene.
We’re increasingly exposed to the details of torture regardless of our individual relationships to people with private or public power. How does that exposure enable us to intervene, to press for a world so unlike this one that torture can’t be a commonplace, can’t be an entertainment trope, can’t be an experience we passively endure or—God help us—enjoy?
Even if I’ll never brand or beat or brutalize another human being myself, what could make me start believing that others’ suffering could be a “necessary evil,” that is, a “good”? What about my core values and beliefs could stop me from excusing that suffering whether it happened in front of me or far, far away at a government compound or prison or refugee camp?
The psychological facts about how people respond to the threat of pain or suffering haven’t changed. And, historically, sincere faith hasn’t been enough to help us choose otherwise. It still isn’t (Pew Forum | Post/ABC).
So what do we need to help us turn this corner?