An important study of torture by the remarkable Metin Basoglu has just appeared in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. Dr Basoglu, who is at the Institute of Psychiatry of King's College, London, studied two groups of torture survivors (432 in total), one from Turkey and one from the former Yugoslavia. The article, which is accompanied by two commentaries, used principal components analysis to look at 'captivity stressors' and relate them to the perceived severity of the torture and to post-traumatic stress disorder in the victims. It provides yet another compelling argument for regarding torture as a social abomination, not a 'last resort'.
To read the list of stressors is to catch a glimpse of a world most people would prefer not to think about. The techniques include:
- deprivation (of food, clothes, sleep, water, privacy, medical care, hygiene, sensory stimuli)
- psychological abuse (e.g. sham executions, witnessing torture) and threats of torture or death against victims and their loved ones
- physical restraint (including forced standing, and the fearsome 'Palestinian hanging' or strappado, in which the person is hung from their hands, which are tied behind their back)
- extreme sensory stimuli (e.g. bright lights, noise, heat/cold)
- humiliation (often involving excreta)
- physical torture (beatings, needles under nails, electric shocks)
- sexual torture (including rape)
Basoglu sees torture as having four components:
- the perpetrator's intent (the action is deliberate)
- the perpetrator's purpose (the action is done for a reason)
- the stressors are selected to cause pain, suffering, distress
- the victim's lack of control is deliberately enhanced
As so often, the sense of control appears to be the key here. That leads to several predictions, for which the study finds support. For example, political activists, who have been trained to deal with torture and are presumably highly committed to their cause, should feel more in control than non-activists, and thus should be harder for torturers to break. Indeed, one of the research's most astonishing findings, which Basoglu emphasises, is the awe-inspiring resilience some people display under torture.
This suggests that, contrary to what is often said about torture's value in gathering information, torture is best at breaking the innocent and uninvolved civilians caught in the system by mistake - and may fail to work against its real targets. It's also counterproductively good at radicalising victims, thereby storing up future problems for the torturing regime.
(If you were developing a test for cancer, would you want a test which gave positive results for non-cancerous cells, missed cancerous ones, and also damaged patients' DNA, hence raising their cancer risk? Who would? And yet people support the use of torture, which is good at making enemies but hopeless for seeking out truth. If torture weren't so good at making perpetrators - or, more specifically, their bosses - feel better, we'd have ditched its techniques on efficiency grounds alone, never mind the morals.)
If control matters, then the degradation of control inherent in cruel, inhuman and degrading treatments should make for more severe torture; the physical damage done should matter less to the victim. Again, Basoglu finds this.
The study does not mention former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's famous rema
rks on forced standing: "I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?" Nonetheless it demolishes the Bush government's equivocations over their interrogation techniques. Basoglu shows that what matters in torture is the combination and extent of techniques, and the helplessness they induce. You can't say a specific method isn't torture because it, by itself and taken out of context, doesn't actually cause severe physical damage. Physical damage is not the worst harm done in torture.
The philosophical riddle of the grains of sand asks, when does a group of grains become a heap? One grain isn't a heap, nor two, nor three, so adding one more grain can't turn 'some grains' into 'a heap' - yet a heap is what you get. Likewise for torture. Each technique by itself may seem innocuous (especially to the unthinking or wilfully ignorant). Put them together, and the suffering becomes unbearable.
Reference: Basoglu, M. (2009). "A multivariate contextual analysis of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatments: Implications for an evidence-based definition of torture." American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 79(2): 135-145.
(Apologies to Dr Basoglu for font limitations, which prevent me rendering the Turkish symbols in his name.)
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