Blog: Reflections on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture
In recognition of the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, Martin Kettle, Interim Head of the UK NPM Secretariat, reflects on the history and meaning of torture, drawing on his experience working closely with survivors of torture and ill-treatment, and the responsibility that comes with bearing witness to their experiences.
The world marks 26th June as the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.
There is much discussion about the nature of torture. The 118-word definition in the UN Convention against Torture (1984) has stood the test of time. In short, severe pain inflicted by an official person either to extract information or a confession, or to punish, intimidate or coerce, or for any reason based on discrimination.
It’s a legal definition; and like many such, it is about what counts as torture, and what doesn’t. That is a little different from understanding what torture is. Such understanding, it could well be argued, is only accessible to those who have themselves been tortured.
The word came to us from Latin via French, and from a word meaning ‘twist’. The same word as ‘torque’. ‘Torture’ was originally applied to the rack: a Greek, and then Roman instrument where the victim’s wrists and ankles were chained and the chains attached to ratcheted rollers at either end of the rack, so that they could be tightened incrementally. Its Roman usage was not so different from crucifixion. The rack was in use in England between the mid-15th and early 17th centuries.
I have thought of that sometimes, when I have seen ‘pain compliance’ being used in prisons or in the forcible removal of people from the UK. In particular, I have not infrequently seen steel handcuffs being not only applied but also slightly twisted in order to encourage someone to board a plane, for example; or in recently discontinued prison practice, thumbs or wrists routinely twisted back to encourage someone to cease from physical resistance.
Almost no one would describe such actions as torture. I have frequently seen the marks of actual torture on people’s bodies, and heard their accounts of what was done to them. I have – who hasn’t? – seen the trauma-formed instant reactions to a loud noise or a knock on the door at night or just a man in a uniform.
This is the day for the voice and the memory and the support of victims of torture. I have never been tortured nor even seen anyone being unequivocally tortured, and so I feel myself subject to Wittgenstein’s injunction in the last sentence of his Tractatus – ‘whereof one cannot speak, of that must be silent’. But their voice must never go unheard.
‘Victim’ is another word from the Romans, but it has nothing to do with ‘victory’. Victima was a technical term for an animal used in sacrifice. It only appeared in its modern use in the mid-17th century: just too late to be applied to someone who suffered the rack. To be a victima, to adopt the meaning prevalent for all but the last 300 years, is to be treated as an animal, as dispensable, as a being whose suffering, whose very life means nothing in the context of an entirely useless, cultic infliction of ultimate, lethal pain.
It is a cruel, extra twist of the rack when victimhood becomes a mark of shame – as with the survivors of rape, no less common a method of torture now than ever. This Day in Support of Victims of Torture is a day also of respect for the dignity of these children, women and men. I have several times had to be very quiet when a man has found a private space to lift his shirt or his trousers and show me, with dignity, the marks of torture. They are the stigmata which indict the human race and cannot but generate an outrage which must, must be channelled elsewhere than into further cycles of hatred and violence.
Our NPM deals mainly with issues of potential cruelty or ill-treatment: to monitor and to prevent, going into every place where people are deprived of liberty and are to an extent sealed off from the public view. But if we know anything about the current state of the world, at whatever point of the compass, we know that torture, along with every form of casual or deliberate cruelty, is never impossible and is, perhaps in a growing number of contexts, real. All 21 of our NPM monitoring bodies look to support victims of torture, and most especially to prevent future victimisation. And as individuals we can think of no one that deserves and calls out our acting, our giving and our respectful caring more than the victims of torture, that abuse which perhaps more than any other denies that humanity means anything at all.