Torture

• 1. Introduction

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  Torture is the deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on a person, and despite being one of the oldest and most universally condemned practices in human history, it remains active in most countries today. Jean Améry, a torture survivor, wrote that it was "the most horrible event a human being can retain within himself" and that "whoever was tortured, stays tortured". How can something so broadly outlawed, so widely opposed in public opinion, and so thoroughly discredited by research persist across every continent and political system? The answers involve the nature of fear, the failure of institutions, the sociology of violence, and a centuries-long struggle to define and then constrain what counts as torture in the first place.

• 2. Defining the Undefinable

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  Cesare Beccaria, the Italian reformer, declared in 1764 that torture was "a sure way to acquit robust scoundrels and to condemn weak but innocent people". His words targeted a specific legal definition of torture that had governed European courts for centuries, yet even today, what counts as torture remains one of the most contested questions in law.

  The United Nations Convention against Torture requires that torture be carried out by "a public official or other person acting in an official capacity". Other legal systems stretch this to include non-state armed groups and organized crime. Courts have gradually moved away from that state-centric view by holding governments responsible for failing to prevent or punish torture by third parties.

  The threshold at which treatment becomes torture rather than merely cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment is the most contentious element. Legal scholar Ergün Cakal argues that violent practices only come to be recognized as torture after they no longer serve the purposes of the state. The United States government, for instance, argued that waterboarding is not torture, illustrating how definitional flexibility can be used to justify what others would classify as a grave violation.

  Judicial corporal punishment sits in a similarly contested space. The UN definition initially excluded pain arising from "lawful sanctions", but from the 1990s onward courts increasingly recognized corporal punishment as torture. Capital punishment, as an extreme form of corporal punishment, has also seen certain methods of execution banned as tortuous. Others do not consider corporal punishment with a fixed penalty to be torture, arguing it does not aim to break the victim's will, which carries the discussion into the next question: what exactly is torture trying to accomplish?

• 3. Who Gets Tortured

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  Most victims of torture are poor and marginalized people suspected of crimes. This fact rarely surfaces in public debate, which tends to focus on political prisoners and victims of armed conflict, two categories that draw attention disproportionate to their share of total cases.

  Groups especially vulnerable to torture include unemployed young men, the urban poor, LGBTQ people, refugees and migrants, ethnic and racial minorities, indigenous people, and people with disabilities. Criminalization of poverty through laws targeting homelessness, sex work, or informal employment can expose people to violent and arbitrary policing. Victims from these groups typically lack the resources or standing to seek legal redress, and the violence against them is often framed by perpetrators as a legitimate policing tactic.

  Liberal democracies are less likely to abuse their own citizens but may practice torture against marginalized citizens and non-citizens to whom they are not democratically accountable. Majoritarian institutions prove ineffective at preventing torture against minorities or foreigners. Voters may support violence against out-groups perceived as threatening, and public demand for decisive action against crime can actively facilitate the use of torture.

  Torture is more likely when a society feels threatened by wars or crises, but studies have not found a consistent relationship between the use of torture and terrorist attacks. In some countries such as Kyrgyzstan, suspects are more likely to be tortured at the end of the month because of performance quotas, a detail that reveals how bureaucratic incentives can drive individual acts of violence.

• 4. The Anatomy of Perpetrators

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  Psychiatrist Pau Pérez-Sales finds that torturers act from a variety of motives, including ideological commitment, personal gain, group belonging, avoiding punishment, and avoiding guilt from previous acts of torture. Fear, rather than sadism, is the most common driver. Most perpetrators do not volunteer for the role; many have an innate reluctance to employ violence and rely on coping mechanisms such as alcohol or drugs.

  In most cases of systematic torture, perpetrators were desensitized to violence during training through exposure to physical or psychological abuse, which can be a deliberate tactic to create torturers. Even when not explicitly ordered by their governments, perpetrators may feel peer pressure driven by competitive masculinity. Elite and specialized police units are especially prone to torturing, partly because of their tight-knit nature and insulation from oversight.

  Sociologist Christopher J. Einolf argues that "torture can create a vicious cycle in which a fear of internal enemies leads to torture, torture creates false confessions, and false confessions reinforce torturers' fears, leading to a spiral of paranoia and ever-increasing torture" similar to a witch hunt. Once a torture program begins, it almost always escalates beyond what decision-makers originally intended.

  Bureaucracy plays a poorly understood role. Military, intelligence, psychology, medical, and legal professionals can all become complicit. Responsibility gets diffused across institutions, and perpetrators use that diffusion to excuse their actions. Maintaining secrecy is essential, achieved through direct censorship, denial, mislabeling, or offshoring abuses outside a state's territory. The approval of superiors is necessary but not sufficient; a specific order to torture is rarely documented.

• 5. The False Promise of Results

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  The use of torture to obtain information during interrogation accounts for a small percentage of worldwide torture cases. Confession extraction and intimidation are far more common purposes. Nevertheless, the idea that torture reliably produces actionable intelligence has proven tenacious.

  The ticking time bomb scenario, in which a captive knows where a bomb is hidden and only torture can extract the information in time, is cited regularly to justify interrogational torture. Scholars of torture describe this scenario as extremely rare, if not impossible. Fictional portrayals of torture as effective have compounded misconceptions that sustain the argument.

  Research has found that coercive interrogation is only slightly more effective than cognitive interviewing for extracting a confession, while presenting a much higher risk of false confession. Many torture victims will say whatever the torturer wants to hear simply to end the pain. Others who are actually guilty refuse to confess, particularly if they believe confession would only bring more torture.

  Ron E. Hassner, while skeptical of some criticisms of torture, argues that for torture to be effective it must be planned and drawn out. His conclusion is stark: "Our society would have to acquiesce to a massive bureaucratized torture campaign, at times of peace or war, that targeted thousands, from all walks of life, regardless of culpability, in order to extract modest intelligence that was, at best, corroborative." Research has also found that state torture can extend the lifespan of terrorist organizations, increase incentives for insurgents to use violence, and radicalize the opposition.

• 6. Methods and Their Aftermath

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  Beatings or blunt trauma are the most common form of physical torture, reported by about two-thirds of survivors. These range from unsystematic blows to targeted techniques such as falanga, which focuses strikes on the soles of the feet, and repeated strikes against both ears. People are often suspended in painful positions such as strappado or upside-down hanging in combination with beatings.

  Beginning in the twentieth century, many torturers shifted toward non-scarring and psychological methods to maintain deniability. Democracies, facing more scrutiny and legal pressure, led the innovation in what came to be called clean torture practices in the early twentieth century. These techniques spread worldwide by the 1960s. Electric shocks, asphyxiation including waterboarding, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, positional torture, and musical torture all fall into this category.

  Psychological methods are frequently reported as subjectively worse than physical ones. Death threats, mock executions, and being forced to witness torture of another person are associated with severe long-term harm. Rape and sexual assault are described as universal torture methods and frequently instill a permanent sense of shame in victims.

  Torture survivor Jean Améry argued that "whoever was tortured, stays tortured". An average of 40 percent of survivors develop long-term post-traumatic stress disorder, a higher rate than for any other traumatic experience. Chronic pain and pain-related disability are commonly reported. Death is not an uncommon outcome. Criminal prosecutions for torture are rare; most victims who submit formal complaints are not believed, partly because the effects of torture frequently produce inconsistent testimony, undermining survivors' credibility in both refugee proceedings and criminal cases.

• 7. Law, History, and the Road to Prohibition

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  There is archaeological evidence of torture in Early Neolithic Europe, roughly 7,000 years ago. Throughout most of human history, torture was legally and morally acceptable; painful punishments were distinguished from torture itself, and confessions obtained under torture were considered reliable. In most societies, citizens could be judicially tortured only under exceptional circumstances such as treason, and only when some evidence already existed. Non-citizens including foreigners and slaves faced torture far more commonly.

  In China, judicial torture practiced for more than two millennia was banned in 1905 along with flogging and lingchi as a means of execution, though torture in China continued through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Europe, torture was already of marginal importance to criminal justice by the time it was formally abolished in the 18th and 19th centuries. Enlightenment ideas about human value, the lowering of the standard of proof in criminal cases, and the expansion of imprisonment as an alternative all contributed to abolition.

  Colonial powers used torture widely to subdue resistance, and torture reached a peak during the anti-colonial wars of the twentieth century. An estimated 300,000 people were tortured during the Algerian War of 1954-1962. Shocked by Nazi atrocities that featured prominently in the Nuremberg trials, the United Nations drew up the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which prohibited torture. In the early 1970s, Amnesty International launched a global campaign against torture, exposing its widespread use and contributing to the United Nations Convention against Torture in 1984.

  The prohibition of torture is now a peremptory norm in international law, meaning it is forbidden for all states under all circumstances. In 1987, Israel became the only country in the world to purportedly legalize torture. More broadly, the United States government challenged the prohibition as part of its overseas torture program in the war on terror, using the same state security arguments deployed by Israel and various colonial powers before it.

• 8. Prevention and What Works

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  Malcolm Evans, a longtime participant in United Nations anti-torture efforts, argues that "fundamental shifts and changes in societal attitudes" towards the people at risk of becoming torture victims may be required to put an end to torture.

  Because the risk of torture is highest directly after an arrest, procedural safeguards such as immediate access to a lawyer and notifying relatives of an arrest are among the most effective prevention tools. Visits by independent monitoring bodies to detention sites have also reduced torture. Torture proliferates especially in situations of incommunicado detention.

  General training of police to improve investigative skills has been more effective at reducing torture than specific human rights training. Institutional police reforms have worked when abuse is systematic. Naming and shaming campaigns have shown mixed results and can in some cases make things worse. Legal changes that are not implemented in practice have little effect, particularly where the law has limited legitimacy or is routinely ignored.

  Political scientist Darius Rejali criticizes torture prevention research for failing to address "what to do when people are bad; institutions broken, understaffed, and corrupt; and habitual serial violence is routine". Torturers, Rejali notes, operate within a subculture that finds ways around rules. Safeguards that apply inside detention can be circumvented by beating suspects during roundups or on the way to the police station, before any formal protections kick in.