And now for a disturbing question

[swan_tower]

I have reached new heights — or possibly depths — in asking for research recommendations.

Because I need stuff to read on the subject of torture.

(Consider that a trigger warning for the rest of this post, because yeah. It’s gonna be like that.)

For the purposes of the story I’m working on, what I need to look into are a) methods used and b) the short- and long-term effects of those methods. Discussions of the intel value or lack thereof are irrelevant for this project; the torture is being carried out for reasons other than the gathering of information. Ditto anything about the legality of such things, because this isn’t taking place in the real world. I’m focused on what the bad guys would be doing to the character (including considerations like “if they don’t want their victim to die from shock, how should they pace their actions”), how the character would plausibly respond to what’s happening (i.e. offering information they don’t care about, going catatonic, etc), and what kind of physical and emotional scars the victim would be left with afterward.

This is one of those cases where I almost certainly will not get graphic within the story itself about what’s being done, but I very much need to work out the graphic details so that I’ll know how to write everything around it. If you can recommend a book or web resource to me that will help me do this right, I’d be very grateful. My knowledge of the subject all derives from early modern witchcraft trials, which is long on ways of maiming people for life but short on the details of how it affected the victims during and after. I’m sure people have written about this in recent times; I just don’t know how to find what I need.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[between4walls.livejournal.com]

You absolutely need to read The Question, by Henri Alleg, a memoir of his being tortured during the Algerian War. Its short and detailed. Jorge Semprun (another torture survivor) used it to reverse engineer what might happen if he was captured while underground in Spain. Jean Amery is supposed to be quite good, too--i havent read him, though. He was tortured in WWII.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Normally I'm much bouncier about accepting recs, in a "that sounds fabulous!" kind of way, but on this topic . . . yeah.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Check out Amnesty International's website: http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/torture

Several long extracts of Mohamedou Ould Slahi's _Guantanamo Diaries_ were serialized in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/guantanamo-diary

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I'll definitely look into those.

[sovay]

For the purposes of the story I'm working on, what I need to look into are a) methods used and b) the short- and long-term effects of those methods.

What time period?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

From a tech standpoint, pre-electricity. Any other points on that front are negotiable, as I can set the parameters to suit however I decide to approach this.

I should clarify, though, that I probably need to look into physical torture more than psychological (though of course the two are not entirely separable).

[sovay]

From a tech standpoint, pre-electricity.

That was what I wanted to know.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Modern era? No specific suggestions, but if you search for torture + Chile (and/or Pinochet) you will get a lot of horrific stuff. The Nazis, of course, did a lot of torture and I would consider everything going on in concentration camps to be a form of very effective torture, even if wasn't specifically directed at one individual. I would also look into Guantanamo for the current state of the art, so to speak.

Long-term effects: people who have been tortured have the highest rates of PTSD of any trauma survivors. It's statistically worse for you, mentally speaking, than rape, child abuse, and combat.

However, if you're talking about torture that happens to adults, they may come out a lot more functional, at least on the surface, than people who were abused as children and never experienced anything but abuse. (This has been my personal experience, FWIW.) Concentration camp survivors generally got jobs, got married, had kids, etc. However, there were lasting effects that were passed down to their children and sometimes even their grandchildren. This has been studied a lot. Search for something like generational trauma Holocaust/concentration camp survivors.

I don't have specific resources for this, but if your setting is more modern and you're talking about stuff like sleep deprivation and electric shock rather than the rack or Iron Maiden or such, torturers tend not to be too concerned with their victims accidentally dying on them and don't take special measures to prevent that. 1) if the intent is to terrorize rather than to get info, it doesn't matter if people die sometimes, 2) people don't generally go into the life-threatening type of physical shock from pain alone. But I think water boarding has been studied in terms of how much you can do without accidentally drowning the person.

People telling the torturer everything they want to hear is pretty easy to elicit. Sleep deprivation + threats over as little as eight hours/a couple days will get that from a lot or possibly most people. The Central Park jogger case has some info on that - cops got fake confessions from innocent people by doing that in a fairly short time period. Catatonia is somewhat rare in general and not everyone will do that no matter what happens to them.

John McCain might be a good person to look at for reference on a lot of this stuff. Ditto SERE training though obviously that is not all publicly known. To a certain extent you can train people to resist torture, though how much and what you're defining as resistance varies.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I should have specified that I do indeed mean physical torture more than psychological (though the two are interlinked, of course, and the circumstances of the situation are going to have seriously negative psychological effects on the protagonist, for character-specific reasons the captors won't have anticipated).

I'm pretty much taking PTSD in the aftermath as a given, to one degree or another. Given what you've said before about helplessness contributing to the likelihood of PTSD, it seemed logical.

[carbonel]

I don't know if this is the sort of thing you're looking for, but the work that had the most impact on me that dealt with torture was the play The Investigation by Peter Weiss.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

It isn't what I'm looking for, but it sounds useful regardless; one often gets great value out of the things one didn't even know to ask for.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Well, damn. I left all my books in the UK. (I have a splendid Mediaeval Research Library, specifically including books on torture et al. Sigh.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Do you recall any titles or authors?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

No, of course not. These were the books I bought when I was reading everything, prior to writing the Outremer series. Whatever was in print in the UK in the late '90s, in re generic mediaeval/Crusaders/castles/whatever. I know there was torture in the mix, but...

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

in re generic mediaeval/Crusaders/castles/whatever

Oh, I know that kind of research. :-)

[shark-hat.livejournal.com]

I took a quick look through the catalogue of a university which has a peace studies degree. Obviously most of their books are on discovering/preventing torture and helping survivors, but these ones look relevant.

The phenomenon of torture : readings and commentary / edited and with an introduction by William F. Schulz ; foreword by Juan E. Mendez.
Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2007.
- has a chapter with firsthand accounts of being tortured


A couple of books about what it does to the body:
Medical investigation and documentation of torture : a handbook for health professionals.
Colchester : University of Essex, Human Rights Centre, 2005.

A radiologic atlas of abuse, torture, terrorism, and inflicted trauma / B.G. Brogdon, Hermann Vogel, John D. McDowell; with contributions by Richard Dirnhofer and others. Boca Raton, Fla. : CRC Press, 2003.

Web sources:
Torture Journal (free)
http://www.irct.org/media-and-resources/library/torture-journal.aspx

Amnesty International would definitely be a good source, and the resources of this special interest group of a body that studies pain could be worth a look too http://www.iasp-pain.org/SIG/TOVW

You could try a search through the Directory of Open Access Journals with search terms like "torture pain", "torture long-term", "torture chronic" "torture aftereffects", etc. https://doaj.org/