Content notes: torture, ill-treatment, coercive control, domestic abuse, gaslighting, isolation, surveillance, humiliation, conversion therapy, electric shock, suicide
… the Special Rapporteur is of the view that, under human rights law, “psychological torture” should be interpreted to include all methods, techniques and circumstances which are intended or designed to purposefully inflict severe mental pain or suffering without using the conduit or effect of severe physical pain or suffering.
— Nils Melzer, UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Psychological torture, A/HRC/43/49, para. 19
Torture that leaves no mark is still torture. That sentence should not need a United Nations report behind it. It has one anyway, because the world keeps deciding otherwise.
The bias that makes it deniable
… national practice still tends to deny, neglect, misinterpret or trivialize psychological torture as what could be euphemistically described as “torture light”, whereas “real torture” is still predominantly understood to require the infliction of physical pain or suffering (so-called “materialist bias”).
— A/HRC/43/49, para. 14
In terms of severity, psychological and physical stressors have been shown to inflict equally severe suffering. … From a psychophysiological perspective, therefore, the distinction between “physical” and “psychological” torture is of predominantly conceptual, analytical and pedagogic benefit and does not suggest the parallel existence, in practice, of two separate and mutually exclusive dimensions of torture, or of any hierarchy of severity between “physical” and “psychological” torture.
— A/HRC/43/49, para. 22
… the infliction of mental pain or suffering also affects bodily functions and, depending on intensity and duration, can cause irreparable physical harm or even death, including through nervous collapse or cardiovascular failure.
— A/HRC/43/49, para. 22
There is the whole argument in three paragraphs. Harm without a bruise is not milder harm. It is harm assessed by people who were taught that evidence has to be visible. That teaching has a name now: materialist bias. The UN calls it an error.
This is why so many of us have spent years being told that what happened to us was not that bad. The assessment method was broken. Not the account.
We named this first
Ableism is the fact that it is totally legal to torture disabled people in the name of treatment and help and “for your own good” — everywhere from the daily ABA torture sessions focused on normalization at the expense of our own mental health to the extremes of the Judge Rotenberg Center where we are shocked even for flapping or moving out of our seats.
— Lydia X. Z. Brown, Ableism is not “bad words.” It’s violence.
Autistic and Disabled people have been using the word torture about compliance training, restraint, seclusion, and “treatment” for a very long time. We were told it was hyperbole.
It was not hyperbole. It was a correct application of a term whose legal definition we had never been handed.
What it actually requires
A term is only useful if it means something. Psychological torture has four constitutive elements, and they are what make a claim hold up rather than dissolve.
Severity. The mental pain or suffering must be severe, assessed holistically and case by case.
Powerlessness. The person cannot resist or escape.
“Powerlessness” refers to the victim’s inability to escape or resist the infliction of mental pain or suffering, and can be achieved not only through physical custody but also, for example, through incapacitating medication, deprivation of legal capacity, serious and immediate threats and social contexts marked by coercive control, mobbing, cyberbullying and persecution.
— A/HRC/43/49, para. 84(c)
Read that list again. Deprivation of legal capacity — when a person’s decision-making is taken away and given to someone else. Guardianship. Conservatorship. Substituted decision-making. Being made a person whose no does not count. That is not an exotic edge case in our community. For a great many Disabled people it is the ordinary architecture of their week.
Intentionality. Not malice — foreseeability.
“Intentionality” is present where the perpetrator knew or should have known that, in the ordinary course of events, his or her acts or omissions would result in the infliction of severe mental pain or suffering.
— A/HRC/43/49, para. 84(d)
Purposefulness. And here is the one that matters most to us:
“Purposefulness” is present when mental pain or suffering is inflicted for purposes such as interrogation, punishment, intimidation and coercion of the victim or a third person, or with a discriminatory nexus, regardless of purportedly benevolent purposes such as “medical necessity”, “re-education”, “spiritual healing”, or “conversion therapy”.
— A/HRC/43/49, para. 84(e)
Regardless of purportedly benevolent purposes. “I was only trying to help” is not a defence. Neither is “it’s therapy,” “it’s evidence-based,” or “it’s for your own good.”
It does not require a prison, and it does not require a state
The two objections that get used to shut people up are the same objection wearing different hats. Both fail.
The international legal concepts of “torture” and of “other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” have two distinct components, which could be described as “substantive” and “attributive”. The “substantive” component defines the conduct that amounts to torture …, whereas the “attributive” component defines the level of State agent involvement required in order for torture or ill-treatment to give rise to the State’s international legal responsibility.
— A/74/148, para. 5
From a substantive perspective, torture and ill-treatment as conceptualized under international law need not necessarily involve a State agent, but can also be committed by private actors without a State agent’s participation, instigation, consent or acquiescence.
— A/74/148, para. 6
Conceptually, torture and ill-treatment can occur in both custodial and extracustodial contexts as well as in both the public and the private sphere.
— A/74/148, para. 8
Whether a government is legally on the hook is a separate question from whether the conduct was torture. Collapsing the two is how a house, a school, a clinic, or a group home becomes a place where the word supposedly cannot apply.
From a substantive perspective under international law, and regardless of questions of State responsibility and of individual criminal culpability, both of which need to be separately assessed, domestic violence therefore always amounts to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and very often to physical or psychological torture.
— A/74/148, para. 10
The six methods
Physical torture uses the body to reach the mind. Psychological torture goes straight at the needs a person is built from.
In contrast to physical torture, which uses the body and its physiological needs as a conduit for affecting the victim’s mind and emotions, psychological torture does so by directly targeting basic psychological needs, such as security, self-determination, dignity and identity, environmental orientation, emotional rapport and communal trust.
— A/HRC/43/49, para. 43
1. Security — inducing fear, phobia and anxiety.
… the prolonged experience of fear, in particular, can be more debilitating and agonizing than the actual materialization of that fear, and even the experience of physical torture can be experienced as less traumatizing than the indefinite psychological torment of constant fear and anxiety.
— A/HRC/43/49, para. 48
The waiting is the injury. Not the incident — the permanent anticipation of the incident. Some of us have lived in a home, a classroom, or a workplace where the next thing could come at any moment. We already know this in our bodies.
2. Self-determination — domination and subjugation.
- Arbitrarily providing, withholding or withdrawing access to information, reading material, personal items, clothing, bedding, fresh air, light, food, water, heating or ventilation;
- Creating and maintaining an unpredictable environment with constantly changing and erratically disrupted, prolonged or delayed schedules for meals, sleep, hygiene, urination and defecation and interrogations;
- Imposing absurd, illogical or contradictory rules of behaviour, sanctions and rewards;
- Imposing impossible choices forcing victims to participate in their own torture.
— A/HRC/43/49, para. 49
All these techniques have in common that they disrupt the victim’s sense of control, autonomy and self-determination and, with time, consolidate in total despair and complete physical, mental and emotional dependency on the torturer (“learned helplessness”).
— A/HRC/43/49, para. 50
“Absurd, illogical or contradictory rules of behaviour, sanctions and rewards” is a description of an arbitrary reinforcement schedule. Read it beside behaviorism and beside every compliance programme sold to our families as help.
3. Dignity and identity — humiliation, breach of privacy, sexual integrity. Constant surveillance. Systematic ridicule and derogatory treatment. Public shaming, defamation, and the exposure of intimate details of a person’s private life.
It must be stressed that the humiliating and degrading nature of abuse does not necessarily relegate it to the realm of “other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”, which is sometimes (incorrectly) regarded as a “lesser” wrong than torture.
— A/HRC/43/49, para. 52
4. Environmental orientation — sensory manipulation.
Sensory hyperstimulation below the threshold of physical pain, such as through constant bright light, loud music, bad odours, uncomfortable temperatures or intrusive white noise, induces progressively severe mental stress and anxiety, inability to think clearly, followed by increasing irritability, outbursts of anger and, ultimately, total exhaustion and despair.
— A/HRC/43/49, para. 55
Read that next to sensory trauma. Then read it next to a fluorescent-lit classroom, an open-plan office, a supermarket, or a sensory room used as punishment. The UN Special Rapporteur on torture has described the endpoint of an inescapable sensory environment as total exhaustion and despair. We describe it as Tuesday.
This is the domain where deniability is most complete, because the person imposing the environment feels nothing standing in it. That gap is not proof that nothing is happening. It is the double empathy problem with the volume turned up to harm.
5. Social and emotional rapport — isolation, exclusion, betrayal.
A routine method of psychological torture is to attack the victim’s need for social and emotional rapport, through isolation, social exclusion, mobbing and betrayal.
— A/HRC/43/49, para. 56
Other methods … include … the instigation, encouragement or tolerance for oppressive situations of harassment, bullying or mobbing against targeted individuals or groups.
— A/HRC/43/49, para. 58
Note the word tolerance. Not only orchestrating the mobbing — permitting it. Bystanders are inside the method, not outside it. Every adult who watched and did nothing is named in that sentence.
6. Communal trust — institutional arbitrariness and persecution.
In the view of the Special Rapporteur, when institutional arbitrariness or persecution intentionally and purposefully inflicts severe mental pain or suffering on powerless persons, it can constitute or contribute to psychological torture.
— A/HRC/43/49, para. 63
This is systems generated trauma with a harder word attached to it. The assessment that never comes. The support refused and refused and refused. The file that follows you. The administrative burden deployed until you stop asking.
The euphemisms
Moral disengagement through trivialization begins with the use of euphemistic language aimed at “sanitizing” torture and ill-treatment and creating a perception of acceptability. Thus, measures involving torture or ill-treatment have been euphemistically described as, inter alia, “enhanced interrogation”, “deep interrogation”, “moderate physical pressure”, “pressure techniques”, “special measures”, “human resource exploitation”, “vocational training”, “conversion therapy”, “deterrence” and “special administrative measures”.
— Nils Melzer, Biopsychosocial factors conducive to torture and ill-treatment, A/75/179, para. 52
Conversion therapy is on the United Nations list of euphemisms for torture. We have written for years about what shares a founder, a method, and a lineage with it.
Euphemism is not decoration. It is load-bearing. It is the thing that lets a practice keep running.
Accumulation is the injury
If you read one paragraph on this page, read this one.
Victims tend to experience and respond to torture holistically, and not as a series of isolated techniques and circumstances, each of which may or may not amount to torture. Accordingly, psychological torture may be committed in one single act or omission or can result from a combination or accumulation of several factors which, taken individually and out of context, may seem harmless. The intentionality, purposefulness and severity of the inflicted pain or suffering must always be assessed as a whole.
— A/HRC/43/49, para. 86
Every one of us who has tried to explain a life has had it taken apart into incidents. Each incident examined alone. Each one found survivable. The conclusion: nothing happened.
That method of assessment is wrong, and now there is a citation saying so. The technical term for the correct unit of analysis is a torturing environment — the whole accumulated situation, not the individual pieces.
Why nobody believed you
There is a second injury, and it has its own literature.
The most rudimentary manner of avoiding or suppressing moral dilemmas … is denial of fact. Importantly, when used as a method of moral disengagement, the primary purpose of denial of fact is not the deception of others, but self-deception through wilful ignorance.
— A/75/179, para. 28
Best summarized in the slogan, “what must not be, cannot be” … powerful mental blind spots are unconsciously created, which enables the conscious mind to “pseudo-rationally” dismiss even compelling evidence for serious misconduct as mere “conspiracy theories” and, instead, question the motivations and integrity of “moral advocates” making, transmitting or investigating the incriminating allegations.
— A/75/179, para. 29
Importantly, once bystander apathy becomes normalized, those who dissent from passivity by denouncing immoral activity as active bystanders … tend to be socially sanctioned. In practice, such “moral advocates” are often isolated and excluded by the passive majority, treated with contempt and self-deceptively perceived as traitorous, selfish, arrogant or insulting.
— A/75/179, para. 43
If you reported harm and were punished for reporting it, that is paragraph 43. If you were told you were exaggerating, that is paragraph 29. If you were treated as the problem for naming a problem, that is paragraph 30(f) — “discrediting, demonizing or blaming victims, witnesses, critics and other moral advocates.”
None of this is a personal failing on the part of the people who disbelieved you. It is a documented, evidenced, named mechanism operating exactly as described. That does not excuse it. It does mean you were not imagining the wall.
Outside the circle
Group-based psychological processes can lead in-group members to consciously or unconsciously exclude out-group members from the boundaries of their usual moral conduct (“circle of moral regard”). That process of dis-identification enables individuals to inflict suffering on out-group members without experiencing the moral dilemma associated with the same conduct directed against in-group members. Group-based discrimination … can manifest on the micro level, with individuals being isolated, bullied or mobbed within tribes, families, professional teams, school classes and military units, and can extend up to the macro level of mass atrocities.
— A/75/179, para. 67
The grounds of exclusion named in the preceding paragraph include disability.
This is ableism rendered in human rights vocabulary. Move a person outside the circle of moral regard, and the harm done to them stops registering as harm. Not to the people doing it. Not to the people watching. Not, in the end, to the systems built to notice.
Our whole project is the work of putting people back inside that circle, and refusing to let anyone define the circle small.