Elaborating a Model of Social Torture
In seeking to apply the above elements of the torture model to what I knew of northern Uganda I felt that while some of the impacts I observed closely resembled those commonly attributed to torture, the term torture as it stands within a particular strand of legal practice and the popular imagination, cannot do justice to processes and impacts on the scale I had observed. I also felt that the hidden processes behind the visible impacts were in some respects diametrically opposed to those we suppose to take place in individual torture. To capture this sense of both overlap and difference I arrived at the term social torture, a process which can be differentiated from individual torture around six key issues, as set out in Table 1.1 below.
Table 1.1 Key Differences between Individual and Social Torture
| Individual torture | Social Torture |
| High Intensity | Low Intensity |
| Impact focused on individuals and their direct associates and family | Wide impact on society as a whole |
| Place and Time-bound | Geographically extensive and Time-indifferent |
| Dependent on small set of perpetrators with specific objectives | Involves multiple actors with broad set of needs, and is to a degree self-perpetuating |
| Perpetrators justify actions to themselves, using psychological mechanisms | Relies on justification to society as a whole, using public discourses |
| Interventions focus on individual justice and recognise that intentions | Interventions need to focus on social systems and recognise that intentions are secondary to causal responsibilities |
Low Intensity, Wide Impact
Whereas individual torture is conventionally thought of in terms of a highly intense and intrusive intervention, which impacts primarily on the individual victim and his or her immediate family, Social Torture can be characterised as ‘low intensity’ in that its methods and impacts are often not immediately visible but should be identifiable across society as a whole. In other words, while in individual torture only a minority are directly affected, in Social Torture only a minority will escape the impacts.
Low intensity goes hand in hand with a wide yet gradual impact. Its mechanisms are not always immediately identifiable for there is not always a simple one-to-one correlation between acts of torture and symptoms of such torture, particularly where the torturer is skilled in working so as to minimise visible damage. One symptom may arise from a number of discrete causes, or from a combination of them. For example, the literature suggests that the likelihood of PTSD among torture victims is increased if, amongst other things, the torture victim has already experienced ‘the phenomenon of being forcibly uprooted from one's home’, and if the victim is either very young or very old (Melamed et al. 1990: 20).7 In short, it may be the cumulative impact of multiple violations which triggers a visible symptom, such that cause cannot be traced back to any one of those violations in particular. This suggests the need to look for impact over the medium rather than the short term, and to speak of causal contexts rather than single causal incidents.
Even when they are visible, impacts cannot always be traced back directly to a particular act. As studies of the families of Holocaust survivors and of the disappeared in Latin America have shown, the torture of individuals affects not just the immediate object of the torturer's attentions, but also those associated with that person in the form of symptoms such as withdrawal, depression, and intense generalised fear (Melamed et al. 1990: 25). It is thus possible for impacts to be transmitted across and down the generations without the continued need of a physical perpetrator. This distance between individual acts and overall impact contributes substantially to the gradual nature and low visibility of the phenomenon of social torture. As one MP in northern Uganda commented; ‘This insecurity is a greater threat than the abductions. It is present every day but nobody sees it’.8
Geographic Extension and Time-Indifference
In the popular imagination torture takes place in very specific sites, generally away from the purview of the general public, at the hands of a very particular set of people, and over a delimited period of time determined by the limited capacity of the individual body and mind to resist torture. It has a beginning, when the victim is whisked away from their normal daily life, and it has an end, when the person, if still alive, may be returned to the ‘outside’ world, often with visible physical and psychological scars to deal with – in the midst of people the majority of whom have not undergone the same experience.
Social Torture, by contrast, rather than taking place in very restricted locations in short bursts, is both geographically extensive and time indifferent. The whole environment, in this case both the ‘protected villages’ and the war zone as a whole, are the site of torture – all the time. For most people, who have no resources with which to remove themselves from the war zone, there is no ‘outside’. You are not whisked away from your daily life to be tortured; daily life is your torture. This is not helped if the ‘outsiders’, who in the individual model of torture give victims hope by creating political pressure on the victim's behalf, in this scenario are ‘bystanders’ whose inaction is itself a contribution to social torture.
If your whole world has become the torture chamber, then determining a clear beginning becomes hard. As I shall suggest in Chapter 3, it is never easy to know when a war truly begins. Nor is it easy to know when torture begins. If, as argued in Chapter 6, it is necessary to look at debilitation arising not just from discrete incidents but from the accumulation of such, then pin-pointing a particular incident as the torture becomes redundant. Forcible displacement prior to an act of individual torture does not just render the victim more susceptible to PTSD symptoms after such an act, it is a part of the torture process itself.
Just as the beginning is hard to pinpoint, so is the end. What people experience and the symptoms they exhibit can barely be described as post-traumatic, as for most people there is no end to the circumstances which caused the trauma. Whereas the aid workers in war zones are sent on R and R (Rest and Recuperation), there is no such respite for the population at large. From this point of view to use the term post-traumatic stress to describe what is happening inside the war zone can itself be seen as part of a structure of denial, or at least a refusal to acknowledge that there is no ‘normal’ or pre-traumatic situation to revert to. In short, the process of social torture is time indifferent, measured in years or decades rather than the days of torture to which the individual's body can be subjected.
Multiple Actors
Over time large sections of society (rather than a narrowly selected group of ‘public officials’) become involved in the process, and a synergy is established between the psychological needs and wants of some and the petty economic and political interests of others. These are needs which the various actors involved will deny, and interests which they will have no wish to see exposed. In drawing in multiple actors (particularly the so-called ‘external’ ones), social torture furthers underlying processes of social and political change over which individual actors have little direct control or influence, and, to the extent that their own interests are furthered by keeping quiet, little incentive to challenge. This integration of multiple actors into the dynamics of social torture challenges a key aspect of many existing models of conflict, namely the tendency to view conflict situations as somehow ‘out there’, completely other and detached from the contexts in which those doing the analyses are situated. If, as I shall argue, social torture has to be understood as a systemic process in which what is happening, for example, in Gulu, is influenced by and of import to those making decisions in Kampala, London, Brussels and Washington, then an ‘internal’ versus ‘external’ model will only hold insofar as it describes those who are physically inside the war zone and those