all help people to recover a positive sense of self, and adherence to ideologies (whether religious or secular) helps to create a sense of how the world is ordered.
Devaluation and dehumanisation can be achieved in many ways. In Kelman's analysis, torturers label their victims as ‘terrorists, insurgents, or dissidents who endanger the state’ as a part of the dehumanisation process. To move from this kind of dehumanisation of a limited number of individuals to dehumanisation of an entire social group is relatively easy, as demonstrated by the post-September 11 2001 blurring of distinctions between the categories ‘terrorists’ and ‘Muslims’ by western governments and media. This is the more so if individuals behave in ways which appear to confirm the negative qualities already ascribed to the social group from which they stem. Once catalysed, the processes of devaluation and dehumanisation can quickly acquire their own momentum. As Staub points out, torture often renders victims ‘bloody, dirty, undignified’ such that ‘they can easily be seen as less than human’ – and as Gilligan establishes, when victims be-come perpetrators the fact they were once victims is forgotten, resulting in interventions focused on punishment rather than rehabilitation or reintegration.
Such processes for devaluing others and creating a sense of order are more easily catalysed where there is already a ‘history of devaluation of a group of people’, a ‘monolithic rather than a pluralistic society’, a cultural concept which has been frustrated, ‘strong respect for and a tendency to obey authority’, a history of aggression in which violence is normalised and made acceptable, and an ‘ideology of antagonism’ (Staub 1990, 1995: 101–103).
Alongside the military and psychological functions it is possible to identify political and economic ones. The links between the psychological and political ones are likely to be intimate in a situation such as Uganda; it seems probable that with the colonial legacy still within living memory, and with neo-colonial forms of control being exercised through concepts of ‘modernisation’, ‘democracy’, ‘good governance’ and ‘structural adjustment’, the psychological need for a strong sense of positive identity will be considerable. Achieving this is likely to entail, through devaluation, the subordination of minority groups, and, through the signals this sends, the control of the wider society as a whole.
The economic benefits arising from social torture scenarios, I would suggest, are likely to resemble those emerging in other situations of widespread suffering, as identified by Keen in The Benefits of Famine (1994); they could include the establishment of activities such as humanitarian relief interventions, the establishment of niche activities focused on identifiable ‘victims’ such as child soldiers, and the exploitation of captive markets by particular individuals and groups. The management of these in turn is liable to be linked to political functions, such as using economic rewards to buy off dissidents and potential critics.
Justifications
While the multiple possible functions of torture explain some of the incentives for keeping it going, it is also necessary to explain how the perpetrators and bystanders justify it.
In terms of justifying torture to themselves, the psychological processes adopted by perpetrators for immediate legitimation are similar to the mechanisms used to meet their underlying psychological needs discussed above. Staub summarises them as ‘differentiation, devaluation, and moral exclusion’ (1990: 52). Clearly the three are linked. Differentiation into an ‘in’ and an ‘out-group’ allows devaluation of the ‘out-group’. Devaluation in turn makes the moral exclusion of the out-group more feasible, thereby enabling their torture. Kelman similarly describes ‘dehumanization’, along with ‘routinization’ and ‘authorization’, as what makes possible ‘the exclusion of torture victims from the torturer's moral community’ (1995: 31).
The psychological mechanisms employed by ostensible ‘bystanders’ to justify their apparent passivity share some characteristics with those used by the perpetrators. Staub points to their use of what he calls ‘just world thinking’, a process in which, ‘Wanting to believe both in a just world and that they themselves will not become victims of random circumstances, people tend to view those who suffer as being responsible for and deserving of their fate because of their character or prior conduct’ (1990: 56, 1995: 106). In other words, ‘just world thinking’ goes hand in hand with devaluation of the victims.
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
