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 who are outside it. It will not have any value in identifying causal responsibility for what is happening inside the war zone.
Self-Perpetuating
Once under way, social torture elicits from its victims states of physical and psychological debilitation, dependency, dread and disorientation and corresponding behavioural responses. These tend to mutually reinforce and deepen each other rather than resolving themselves, and thus contribute to perpetuating or escalating the situation.
For example, although torture is often visited upon the physical body in the first instance, it is at core an invasion of people's minds which is very difficult to reverse, such that methods and impacts ultimately become one and the same thing. As Primo Levi (1989) puts it, ‘Anyone who has been tortured, remains tortured’. The mental state described as ‘disorientation’ is an outcome of torture, but being in that state is itself an additional form of torture.9
Even those who are being devalued may participate in their own devaluation, for discourses of devaluation catalysed by external actors (e.g. colonial notions of the ‘native’, or blaming the Acholi for what happened to them) are internalised by a particular population and quickly acquire a momentum which is independent of the actors who catalysed the discourse and continues long after they have left.
Not only is the invasion of the mind hard to reverse, it also finds expression in further physical debilitation. Both direct and indirect victims are subject to severe psychological stress, which is known to weaken the immune system.10 This may increase morbidity, thereby accelerating physical debilitation and economic dependency, a state in which people are unable to fulfil or learn the roles which under normal circumstances would give them a sense of their adult identity (e.g. provision and protection). This in turn aggravates psychological debility.
Once physical dependency has been induced through lack of food and lack of sleep (which in turn is related to dread), people cannot afford to bite the hand that feeds them, and their time horizons become foreshortened by the realities of day-to-day survival in the war zone. Coping mechanisms adopted to ameliorate their personal situation in the short term often have the opposite effect in the long term. To eat today, for example, people resort to selling sex with its concomitant risk of HIV tomorrow (see Chapter 6).
In a sense torture becomes involuntarily self-administered, and, insofar as these behaviours are perceived and/or portrayed as self-inflicted, it also becomes possible to ‘blame the victim’ and thereby reinforce discourses of devaluation and dehumanisation. This diverts attention away from causes and directs it to symptoms, in a manner which is used to justify the action and inaction of those who in principle have the capacity to do differently. It becomes difficult for any of the multiple actors involved to step back and assess their true contribution to – or position in – the various intersecting cycles of violation and violence. Social Torture thus acquires a degree of momentum independent of the perpetrators’ original actions or intentions.
Public Discourses
Because of the scale of social torture, and its potential visibility to the public eye, institutions such as governments, churches and NGOs need to convince their constituencies, congregations, and funding bases respectively, that institutional actions and inaction make sense and are legitimate. This is likely to be achieved through the manipulation of discourses and their accompanying silences. By focusing loudly on some elements of the situation, and keeping silent on others, these discourses serve to fragment and thus to divert attention from the bigger picture. Just as the individual perpetrator draws on a language of devaluation shared with other members of society to pre-empt any psychological discomfort with his own actions, so
