Torture

"A groundbreaking work. Its conclusions allow us to understand how state-sponsored violence is a social illness, and how easily moral boundaries can be destroyed. Our lesson is to grasp carefully how the technique of transforming individuals into evildoers is a highly rational exercise of constructed hatred, the isolation of individuals, and the blurring of the border between duty and cruelty."--Maria Pia Lara, editor of "Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives"

"It's rare enough that people study torturers. It's very dangerous fieldwork, demoralizing material to ponder over, and intellectually hazardous to put it together coherently. These authors do better than this: they come back with a book well worth thinking about. Thinking about torture these days is something we do less and less; one can only hope this book will be an antidote to so much thoughtlessness."--Darius Rejali, author of "Torture and Modernity: Self, Society and State in Modern Iran"

"The volume disturbingly reminds us that the problem of impunity is not just one that concerns the direct torturers and murderers but also all those who are complicit in the system of impunity."--Sir Nigel Rodley, United Nations Commission on Human Rights

Prisoners are a uniquely vulnerable social group and protecting them from oppressive states has given rise to a complex web of standards generated by a variety of international mechanisms and processes. Protecting Prisoners examines the most detailed and far-reaching set of custodial standards yet devised--those of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT)---and relates them to those of other European and United Nations bodies. The book also examines the reaction of selected Council of Europe member states---Belgium, France, Hungary, the Netherlands, Turkey, and the United Kingdom---to the application of those standards in CPT reports. This dual perspective provides a critical insight into the degree to which the development of international human rights law is having a practical impact on the situation of prisoners.

This book is the first major analysis of the vigilantism that accompanies the economic, political, and social disintegration occurring in many Latin American countries. The essays examine the most prominent forms of vigilantism, including mob lynchings, assassinations by self-appointed or privately employed "enforcers," citizen uprisings against the police, the work of the notorious death squads, and extra-legal violence by on-duty police. The authors show the relationship between vigilantism and authoritarian governments whose inegalitarian practices and economic dependence on foreign powers perpetuate a cycle of poverty, repression, and violence.

"We were all out in la charca, and there they were, coming over the ridge, a battalion ready for war, against a schoolhut full of children." Tanks roaring over farmlands, pregnant mothers tortured, their babies stolen and sold on the black market, homes raided in the dead of night, ordinary citizens kidnapped and never seen again--such were the horrors of Argentina's Dirty War. Now, in A Lexicon of Terror, Marguerite Feitlowitz fully exposes the nightmare of sadism, paranoia, and deception the military dictatorship unleashed on the Argentine people, a nightmare that would claim over 30,000 civilians from 1976 to 1983 and whose leaders were recently issued warrants by a Spanish court for the crime of genocide. Feitlowitz explores the perversion of language under state terrorism, both as it's used to conceal and confuse ("The Parliament must be disbanded to rejuvenate democracy") and to domesticate torture and murder. Thus, citizens kidnapped and held in secret concentration camps were "disappeared"; torture was referred to as "intensive therapy"; prisoners thrown alive from airplanes over the ocean were called "fish food." Based on six years of research and moving interviews with peasants, intellectuals, activists, and bystanders, A Lexicon of Terror examines the full impact of this catastrophic period from its inception to the present, in which former torturers, having been pardoned and released from prison, live side by side with those they tortured. Passionately written and impossible to put down, Feitlowitz shows us both the horror of the war and the heroism of those who resisted and survived--their courage, their endurance, their eloquent refusal to be dehumanized in the face of torments even Dante could not have imagined.

This handbook provides both a conceptual and practical framework for diagnosing, treating, and assessing post-traumatic stress in survivors of violence, abuse, war, ethnocultural problems, political torture, and disaster. The in-depth clinical experience of Williams and Sommer helps define a variety of theories and methods for treating children, adults, families, and other groups with various types of post-tramautic stress disorders. They point to specific new kinds of therapies and types of interventions, and discuss new developments and trends for the treatment of post-traumatic stress. This reference volume, with its lengthy bibliography, is designed for students, teachers, and practitioners in the fields of psychology and psychiatry, social work, medicine, and public health.

Mental health problems among asylum seekers and refugees are becoming a public issue, but awareness of this problem among the mental health community is relatively low. Although advances have been made in the provision of innovative mental health services for asylum seekers and refuges with PTSD, they are not systemized, and not widely known to professionals in the field. A publication offering practical guidelines for the treatment of torture victims and political refugees does not exist. Broken Spirits aims to bring together the works of the most respected mental health professionals-from the U.S. and abroad-and make available the most current knowledge on complex PTSD, forced migration and cultural sensitivity in diagnosis and treatment.

In the 19th century the prohibition of judicial torture was celebrated as a triumph of civilisation. But in the aftermath of the 2nd World War it was necessary for the International community to re-emphasise, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, its abhorrence of torture: the proscription of torture became part of international customary law. But torture by agents of contemporary states persists, not least in the heart of Europe where reliance on the use of custody is growing once again. This pathbreaking documentary and empirical study - of a kind rarely undertaken in the field of international human rights law - considers in detail the work of the latest actor on the international stage attempting to prevent torture. The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment (the CPT), established in 1989, represents a new phase in international human rights intervention. The Council of Europe member states have given a Strasbourg-based Committee of experts an almost unfettered hand to examine their places of custody and report on what they find. The authors, an international lawyer and a criminologist, bring their different analytical perspectives to bear on this innovative human rights mechanism. The authors consider the nature of torture in the late 20th century and, given the pervasive culture of denial, the difficulties in combating it. They argue that utilitarian justifications for torture lurk just beneath the surface of modern liberal democratic state practice. They describe the background to the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture, examine the text and the modus operandi of the Committee, set the CPT's standards against those of other international bodies and discuss how the work of the Committee should best be carried forward in an enlarged and increasingly diverse European community of nations.