Introduction

Torture is simultaneously a silenced entity and an overused term – something we often shy away from in serious discussion, but a word we might use flippantly. It is not uncommon to use the term ‘torture’ to describe mild displeasures: sitting through a poorly written play, listening to a song we don't like, spending time with an odious relative. Meanwhile, debates about what torture actually is continue across the social and political sciences, law courts and military tribunals. In the aftermath of 9/11 in particular, whether violations should be deemed torture or cruel and inhuman treatment or indeed – as the Bush administration rolled out as a means to ‘interrogate’ potential terrorists – Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs), continue. Meanwhile, violations which may amount to torture continue globally – daily and routinely.

This book stems from a long period of grappling with this concept: torture. Since the mid-2000s I have worked with and researched various forms of violence – some over long periods of time, others (such as childhood abuse) over shorter periods. Research and activism have focused on sexualized violence, trafficking, domestic abuse, conflict-related rape, and torture with women seeking asylum in Northern Europe. There have been many times that I have spoken with women who have survived various and often multiple abuses, never to refer to them as torture. And yet the forms of violence they are subject to, as this book will highlight, are no less impactful in their inflictions of harm than those which we might recognize as torture.

The crux of this disentanglement came during a conversation with a colleague who was visiting the Danish Institute Against Torture, an organization which has been a partner for three of my projects. As we discussed their long-term research efforts and books, and debated what is or may not be considered torture, he highlighted a ‘torture’ he had not come across earlier: the shooting of kneecaps in Libya. The application of the term in this context certainly evoked my interest. Growing up in Northern Ireland during and after the conflict, shooting someone in the knees (almost exclusively enacted and experienced by men) was simply called ‘kneecapping’. It is an exercise by which a violator of (usually) paramilitary rules or norms is taken to an area – not even always remote – and shot in the kneecaps.