Introduction: thinking beyond states and state institutions

In the month prior to submitting this book for publication I garnered opinions of approximately 100 practitioners working on trauma, torture, violence and rehabilitation, discussing if or how much the concept of torture is of central relevance to their work. For some, particularly lawyers and legal advisors working on international committees and advising governments accused of torture, it was paramount: without the concept of torture, all aspects of international or criminal justice, accountability or torture rehabilitation would be defunct. Others alluded to the possibility of ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment’, only themselves to agree that the concept of and terminology around ‘torturous’ holds a linguistic and discourse advantage in its derivation of ‘torture’, given torture's common understanding as the most heinous of all violence.

For others, my continued inclusion of legal definitions of torture undoes the objective of transcending definitional boundaries of torture, since some aspects of the book continue to build around it. For some psychologists and psychotraumatologists in particular, the term can be relevant for survivors of torture, but far from relevant to treatment or rehabilitation since extreme violence may have been part of a longer-term trajectory, even from childhood. As a number of people argued, even assessing for evidence of ‘torture’ can be highly problematic: people receiving support can relay torture as one of many traumatic events or forms of serious physical or psychological violence. Without a torture assessment, they might see many more self-elected survivors of extreme violence who experience the same impacts of trauma. In short, torture assessments may be useful to an extent for responding to state inflicted or sanctioned torture, but they also act as a metaphorical sieve for responding to other forms of extreme violence, even those which may mirror torture in their sustained and impactful nature.

Whether one agrees or not, torture as we have explored it so far remains central to how knowledge around torture is produced, including in scholarly works. Whatever one's stance, torture exists in social, legal and political consciousness and so we cannot move to a space which transcends boundaries if we have not explored what those boundaries are. This chapter therefore aims to probe those boundaries further with the primary focus of conceptualizing and recognizing torturous violence, particularly integrating gendered perspectives.