As you might have guessed from Her Voice Is A Backwards Record and Mea Maxima Culpa, I’m fascinated by torture. You can come up with all kinds of complex Freudian explanations for my obsession, but I think it’s just luck. Octavia Butler is obsessed with weird alien sex, Georgette Heyer is obsessed with dukes, Philip Roth is obsessed with Jewish men strugging with erectile dysfunction, and I’m obsessed with torture.
So I have put some thought into how I address this topic in a way that’s sensitive and respectful. I don’t mean to say that this is how all authors should approach writing torture; this is just how I approach it for myself. I think there are lots of different ways to write about torture that are equally valid, depending on the particular writer’s goals. I don’t intend this to be in any way prescriptive. This is just what I think.
In this post, I’m using the broad definition of “torture” used in the Declaration of Tokyo, which includes actions by nonstate actors, rather than the narrower definition used by the UN Convention Against Torture. I think for writers similar considerations apply whether you’re writing about state actors or nonstate actors.
First: I strive to always remember that torture survivors are reading my writing. It’s very easy for writers—especially relatively privileged writers like myself—to assume that torture happens to someone else, far away, in some place where they don’t have books. But you likely have encountered torture survivors, even if you aren’t aware of it. Innumerable people have endured torture, in various contexts: police or prison-guard brutality, political imprisonment, kidnapping, institutional abuse such as troubled teen camps, abusive romantic relationships, child abuse, elder abuse. Even using the UN definition of “torture”, torture survivors are very common. For example, Americans are likely to encounter both immigrants fleeing torture in their home countries and victims of torture in the American criminal justice system.
My awareness that a torture survivor might read my story doesn’t necessarily cause me to do any specific thing; it always depends on the needs of the story. But the fact that some of my audience has survived torture is something I try to always have in the back of my mind during revisions. If I’d be uncomfortable with a torture survivor reading something, I take it out.
Second: I never write torture justified for utilitarian reasons, particularly the cliche “ticking time bomb” scenario where torture is the only way to get time-sensitive information that prevents the death of thousands of people. The balance of the evidence suggests that torture doesn’t produce reliable information—people will say anything to get the pain to stop. I consider it irresponsible and dishonest to write fiction that implies that torture is justified, particularly given that Antonin Scalia and top Bush officials cited fictional ticking time bomb scenario as a reason to allow the torture of inmates.
Utilitarian torture is vastly overrepresented in fiction compared to how common it is in real life. I strive to represent more common motivations for torture. The excellent paper Liberalism, Torture, and The Ticking Time Bomb gives four reasons for torture other than intelligence-gathering:
The pleasure of the victor (“to relive the victory, to demonstrate the absoluteness of his mastery, to rub the loser's face in it, and to humiliate the loser by making him scream and beg”).
Frightening victim and observers into obedience.
Punishment for crime, in particular as “a symbolic assertion of the absolute sovereign whose personal prerogatives had been affronted by crime… a ritual of royal dominance and royal revenge, acted out in public spectacle to shock and awe the multitude.”
Getting confessions in legal systems which make it difficult or impossible to find people guilty without a confession.
Liberalism, Torture, and The Ticking Time Bomb discusses torture as a state action. If we’re using a broader definition of “torture,” then torture for pleasure is often not just pleasure in victory but also pleasure more broadly in power, control, and dominance over others. Similarly, torture as punishment is sometimes revenge—the desire to make others suffer the way you or someone you care about suffered.
In my own writing, I generally focus on torture motivated by pleasure or the desire to frighten or punish; I feel like these common motivations are underrepresented. If appropriate for the story, I might expand to torture to get information (either as interrogation or to elicit a confession), although in that case I’d be careful to point out that torture is an unreliable source of evidence.
Third: I try to accurately reflect the complexity of the experiences of torture survivors. In particular, I try to hold two seemingly contradictory truths in my mind. On the one hand, “not breaking” is not a sign of strength or willpower or cleverness or moral purity. There are far too many stories where everyone else revealed secrets or became complicit or obeyed the torturer, but not the protagonist, who is simply too special and virtuous to give in. I hope I don’t need to elaborate on how cruel this narrative is to torture survivors.
On the other hand, all people have agency. No one is merely a passive Suffering Object who is acted upon without any control over their lives. People make jokes, perform small acts of defiance, are kind to each other. Resistance may be futile or pointless or “only” a moral victory; it may be so small it is nearly impossible to notice from the outside. But it is there. Whenever I write a character who survives torture, I strive to think through what their resistance was and what meaning they derived from it.
I also remember that torture is a big deal. I don’t write stories where someone is tortured and shrugs it off and gets a hug from his love interest and moves on with his life without any long-term consequences. Torture is a fundamental rupture in normality, in the way life ought to be. Most torture survivors—even if they don’t have diagnosable PTSD or other mental disorders—are never the same person afterwards. Being tortured changes you.
Fourth: I also try to reflect the complexity of the experiences of torturers. I don’t write stories where a hero tortures someone without any thought or consequences, except maybe a brief scene of staring angstily in the distance while contemplating how he’s a hard man that makes the necessary decisions. I don’t write stories where a villain tortures someone to show off how evil they are.
Torturers aren’t incomprehensible monsters who torture people because they love evil for its own sake.1 Torturers are people—often, very ordinary people—who have the same motivations everyone else does. Anger, often righteous anger, and the desire for the one who wronged you to suffer. Dehumanization; not seeing the enemy as really a person the same way you are. The dark delight in power over others. Ruthless consequentialism. Going along with what everyone else is doing, fear of defying authority, the thought that if this were really bad someone else would say it was bad. The fear that if you don’t hurt today’s victim as hard as you can you’ll be next; torturers themselves are sometimes torture victims. The need to keep your job.
I don’t write a torturer unless I understand why I’d do the same thing in their shoes.
Torturing others is often traumatizing (which is not to say, of course, that the harm caused to the torturer is “the same as” or “equivalent to” the harm caused to the victim). Many torturers experience moral injury—the psychological harm that comes from doing evil. Self-hatred, self-disgust, guilt, and grief are common, as are depression, PTSD, and substance abuse. Moral injury is also a rupture in normality. The torturer knows for the rest of their life what they are capable of doing.
Fifth: I try to avoid narm. This is something I have a lot of complicated feelings about. Torture is melodramatic. Everything you think of as being so outlandish it completely breaks your suspension of disbelief, because no one would ever do something like that—it happened, probably many times. I want to depict this reality about torture.
And yet—I worry that accurate descriptions of torture will come off as absurd, as impossible, as funny. The last thing I want is to depict torture as funny.
I try to use precise, specific, concrete details. I pay close attention to characters’ embodiment: heart rate, muscle pain, dissociation. I practice metonymy: choosing a single vivid incident and allowing it to stand in for a wide range of experiences that the reader’s mind can fill in.
Sometimes I’m not a good enough writer to thread the needle. My novella Her Voice Is A Backwards Record inaccurately represents troubled teen camps. Troubled teen camps mostly descend from Synanon. They use a variety of Synanon-derived techniques, from hypnotic chanting to hitting the ground with pool noodles for hours to pretending to be another patient’s dead mother and accusing him of causing her death. I chose to leave those aspects out and to depict the group therapy session as a more “normal” psychiatrically abusive group therapy session. I was worried that, given my current writing abilities, I couldn’t depict the genuine horror of being forced to hit the ground with pool noodles, without it coming off as camp. I still don’t know that I made the right choice.
This is my general approach right now; it’s in flux, and I don’t want to say that this is how I’m going to handle it in six years or even six months. I’m curious about the experiences of other writers whose stories handle this sort of “sensitive” material: torture, rape, war crimes, suicide, etc. I’m also curious about which stories readers (especially readers who are survivors) have found particularly resonant or realistic or validating, and which they found offensive or tasteless or harmful.
Ironically, “my enemies are incomprehensibly evil monsters” is a common justification for torture.
Narm and pool noodles makes me think of Holes by Louis Sachar. What's so bad about digging a hole in the ground every day?
He does three things that I can think of:
- The narration sort of skates dissociatively over the emotional experience, using the trauma-processing tools of the mind as part of the diegesis.
- He makes the humor the characters' and narrator's humor. You're cued to separate the situation and the narrator a little bit, and therefore to look at both of them. "What are they doing?" _and_ "how are they feeling about it?" The reader is asked to unpack the horror themselves.
- The plot roots the present-day experiences in a larger frame that is more obviously terrible. (Maybe he doesn't connect these things as tightly as he could have if he wanted to highlight the terribleness of the present-day experiences.)
This reminded me a lot of the always-excellent Jacob Geller's video, "Analyzing Every Torture Scene in Call of Duty". If you're interested in the topic, it's quite possible you've already seen it, and if not, it sounds like you've already arrived at many of the same conclusions regarding torture and the ethical ramifications of its portrayal in fiction. He covers the "ticking time bomb" myth, the pernicious idea that "good people" can resist breaking while "bad guys" will fold due to some inherent quality of moral character, and the question of what choosing to commit torture says and doesn't say about the person who chooses it. All through the lens of one of the most consistent throughlines of one of the largest media franchises on the planet, and from someone I consider the most thoughtful and insightful person currently working in the media criticism space. Not sure how much of it will be new to you, but worth a watch if it's an interest of yours (or for anyone else who might want another perspective on the ideas).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPiL3-CYzWk