The Phenomenon of Torture by Schulz William F.;Méndez Juan E.;

Author:Schulz, William F.;Méndez, Juan E.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

THE FACTOR OF INTIMACY

The next question is whether there is something less terrible for the victim or for the social fabric when the violence is inflicted by an intimate rather than an official. The fact that intimate violence involves a breach of trust cannot be underestimated. The torturer knows this well. Small kindnesses—asking about the victim’s family, occasional indulgences—evoke the desire to trust and are among the most effective psychological tools. Scarry points out as well that torturers use domestic props—refrigerators, bathtubs, soft-drink bottles—as weapons in order to disorient the victim. Thereby, “the domestic act of protecting becomes an act of hurting.” The shock of being beaten by a partner as opposed to a jailor can be more numbing and world-destroying. Rape by husbands is experienced as more devastating and longer lasting than rape by strangers. And, ultimately, resistance to emotional dependency and the most profound trauma is more complicated for the battered woman than for the hostage, as she is courted rather than kidnapped into violence. She must, in Herman’s words, “unlearn love and trust, hope and self-blame.”

The impact of gender-based versus official violence on the social fabric is incomparable only so long as the parallel state of patriarchy, the harm it perpetrates, and the violence it engenders remains invisible, sentimentalized, and legitimized. Gender-based violence in the home is profoundly traumatizing for both victims and observers; it shapes (fortunately sometimes by negative example) ideas about the gender hierarchy, about male dominance and female submission; and it helps to prepare people and a society for the use of official violence. Efforts to assess the impact on children and the people they become as a result of having observed their father battering their mother or their mother being beaten do not show clear-cut correlations. But the data suggest that such experience does play a role—albeit a complex one—in the formation of adult personality and in the perpetuation of discrimination and violence in families and society. [. . .]

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