Narrow cultural and legal definitions of violence, from colonialism to genocide or torture, secure impunity. Whether it is unrepaired colonial legacies or novel, insidious colonial enterprises, genocidal wars which massacre, maim, and displace millions, or cruelty normalized against trillions of animals—violence crushes the body and spirit of countless humans and nonhumans and has only deepened in intensity and sophistication, escaping legal definitions and evading accountability. I cover these in my prior book reviews in this journal (Afana 2020, 2021a, 2021b, 2023).
Victoria Canning discusses how narrow definitions of torture erase crimes and silence victims. Introducing “torturous violence”, Canning shows how many forms of non-criminalized brutality have physical and psychological effects similar to those resulting from the few acts included in the legal definition of torture. Scholars and practitioners are encouraged to think beyond “orthodox legalism” and embrace victim-centred “experiential epistemologies” (x). The book’s empirical data draws on interviews with torture survivors, psychologists, psychotraumatologists, lawyers, detention custody officers, advocacy workers, alongside ethnographic activist research.
The 1984 United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT) offers a narrow definition of torture: the intentional infliction of severe physical or mental suffering, to obtain information or to punish, intimidate or coerce, inflicted by or with the involvement or consent of a public official. Since this restricts torture to state conduct (typically inflicted within sites of detention/confinement), violence perpetrated by non-state actors and acts not fitting the purpose above escape accountability. Legal, academic, and medical responses to torture remain mostly anchored in UNCAT, so the narrowness of its definition impacts survivors and societies broadly.
Discussing kneecapping in Northern Ireland (shooting the kneecaps of someone who violated paramilitary rules), Canning notes that had the kneecapping been administered by state officials, torture would have been easily applicable (2). Likewise escaping narrow definitions (in which the most common targets of torture are men) is the trauma of women falsely imprisoned, strangulated, raped, scalded, beaten, and otherwise abused physically and psychologically (3). Torturous violence blends into our everydayness: at home, in schools, or hospitals (30). While the focus on legal definitions and on state crime should not be lost, we need to recognize forms of violence similar to torture yet not committed by states and not inflicted to obtain information. The author thus seeks to shift emphasis from who inflicts torturous violence and why, to the forms of violence enacted and their impacts (5).
“Outlining the Definitional Boundaries of ‘Torture’”, the first chapter, reviews the limitations of the legal regime on torture, looks at how definitions were applied in various cases, reviews recent debates on the use of torture, and introduces novel realms of torture. Drawing on interviews with practitioners, Canning identifies three approaches to torture—orthodox legalism: strictly following legal conventions; legalist hybridity: flexibly combining legal definitions and a broad understanding of trauma; experiential epistemologies: knowledge rooted in the experiences of survivors and of supporting practitioners (20–29). For me, the core dilemmas here, legally and ethically, are how we determine the severity of suffering and the purpose of torture, and how psychological torture (and the nexus between psychological and physical) is addressed, given the focus on physical violence in mainstream approaches to torture.
“‘Wandering Throughout Lives’: Outlining Forms and Impacts of Torture” illustrates typologies and techniques—physical, psychological, and “clean” tortures—documented by scholars, practitioners, and organizations. Discussed here are also the long-term effects of torture on survivors, their families, and communities. This chapter draws primarily on Darius Rejali’s Torture and Democracy and on Tobias Kelly’s This Side of Silence. Canning notes the glocalization of torture: global in scope and local in forms, permeating survivors’ lives wherever they go, thus transgressing the place and time of its origin (43). Temporal harm (the time lost in a person’s life) is an under-appreciated effect of torture (54). Torture comes with horrific creativity, attested by the extreme forms of brutality used historically and currently. This was for me the most difficult to read chapter.
“‘I Wouldn’t Call it Torture’: Conceptualizing Torturous Violence” introduces “torturous violence”: the infliction of psychological or physical violence mirroring torture yet falling outside the legal requirements to be recognized as such (62). The concept sheds light on invisiblized forms of violence and recognizes the trauma of survivors excluded from legal definitions. Gendered experiences of torture (such as the Magdalene Laundries or the violence inflicted on migrant women) show a continuum of multiple forms of violence. A situation I often think of is the lifelong psychological and physical harm of being forced into an arranged marriage, which victimizes millions of women and girls globally; this might qualify as torturous violence. Harm is not inflicted by state officials, but by those closest to the victim. In Palestine (the context I am most familiar with) and elsewhere, perpetrators are mostly husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles.
“Sexualized Torture and Sexually Torturous Violence” explores sexualized violence, sexualized torture, and sexually torturous violence, occurring not just amid conflict/war, but also during migration or in domestic settings. This is not solely an academic exercise but also personal, given the author’s own experiences as survivor of sexualized violence (79). From the widespread rapes of women in Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia, to rape amid trafficking (forced prostitution, domestic servitude), rape by a relative or partner, forced bestiality, multiple perpetrator rape, rape in prisons, rape with an audience, being forced to watch a family member raped, rape combined with beatings or mutilation or killing, threats of rape, beatings or electrocution of sexual organs, sexual humiliation, the ostracization of survivors when returning to their communities—sexualized violence is perpetrated by varied actors, in multiple ways, and for different reasons, all these three factors often deviating from the UNCAT definition.
“Experiential Epistemologies: Embedding the Lived Experience of Women Survivors” looks at the experiences of violence, conflict, detention, and migration of refugee women. The intersection between domestic and institutional violence shows how legal(istic) notions of torture limit responses to torturous violence. These oral histories show perpetrators who are not state officials and motives for torture which also do not fit the legal definition. These forms of violence against women are seldom recognized as torturous: physical, emotional, sexual, financial violence from an intimate partner; perilous journeys crossing the sea after fleeing their home country; forced prostitution; false imprisonment; facing hunger, dehydration, cold; regular beatings; forced separation from their children; poverty; incarceration in immigration detention facilities and other forms of institutional violence while stuck for years in the asylum-seeking process. The voices of survivors attest their resilience and resistance, contrasting their frequent portrayal as broken, passive, helpless.
“Unsilencing” shows us that, although legal definitions depict torture as a means to extract information, torture often silences through humiliation and fear. This is particularly the case with sexualized violence, which silences through stigma. Ten forms of silencing are identified: epistemological, social, institutional, survivor self-silencing, practitioner self-silencing, spatial, temporal, protective, preservation, capacity (122). Here I was reminded of the “sociology of absences” developed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2016). Even physicians and mental health practitioners can contribute to silencing, as they sometimes avoid discussing torture, fearing retraumatization. Silence sometimes protects survivors; yet, Canning notes, disclosure of traumatic events can be forced upon them in the asylum process: to secure a better future, they need to dig into their painful past. Part of this bureaucratic harm is also “cultural appropriation and appropriateness, Westernized cultural dominance of psychology and psychosocial interventions, as well as neocolonial approaches to migration and borders” (142–143).
“Addressing and Responding to Torture and Torturous Violence”, the final chapter, looks at ways to deepen our responses to torture: expanding the mandates of support organizations by transcending legal definitions of torture, capacity building, and consciousness raising, a deeper understanding of gendered harms, increased funding, and multi-sector collaboration. Canning also documents here the structural constraints faced by survivors and by practitioners: inadequate laws and oppressive asylum processes compounding trauma; austerity measures impacting NGOs, so limiting the services survivors can access; a sociocultural climate blocking the healing and integration of survivors into host countries. While staying mindful of state crimes, we need to consider harms beyond the state; these state and non-state crimes and harms are synergistic when it comes to torture and other types of violence.
Torture and Torturous Violence is a valuable addition to zemiology scholarship, helping legal scholars and practitioners, criminologists, psychologists, and social workers to rethink torture and to create meaningful repair mechanisms. Like other books exploring the depths of violence, it is difficult to read. The book’s horrid details on torture are however necessary to absorb, to confront the reality that torturous violence is all around us, often invisiblized, and if we have been privileged to not be torn by it, it is our duty to learn, resist, and stand in solidarity with survivors.
I will turn now to some recent developments on torture and to some facets of torture not covered in the book (torture against nonhumans) and only briefly discussed (the complicity of professionals). The bodies and minds of many have been crushed by horrific forms of torture, created in collaboration with practitioners supposed to support physical and mental health. The US torture programme was designed and implemented with psychologists and condoned by the American Psychological Association (Democracy Now 2023, Risen 2015). Such complicity is unsurprising; professionals across different sectors have been co-opted by states and corporations to contribute their expertise towards crimes and impunity.
Complicit in torture are also scientists, who develop ever more sophisticated tools for torture, terror, and murder. The weapons industry is a prime example, harming both humans and nonhumans. Religious/spiritual leaders theoretically cultivating compassion and justice have also been complicit in torture. One horrific example is the lynching in 2015 in Kabul of Farkhunda Malikzada after an argument she had with a mullah, who, as revenge, falsely accused her of burning the Quran. Farkhunda was ambushed by an angry mob, knocked to the ground, severely beaten, stoned, pushed from a rooftop, stomped, run over with a car, then set on fire. The complicity in torture of lawyers, physicians, psychologists, engineers, and religious leaders is widespread. I believe this places a duty on us to expose complicity and to pressure professional bodies to create and enforce stricter ethics codes.
Some recent developments on torture pertain to Iraq, the US, Syria, and Palestine. An exception to the impunity that typically accompanies torture is the recent ruling that US government contractor CACI Premier Technology Inc. is liable for its involvement in the torture of three Iraqi men at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003–2004. This ruling, which awarded $42 million in damages to the victims, comes after 16 years of litigation and is the first time survivors of the post-9/11 torture regime testified in a US court (Center for Constitutional Rights 2024). Another development is the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 and the release by insurgent forces of torture survivors from military prisons (Christou 2024). Hundreds of thousands, mostly civilians perceived to oppose the Assad regime, have been tortured and executed at Saydnaya and other torture/death camps in Syria over the past decades (Amnesty International 2017).
Also relevant here is the ongoing genocide on Gaza, which has intensified Israel’s policy of torture against Palestinians. Since 1947, over 1 million Palestinians, including minors, have spent months, years or decades in prison, most of them incarcerated for resisting Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and human rights violations. My father was among the many Palestinians trapped in Israeli prisons. Torture, ill treatment, and deliberate medical negligence have been routine (Addameer 2016, 2023); many fall ill and die prematurely from the physical and psychological trauma of confinement and torture. Over the past year, many Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been abducted, detained/imprisoned, and severely tortured in Israel’s torture camps (B’Tselem 2024).
Not explored in this book (as well as in most other books on torture) is the exclusion of nonhumans from the legal regime on torture. Since torture affects nonhuman animals far worse in both scale and brutality than it impacts humans, we cannot exclude its primary victims. Trillions of sentient beings experience torture and murder in criminal yet legal sectors such as wildlife trade and animal farming (Afana 2024a, 2024b, 2024c). To be a credible intellectual pursuit with a grassroots impact, criminology needs to move towards a non-speciesist ethos. Torture is just one area attesting the similarities between the suffering of humans and nonhumans. As the “wiser” species, we need to stop inflicting violence on other beings and no longer omit them from analyses of violence.