No?

Don’t argue that you’d rather suffer one crime against you than another. Even if you HAVE experienced both, which I am doubting, you CANNOT speak for all victims. I read these articles, and I was so horrified that you would think to speak your opinion on atrocities you don’t seem to know much about that I could not, at first, gather my thoughts to respond.

It is good to have a site about overcoming bias. We should all learn to reason clearly, and recognise bias in ourselves. But, torture? Really? Is this a joke? I would go so far as to say that NOT having a bias against torture is a flaw in your thinking. A big one.

I want to tell you some things about torture: what it is, and what it is not. You have these articles on your site, about “bias against torture,” and I don’t think you have the knowledge to address this.

* Torture is NOT the same thing as corporal punishment. Corporal punishment may or may not be part of torture, but it is not a synonym. The primary goal of torture is to cause psychological suffering: to break and alter the mind brutally. Torture invokes primal and often unconquerable fears: the fear of grotesque injury, the fear of death, the fear of the unknown, the fear of pain which cannot be escaped.

* Torture is NOT primarily used for punitive purposes. Torture is most commonly inflicted on people who are NOT criminals: targets may be chosen for their ethnicity, political or religious position, race, or origin. Torture is used in times of unrest and conflict, to create an atmosphere of terror. Because people are terrified of torture. For good reason.

* Torture is NOT only damaging to the victim. People who have inflicted torture often suffer psychological trauma, also.

* Torture is NOT something that’s done, and then the victim returns to his life–and it is NOT easy to rehabilitate victims. Some psychologists have thought it was not possible, at all. In your other article on this subject, you (or one of your commenters–sorry; I did not want to read the article again) said that you’d rather be tortured than imprisoned for many years, because the torture would be over with faster. But the physical pain from torture may continue for years, or for all of one’s life. Some forms of torture may be fatal. Beatings can cause blood clots to form, break off, and get in the lungs, heart, or brain. Stress positions can cause heart failure. And all forms of torture can–no, almost certainly WILL–cause horrendous psychological damage: agoraphobia (and other phobias), dissociation, PTSD, anxiety disorders of all types, violent anger.

Torture IS an assault on bodily integrity, bodily autonomy, and human dignity. “Crimes against humanity” are described as “…particularly odious offences in that they constitute a serious attack on human dignity or grave humiliation or a degradation of one or more human beings.” Torture is a crime against humanity.

Torture IS designed to crush the ego of a person, humiliate and denigrate them, and break down their sense of self. And it works. Even following a relatively brief period of torture, lasting only a day or two, a victim can display symptoms of identification with their attacker, dissociation, lapses in memory, flashbacks, nightmares, and anxiety disorders.

Torture IS cruel and unusual punishment, which is defined as “criminal punishment which is considered unacceptable due to the suffering or humiliation it inflicts on the condemned person.” Are you in the USA? I think your constitution has an amendment about this.

So, you want to bring a crime against humanity to your shores, even more than it’s already surfaced? You think it’s a good idea to commit gross bodily harm, and inflict the fear (and actual possibility) of death upon citizens of your country? You don’t see a problem with this?

Maybe you mean corporal punishment, which is a somewhat different animal: the victim of court-imposed corporal punishment will generally know what is to be done: how severe and how long the punishment will be, and what it entails. It is still immensely problematic, as it often shares components of humiliation and intimidation with torture. The distinction between the two is not always clear, especially as there HAVE been fatalities from judicially-imposed corporal punishment, so the fear of death may be a component of this, also.

I would not presume to speak for all victims of torture, but I am a victim, myself. I committed no crime. Still, I sometimes thought I deserved this, and had no worth. That is what torture can do to the mind. For nearly twelve years, now, I can’t pass through one day without remembering it. I am still in great physical pain, and also afraid to leave my home. There is no help, either: in the country where I live, torture is not common. Nobody knows what it’s like to have experienced it, or to live in fear of bodily trauma.

If anyone reads these articles still, and sees this comment, I hope you are biased against torture. Strongly biased. I hope you see it as an atrocity, and as the CRIME it is. By all means, call out unjustified bias where you see it. Speak up against harmful patterns of thought. But holding a bias against something so brutally damaging as torture is, I am certain, the sane thing to do.

In this sense we may be being humane to the 4,900,000, whose time we never even take.

If you want to debate the best method, fine, but it’s not clear that this is not humane in the aggregate, ignoring your bias of focusing on only the the effect of rape on individuals in state care who are raped, rather than the overall effect on the entire population.

This may require that you reject the notion that juvenile prisons are not punitive, which seems to be shown to be false by your very statistics.

I know what rape is. How are they defining “sexual abuse”?