Abstract
How we define violent acts and experiences matters—equally for redressing past and preventing future wrongs. It informs what we look for, where we look and what we do. This is most apparent in what is often associated with the label of ‘torture’ or ‘torturous’. Although international human rights law may well celebrate the adoption of universal definitions, because this is no small feat of recognition at least politically, it has produced important exclusions as notably observed by feminist scholars. As Rob Boddice (2017, p. 44), a prominent scholar on the social histories of pain, puts it: ‘pain has been defined, delimited, and determined by a legion of people not so much in pain as in power’. Indeed, pain has long been the province of academics, advocates and adjudicators rather than those who bear the brunt of it. In her recent book, Victoria Canning takes important steps in articulating and grounding the contestation and configuration of torture's definition, and argues that torture is not as straightforward as it seems.
Significantly, Canning raises several oft-neglected questions in the existing literature. How do practitioners (and the organisations in which they work) help define the violence with which they work? What about the survivors of violence: how do their views inform official definitions and organisational operations? How much should those on the ground be bound to top-down legal definitions? Canning identifies what the law generally serves to exclude: the point of view of victim-survivors and their advocates through the reiterative top-down nature of looking to legal authorities in defining and delimiting what they feel and think. Canning pushes for a fuller reflection than that offered by the ‘law and torture’ scholarship—to empirically (so as to conceptually) unpack and understand the construction and consequences of narrow definitions. Much is implicated in Canning's reckoning: state-centricity; fixity on men; (re)production of the public/private dichotomy; hierarchical logics; individualisation of torturers and ignorance of their structures; primacy of physicality; orthodox legalism; exceptionalism; silencing through stigma and shame; and the gendered exclusions of sexualized violence, sexualized torture and sexually torturous violence. These are represented as important interlocking pieces of the puzzle. Their consequences are symbolic (recognition and representation of lived realities) as well as material (access to protection, prevention, rehabilitation and redress).
Canning organises her deep empirical study through a three-pronged typology of how anti-torture actors frame the violence before them: orthodox legalism; legalist hybridity; and experiential epistemologies. Orthodox legalism is taken as ‘strictly following legal conventions’, though there are shifts in emphasis on definitional elements such as severe pain, intent and purpose (p. 20). Canning finds that the ‘narrow definition is regularly presented as sacrosanct, often without reference to how narrow it is and instead presented as epistemological fact’ (p. 14). This approach unsurprisingly dominates how practitioners and organisations operate. Rigidity, often taken to be a means of ensuring quality, can also hurt. Legalist hybridity represents a degree of deviation from the dominant orthodoxy, ‘taking a flexible approach between the application of legal conventions and wider definitions of torture and trauma’ (p. 22). The definition-centricity remains discursively dominant but easily dissolves once picked at. Its dominance is driven by a lack of reflection or from fears of dilution or a loss of focus from expanded recognition and representation. Experiential epistemologies entail the ‘building knowledge on experiences of survivors’ of violence as well as drawing on the understandings of practitioners, thought-through or not. Here, the oral histories of six women are advanced as the lens through which to explore the limitations of legal definitions. Indeed, Canning admits the victim-survivors’ voices are the motivation behind the demanding book project in the first place. It also provides the backdrop for identifying and taxonomizing the intricacies of silencing in the tradition of the late Thomas Mathiesen (2004)—an aspect of the book that warrants merit and attention in its own right.
True to Canning's transdisciplinarity, this book would appeal not only to critical criminologists, but also to any practitioner or scholar working on the nexus of violence and law, state crime, psychology, anthropology, feminism or migration. She approaches the subject as an intersectional feminist and a zemiologist, a combination that has hitherto been missing in the ‘law and torture’ scholarship. She is concerned with the lived experiences of those marginalised or altogether excluded from the anti-torture framework—the ‘gendered implications of upholding narrow definitions’ (p. 3). Narrow definitions silence and silences exclude. As in her previous work, Canning is concerned with ‘unsilencing’ these accounts. The complexity of un/silencing goes beyond what Canning calls ‘epistemological’ or definitional, by society at large, institutions, practitioners and survivors themselves, towards protection and preservation. Despite these radical directions, Canning denies aiming to abandon, diminish or ‘undermine the value of the legal definitions of torture’, but rather to ‘expand the way we can see and think about violence that is as consequential and harmful as torture, but not always recognized as such’ (p. 12). She certainly does not want to correct or strengthen the law either. Her project is more about how legal definitions are discussed, delimited and circulated, and how meaning is produced. It is a foray into the legal consciousness, to put it in socio-legal parlance, about how anti-torture imaginaries are constructed and constricted to legal diktat. She views this reflection as holding the key to ending the cycle of torturous violence.
Here, Canning offers her concept of ‘torturous violence’—one that moves from intent to effect, shifting the focus from ‘who’ is ordinarily thought to perpetrate torture (state authorities), ‘where’ it happens (police stations and prisons) and ‘why’ it happens (intention and purpose) to equally impactful yet invisibilised forms of harm. For Canning, torturous violence is ‘the infliction of emotional, psychological, sexualized and/or physical violence which mirrors acts normally inflicted as torture but which fall outside of the dominant legislative requirements to be recognized as such’ (p. 62). It is taken to be ‘sustained, psychologically impactful and harms to the same or similar extent as violence which is definably torture’ and as possibly ‘enabled by coercive control, marital rights, relative powerlessness between perpetrator(s) and victim/survivor(s), and on structurally violent familial or cultural norms’ (p. 62). Focusing on impact rather than intent, she argues, allows a better understanding torturous violence—redirecting us to reflect on some of the fundamental assumptions.
Whether conscious or not, we (scholars, practitioners and survivors of violence) are active in maintaining our frames of reference and operation—wielding symbolic and material power in what and who matters. Canning's insights are freshly and searingly written—equally for those merely interested and those deeply implicated.