Witnessing Torture

Abstract

I became involved with human rights activism at the age of fourteen, but it would be twenty-five years before I met a person who had survived torture. Many human rights activists and academics never meet someone who has survived a grave violation such as disappearance, torture, rape, or genocide, and certainly the vast majority of survivors never meet those who speak on their behalf in the arena of international human rights advocacy. Indeed, at its highest institutional levels, and in spite of the intrepid on-the-ground work of advocates and humanitarian agents, much human rights work is divorced from the intimate struggles, pain, and trauma experienced by individual humans, focused instead upon reporting on and negotiating with governments, armed resistance groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), corporations, diplomats, and others about the treatment of groups of people: dissidents living under repressive regimes; ethnic minorities mistreated by state apparatuses; detainees confined without trial in the “war on terror”; women and girls violated and oppressed the world over.