#002 FiLiA meets: Linda MacDonald & Jeanne Sarson - Persons Against Non-State Torture (NST)
We are Nurses, Self-funded Independent Scholars, Human Right Educators & Defenders, Researchers, Grassroot Supporters and Listeners of Atrocities
Our work includes: Supporting the Human Rights of Women who have survived Non-State Torture, International Human Rights Education, Speaking, Consulting, Research, Activism, Writing, and Listening to those who have survived atrocity.
PERSONS AGAINST NON-STATE TORTURE
#nonstatetorture
Transcript:
JN: Hello, this is Julian Norman, I’m one of the trustees of FiLiA and I also work as a human rights barrister and today I’m going to be interviewing Linda MacDonald and Jeanne Sarson who are experts in non-state torture and human rights defenders. The book which they have recently contributed to, “Gender Perspectives on Torture, Law and Practice”, is one of the things we’re going to be discussing during this podcast. So first, Jeanne and Linda would you like to introduce yourselves briefly and just say a little about what it is that you do?
L: Well, thank you FiLiA for inviting us to the podcast, it’s very... it’s exciting to be the first international podcast and we appreciate your support from England. Jeanne and I have been working for 25 years as nurses and feminists and grass-root activists and human rights defenders and now published authors and researchers, with women who have been tortured since they were infants mostly, some married men who tortured but most of them, their parents were their torturers and we’ve learned that it’s a feminist issue because they were invisible in society, and still mostly are, and we are trying to support them in getting laws changed and have their human rights recognised. It’s been a long battle.
JN: And just picking that up, that it’s a feminist issue, we often think about torture as something heavily masculinised, we think of Guy Fawkes or ISIS, very masculinised, hyper-masculine, macho concepts of torture. Could you tell us a bit more about the ways it is a feminist issue how non-state torture affects women?
J: It’s been a shocking reality since 1993 when we first started because our expectation was, well this makes sense, you know we’re talking about electric shocking, we’re talking about children being hung and cut and burnt and repetitively raped, torture-raped sadistically, victimised, so we went into it, I guess, we have to say quite naively, because it was a new thought for us. When this happened in Canada in the province of Nova Scotia, so we thought, surely it is criminalised in Canada and we looked at the criminal code and no, it was not. As you say, the criminal code addressed only state torture, which means torture perpetrated by policemen and military or employees of the government, if you will, so then we realised from a feminist perspective there’s this population, like Linda said, that was invisible, that had no legal right. So, we decided we had to look at it internationally and when we went to the UN in 2004 for the first time, we realised that even at the UN, the victimisation, the non-state torture of women and girls was still not visible as a human rights violation and we learnt in 2004 that the term, non-state actors, really was only developing through Amnesty International’s publication around 2000, so then we had this larger issue that torture by non-state actors which should have been incorporated since 1948 when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was released and Article 5 which said that no-one should be subjected to torture and that all Articles apply equally to women as to men but this is not how society has operationalised that human right, so when we eventually got to the UN Committee Against Torture, one of the experts there also informed us that really the state torture of women had not been recognised by the UN and the UN Committee Against Torture for about, I think, twelve years, so even state torture of women was just invisible, period. The shock came that the UN really had to start taking a feminist perspective in their resolutions, in 1994, ’95 the question was, how do we incorporate equal rights of women as human beings into the mainstream UN functioning and that started the process where in 2008 the UN Committee Against Torture released their General Comment number 2, in paragraph 18 it says that torture by non-state actors has to be recognised and it has to have a gender perspective so that’s the kind of feminist, herstorical overview of where we have been.
L: And I would like to add to that, in that, historically, women have been tortured since the beginning of time, this is not a new phenomenon, this is not something that Jeanne and I discovered, we realise it’s an ancient, sadly, ancient reality but as all of women’s suffering has been minimised or misnamed and, at this present time it’s been misnamed as assault in our country, our Government is not willing to call it torture, although if we start thinking about the amount of non-state torture that’s happening in the world, I’m sure it’s much more prevalent than state torture, when you think many houses can be torture-houses, family houses can be torture-houses because this is where the women are enduring the torture, in their houses, in their basements, in hotels and everyday buildings that we are not recognising so non-state torture is a totally invisibilised crime still.
JN: And this is fascinating because, of course, one thing that we don’t really think of, it just doesn’t really enter the narrative, is that if a certain act is perpetrated on a male body, in a prison run by males, it’s recognised as torture, but the very same act, perpetrated on a female body by a parent, an intimate partner, somebody of that nature, doesn’t get the same recognition and naming of torture, it’s called domestic abuse or intimate partner violence or child abuse. How do you think the naming of it as torture is powerful? Why is it important to name it in that way?
L: That’s another reason why it’s a feminist issue, because naming is integral to feminism, because if we don’t name things, we don’t experience them totally and the goal of torture is to destroy the sense of self, so women’s and girl’s and some boy’s too, their spirits are being attacked daily and without it being named, their suffering is never going to be affirmed totally to the devastation that they endured. Our children are not going to grow up in a world understanding that torture is an everyday reality for them, or for their peers or they are not going to be safe in society until they understand the risks. Our laws are not going to be adequate. The care that we provide torture survivors is not going to be adequate because the women are not being listened to in a way that validates the total destruction that torture brings onto their being. So, and we are not going to evolve as a human species until we recognise the atrocities that are happening in our midst, so the naming is crucial and that’s why feminism is so important to this work.
J: Yes I would just add a little bit to the perspective of victimisation, traumatisation healing. It’s been known that if you have suffered a crime that denunciation, even legally, if you choose to press charges, naming has to occur so you can go into a court and name what happened to you, be listened to and what that does, it helps create the credibility and the reliability of women’s voices which has been totally dismissed and told they were lying or they are making up stories, that has been the evolutionary process and with children, if we don’t understand that non-state torture can happen, when children try to tell, they tell with their vocabulary that they understand and if we’re not understanding that they are trying to tell us about torture, we’ve been told by other professionals that they wouldn’t believe that the child could be tortured that if they started telling stories like this that they must be talking about nightmares or bad dreams or something, so as a consequence, the safety of children can’t even be promoted unless we name critically what is happening so I think that’s another aspect why naming is so important.
L: And also to de-pathologise the suffering, because women and children who have been tortured, they tell stories that most people would think are hallucinations or they hear the perpetrator’s voices in their heads and they’re mis-diagnosed as schizophrenic and, you know, torture is not a mental illness, it’s a crime, it’s a human rights violation and women and children are pathologised to be seen to be mentally ill when indeed they’re torture survivors.
JN: So, that’s two things there that I’d just like to ask you to say a little more on, one is, in terms of medicine, treatment for survivors of torture, PTSD, for example, I know that is something which the torture foundation here in the UK helps with, that tends to be people who have escaped persecution from other countries and arrived as refugees. Do you think that those same techniques would be beneficial to those who have survived non-state torture, including in the home and the second thing is what legal changes could help to both prevent non-state torture and to draw it out of the dark so that a light can be shone apon it in the justice system.
J: I would begin, Linda and I, listening to the women, one of the things that they really asked us to acknowledge is that they didn’t want to be labelled. So, as a consequence, we don’t call it PTSD, we call it PTS Response because when you are talking about understanding about how they go to court, you have to understand what torture responses are, you know, what their bodies and what they had to do to survive the torture victimisation inflicted against them and this creates, when you talk about treatment and what would help in a court of law, you have to understand what normal is, what are the normal responses to a person, if they’ve been a child and tortured from infancy or tortured in intimate relationships, what are the normal responses for survival and what we’ve learnt is their body spontaneously disassociates in order to, not be overwhelmed and die in the process of the pain of the torture, so, when they start to speak, they can only cope with so much revealing so much reality at a time, so if you take a person into court and think that they should be able to tell their whole story in five minutes and still cope, that is not a just expectation or it’s not a proper understanding of what survival of non-state torture really means and how we are going to adjust the legal system to facilitate how we are going to listen and how we are going to prosecute the perpetrators of non-state torture. So, the post traumatic stress disorder is really important because the question arises, what do we expect of a person who has endured non-state torture? What do we expect their responses to be? And they have told us that to be told they have a disorder is victimising itself, because it’s like there’s something more wrong with them and we’re trying to say, no there’s nothing wrong with you or your body, your body helped you survive, your brain disassociated from that being down there, you know they often talk about first knowing that somebody down there was tortured, not making the link that it was them that was being tortured and a consequence is that we have to understand that it takes time and also around investigation, if you don’t know that torture happens, the investigators might not even know the tools that perpetrators are using, like one woman told us a hot light bulb was inserted into her vagina. Well the police might not know that a light bulb might contain DNA evidence as a tool, if we don’t talk about it, if we don’t discuss the actions of the non-state torturers are, the tools which they use. The thing is that we are both nurses and so we started in our private practice as following the helping relationship that we were taught in nursing and also from our own history of violence, understanding that violence is not a mental illness and when we started listening to the women, we didn’t think of them as mentally ill, we started off that way and we just followed their process of how they needed to tell, how long it took to tell, staying in a memory from beginning to end, not boxing them into an hour or an hour and a half and sometimes the sessions would last seven hours, but we followed them, just like we would if we were following a woman through labour. It was the same process through memory. And when we went to Boston to the Learning from women conference we met up with a participant there who had a little booklet on torture on state torture and it was the first time we’d read anything that made sense to us about the work that we were doing, we knew it was right because we had the evidence that the woman was healing but to see that that is what happens in state torture, that they often took long sessions, you know, that they had to be supported for a long time, it validated our work and so really it is no different from state torture except that it’s probably more violating, because the perpetrators are more intimate to the victims, the victim’s life and the sense of caring that is shattered because they are their parents or their loved ones of some sort and the tragedy is that the state torture centres, there’s no room for the non-state torture survivors there, we’ve only met one centre that met with us, in Canada and they’ve started supporting non-state torture survivors and as they’ve learnt how to listen, the incidence of recognising non-state torture has gone up quite a bit in three years, more and more women are being identified and we believe the same will happen anywhere if they start to listen and learn differently about survivors.
JN: And what can women do and FiLiA and any other feminist organisation, what can we do to support your work and to support survivors of non-state torture?
J: Well, I think what you are doing is wonderful, getting the reality of non-state torture out into the everyday stream of consciousness and talking is important and start to look at the laws in your countries, I know that the UK is lobbying at the UN to have non-state torture in documents, in the CEDAW report, but also to change your laws, you know some countries have changed their laws, to lobby for the non-state torture specific care at centres so that women can go and see that non-state torture is a form of violence that they’ve endured and that they can name and say yes this happened to me, to teach children in schools that this is a reality and that torture happens in human trafficking, it happens in prostitution, it happens in pornography, to recognise that non-state torture is very prevalent in many forms of violation, all of those are important.
JN: And what laws in particular, would you say, are the gold standard? What would you like to see countries implement, is there anything that is not yet thought of, that you would like to see put in place?
J: Well I think there’s already good examples of how simple a torture among other redresses can be, for example, in Australia, in Queensland, Australia, they have a law on torture that would address any perpetrator, it doesn’t matter who you are, what it focuses on is that it is not the status of the torturer that counts, it’s the acts they commit that identify that torture has been committed, so in one incident where a woman was tortured, the court was very clear to say that for six months she endured torture by her husband, she endured a sexualised assault, she endured other crimes, you know, so it follows the norm that happens in the legal system that a perpetrator of a crime can be charged with different crimes, you know, so that’s not an unusual process to be able to add torture to a perpetrator’s crime that they committed and Michigan in the United States, they also created a very simple law, really, they addressed torture again, regardless of who the perpetrator was. So, we have gathered quite a list of different countries that have laws that address one or the other or just in general so it’s not like we’re creating a new thought, countries have just come to it and for Canada, of course, Canada is resisting because they maintain a patriarchal perspective, that torture should only be state centred, so any country that takes that perspective is really going back to the incorporation of the Convention Against Torture in the 80’s which focused only on men being the owners of the right to be protected against torture, so we have to … that’s a feminist issue too, to address patriarchy and how international law, that’s patriarchal, filters into countries and how that discriminates against women and girls especially with sexualised .. and the torture that occurs.
L: And one other simple thing that can happen, not in law, but if we do this in society, or centres where we listen to women, is to remember the continuum of violence, it goes from neglect to femicide and we have abuse, but we’ve forgotten the non-state torture box on the continuum.
JN: Where .. for those listening, could you just explain what you mean by that continuum?
L: Well, you have a continuum of the different forms of violence that women and girls endure which starts with neglect and it goes through to abuse and then we skip over to femicide, but there’s a whole box between abuse and femicide where non-state torture occurs with all of the electric shocking and drugging and shackling and caging and water torture and pornography and human trafficking and prostitution, it’s all in that box and we’re not really naming that box and so, we have to talk, we have to change our way of thinking, to a paradigm where non-state torture is always prevalent, always present in understanding violence against women.
JN: And do you think that ratification of CEDAW, that’s the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women would help internationally?
J: CEDAW really focussed on discrimination and Article 6 which talks about prostitution or human trafficking, it looks at it from a discriminatory perspective and that women and girls are the predominant victimised persons. I know that their general recommendations like 19 7b no-one should be subjected to torture and recommendation 35 talks about torture, but what has happened in Canada, I’ll use Canada for an example, they have said that, and they use this excuse also, in responding to the Committee against torture which recommended that Canada change it’s law to incorporate non-state torture, they used soft law excuses to say that non-state torture was not written into the treaties per se, but they are general recommendations or general comments that are outside of the wording of the treaties, so soft law says that they are not legally binding, so we don’t have to support the recommendations that either committee give and with Canada, Canada was told in 2012, when it was appearing before the committee against torture, Canada asked the committee against torture not to address non-state torture against women and girls, that shouldn’t be under the UN Committee Against Torture, Canada said to … the Committee Against Torture said to Canada, we cannot ignore the non-state torture of women and girls because that would be discrimination. But Canada did ignore their recommendation by saying this is a soft law and we don’t agree with it. So, last year Canada was in front of the CEDAW Committee and the CEDAW Committee did ask Canada about their non-state torture law and Canada .. the legal response of Canada was that in Canada there was a Member of Parliament who brought forward a Bill C242, an Act to amend the Criminal Code inflicting torture and that was unanimously defeated, so here again, nothing happened and the way that Canada, the Committee, the Standing Committee looked at Bill C242 decided it was not worthy of women to have the right, or men, or children to go into court and have the right to name non-state torture, it was just ..
L: Redundant they said
J: Redundant is the word they used, so..
L: So we’re dealing with political cruelty, that’s what we feel like we’re dealing with, and I listened to the Royal wedding today and Reverend Curry talked about imagining a world where politics was based on love, where business was based on love, that’s the world I’m imagining because we have to care about non-state torture survivors, we don’t have to …we should not be thinking about whether, you know, if they’re asking for a new law that names the crime, we should be caring about them enough, believing them enough, valuing them as human beings, as women, as girls, as children, as some men and say yes, we are opening the door of law to recognise that you indeed endured non-state torture. That seems simple to me, but it’s not.
JN: And just to sum up in a few words or a sentence each, what would be the one thing that you think would make a real drastic difference, to a solution, to an end to non-state torture?
J: We belong to the Coalition of Everywoman Everywhere and their goal is to have state support to come on tap, to support the creation of a new human rights legally binding Treaty that addresses violence against women and girls, so women and girls all around the world would have the right to complain, if their countries were not supporting them as equal persons, with equal human rights and it seems that we’re going to have to go that way because countries are still patriarchal and they’re still resistant to the issue of equality and that would give us a collective voice all around the world, if we could stand together, in such a creation. So we would really invite any country who's listening to this, for their members of their political parties to come forward and please contact every woman everywhere to say yes we’ll support you.
JN: Every woman everywhere.
J: Every woman everywhere.
L: And I'd like to say that as a nurse, my work has been based on caring. So I would say that we have to expand our paradigm of caring to include women and girls who have endured non-state torture, to start to be willing to be uncomfortable in listening to their suffering, because in order to heal from non-state torture, they have to tell their stories and they’re gruesome but we have to be willing to suffer with them, to listen to their stories, to care about them, to believe them. And to help them heal, because they can heal. We witnessed it. It's not an impossible task, it's it takes a lot of caring, but we can do it, if our society develops to that framework.
JN: And that is a wonderful optimistic note on which to end, so I will say thank you so much, Linda and Jean for your time today and for your incredibly important work. We are really proud, as FiLiA to know you, and to support you and I hope we can continue to work together for many years to come.