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Torture

Introduction

The practice of torture is so ancient that its origins are lost in the distant past. However, recorded history shows that all major civilizations practiced it, either as a form of punishment or as a means of obtaining information. The ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, Persians, Romans, and Chinese left records of it, and the Bible recounts many examples (Prip, pp.11).

During the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe, the Holy Inquisition used torture to elicit confessions of heresy or other beliefs or actions contrary to the dogma of the Catholic Church. During the 17th century, suspected witches were subjected to tortures for essentially the same purpose, with those found guilty of heresy or of witchcraft burned alive.

Examination of ancient castles reveals areas reserved as prisons and designed to be as unpleasant as possible. Some spaces were simply deep pits below the lower floor of a castle tower, where a prisoner was literally dropped and then left until such time as someone cared to retrieve him. Such spaces are called “oubliettes,” after the French word oublier, meaning “to forget.” Sometimes formal detention facilities were in basement areas with barred entrances. These were usually too low for a person inside to stand upright, and their location permitted frequent flooding from ground water or the castle moat. In general, the quarters reserved for housing prisoners were themselves a mode of torture. Modern practices of torture have several possible goals: extraction of information, incitement of fear or terror, inflicting pain to punish, obtaining a confession pursuant to a criminal investigation, or, in rarer instances, application of pain for perverse sexual pleasure (Prip, pp.13).

Discussion

Generally, torture attempts to obtain compliance from the victim by inflicting or threatening severe pain or mutilation or through psychological methods, where one is deprived of sleep, disoriented, isolated, and in some instances subjected to sensory deprivation and the application of drugs. Threats or displays of torture of others may also be used (Harbury, pp.111) .

Torture methods vary by culture and utilize available technology. The ancient Greeks wrote about the use of a brazen bull in which victims were roasted to death. The Romans practiced crucifixion and flagellation (whipping with a special multistrand whip weighted with lead at the ends). In the Middle Ages, the state and/or the church used mechanical devices in torture. The thumbscrew, rack, and iron maiden are a few of the best known of these tools ...