Torture is a practice of causing physical or psychological pain to a person. The purposes for which it is implemented are generally: to extract information during an interrogation; punish an enemy; simply exercising sadism.
Torture has existed since the ancient world and in the past was regularly used by courts and armed forces, only since the Enlightenment have some intellectuals questioned its usefulness. Today torture is prohibited by international conventions and the laws of many states but, nevertheless, it is used in numerous countries, including some democracies. Being such a widespread practice, countless systems and tools have been developed over the centuries, some of them particularly brutal, to inflict torture.
What is torture and what is its purpose
Torture is a form of coercion that involves inflicting physical or psychological pain. It is used to extort information, to punish a guilty person or an enemy or, in rare cases, for pure sadism. In some cases torture is inflicted with the aim of killing a condemned person: those who apply the sentence want death not to occur immediately, but to be preceded by pain and suffering.
Throughout history, special tools have been developed aimed at inflicting pain effectively. The level of savagery and the methods of use of these instruments varies greatly: consider that in the Middle Ages both the pillory (metal collar fixed to a column to expose the guilty to the pillory) and the nailed wheel (wheel on which the condemned man was blocked and left to die with broken legs and arms) were used.
A brief history of torture: from Herodotus to the Middle Ages
The use of torture is very ancient. One of the first attestations dates back to Herodotus, a Greek historian of the 5th century BC. C., which tells how a Persian prisoner captured by the Athenians was nailed alive to a stake. In many ancient civilizations, such as the Greek and Roman ones, torture was generally permitted against slaves and foreigners, while those who enjoyed citizenship rights could not be tortured and, if sentenced to death, were executed with less cruel methods.
Torture was widely used in the Middle Ages, so much so that during the Enlightenment it was believed (erroneously) that the cruelest systems had been introduced in this era. Torture was practiced by all courts, including the courts of the Inquisition. Furthermore, the information extracted through torture was considered reliable and only in very rare cases did the judges question it. An almost unique case concerns the trial against the Knights Templar celebrated in Italy in 1311: the sentence, issued by the bishop of Ravenna, declared that the confessions extracted under torture were not to be considered reliable.
Torture was regularly used in the following centuries and only in the eighteenth century, with the Enlightenment, was its legitimacy called into question. Among the jurists who took a clearest position against this practice, the figure Cesare Beccaria stands out, author of the famous treatise Of crimes and punishments (1764), in which he condemned torture not only because it was cruel, but also because it was useless for obtaining reliable information. During the nineteenth century, almost all European states abolished torture, at least officially.
Torture from the twentieth century to today
However, abolition did not make torture disappear; some twentieth-century regimes used it regularly both to obtain information and to punish opponents. We remember the cases of the Nazi regime, of various police forces of the Italian Social Republic (the state established by the fascists in Italy after the armistice of 1943), of some South American dictatorships of the 70s and 80s such as the Argentine and Chilean ones.
It should not be thought, however, that torture is used only by dictatorial regimes. On the contrary, even democratic states sometimes use torture. In the twentieth century, one of the best-known cases involved the French armed forces, who tortured Algerians fighting for independence in the 1950s and 1960s. In more recent times, the torture inflicted in Iraq by United States soldiers in 2003 against prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison shocked public opinion around the world.
According to some analysts, the interrogations carried out on some occasions by the Italian police also amount to torture, for example against people arrested in 2001 for the protests against the G8 in Genoa. Forms of torture, even very brutal ones, are used by the Israeli security forces against Palestinians.
More generally, torture is used in numerous countries today, as Amnesty International and other human rights organizations report, although there is not always agreement regarding which treatments can be considered torture. Unlike in the past, this is a practice kept secret by the authorities, because it violates the UN Convention against torture, signed in 1984 by most states, furthermore in many countries it is a practice explicitly prohibited by law (in Italy, torture has been considered a crime since 2017).
What are the instruments and techniques of torture
Over the years, courts and political-military authorities have “invented” dozens and dozens of forms of torture, some aimed at killing the tortured person and others aimed only at inflicting physical or psychological pain. One of the most used forms has always been flogging, which consists of beating a person with or without the aid of instruments (whips, sticks, etc.).
In the ancient world, cruel methods such as crucifixion and impalement (insertion of a stake from the anus to the throat) were widespread among the forms of torture used to kill. In the following centuries, other brutal systems were established, such as the wheel torture, which consisted of tying the victim to a wheel, which was made to spin while an executioner hit the condemned man to break his bones and inflict more pain.
The stake instead consisted of burning the condemned alive. More “imaginative” forms of carrying out death sentences by torture were boiling, which involved placing the condemned person in boiling water or oil, or quartering, often carried out by tying the victim’s limbs to four horses, which were then made to run in opposite directions.
Among tortures not aimed at killing, one of the most widespread was the rope technique, also used by the tribunals of the Inquisition: the condemned person was tied up, lifted up and made to fall rapidly, thus causing pain and sprains. Among other techniques, the use of forceps and tongs, sometimes red-hot, was widespread, as was the mutilation of body parts. In other cases, the condemned were exposed to beatings, or simply insults, from the crowd, through the use of instruments such as the pillory.
In recent times, torture is often carried out by causing pain with the use of electric shocks. Other forms of torture are sleep deprivation and waterboardingthat is, a form of simulated drowning, used by US security forces.
