#I don't understand how the reporting structure works at the police force | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

scripttorture · 6 years

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1/2 Hi! I'm the one who asked about the magical "truth serum." Thanks for answering my original question! I don't know if this changes things, but the police and the laws themselves have been portrayed as ineffective and often brutal, and the society that I'm writing about is already shaking itself apart because of huge injustices. The only times I've shown the spell in action, it's with people who were eager to co-operate anyway, and when it started to hurt the interrogation fell apart.

2/2 My MC does have lasting psychological damage from his encounters with them. If the way to proceed is to show that this technique is worse than useless, that it's one more reason why the prisons are filled with unjustly convicted people, and that the police who do this are torturers with everything that goes with that, I do think I'm in a position to write that.

For readers generally theoriginal ask with my original response is here.

Yes that contextchanges things. It means that I think I completely misunderstood the originalask. That happens occasionally and I’m sorry about that. Thank you for being sounderstanding.

A lot of askers tend toapologise for sending in long asks but honestly more information is morehelpful for me. Having wider context for the story helps. We’re tackling toughsubjects here and I think detail and nuance is incredibly important

Knowing that you’reshowing this as ineffective makes all the difference.

The original ask wasabout effects, both on the victims and society more generally. I’m going tostart with the MC, this is going to apply to victims generally though.

I’ve got a summary ofthe commonpsychological effects of torture here. Symptoms are generally the same nomatter what technique is used (there are a few exceptions but even thoseinclude the common symptoms on the list). Victims won’t all experience the samesymptoms and it’s impossible to predict who will experience which symptoms.

As a result I tend tosuggest picking symptoms based on what the author feels fits the character andoverall story best.

Given the way you’reusing this magic I think memory problems would be an excellent fit for thestory.

In the long term aftertorture memory problems can manifest in several different ways and theseproblems can occur separate or together. Broadly speaking they come in aboutthree categories: memory loss, intrusive memories and inaccurate memories.

Memory loss can mean forgetting the traumatic incidententirely but that’s not a very common form of problem. More commonly what itmeans is forgetting chunks of time immediately before and immediately aftertorture. It can also mean a sort of long term forgetfulness which makeseveryday life much more difficult. Learning new things, remembering wherethings are, being on time- simple everyday things like that become a lot moredifficult.

That sort memoryproblem is incredibly common and rarely shown in fiction. I’ve actually had afew survivors contact me to say they weren’t even aware what they wereexperiencing was a symptom.

Intrusive memories are alot easier to explicitly link to torture. They’re basically continuallyremembering and going over a traumatic event. It means that the character isconstantly reminded of torture, by small everyday things. And those remindersprompt an extremely vivid, detailed memory of the abuse they suffered. It meansthinking about what they survived almost all the time.

Inaccurate memories aremuch harder to identify as a problem from ‘inside’. They feel like normalmemories and people experience them generally are convinced that their memoryis accurate.

They usually affectmemories of and around torture and they’re often about details. Someone mightsay that the door of the room they were tortured in was on the left, when infact it was on the right. They can affect things like remembering exactly whodid what when and in what order.

This can makeprosecuting a torture case extremely difficult.

For your story inparticularly I want to highlight the work Morgan et al did with US soldiers.The soldiers, who all had years of front line combat experience, went through afake capture scenario as part of a ‘training exercise’. Some of them were thenput through a ‘high stress’ interrogation which included shouting, abuse andthe sorts of clean beating US rules allowed at the time. The other had a‘low-stress’ interrogation, a chat over a hot drink.

Morgan then tested themthe next day to see who recognised their interrogator. Depending on how theywere asked to identify the interrogator between 51-68% identified the wrong person. Most of them wereconfident they’d gotten the right person. (The paper can be found here: C AMorgan et al, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry in 2004, 27, 265-279pgs)

The interrogations werearound four hours and I think this study is really relevant to what you want towrite. Don’t worry too much if you can’t access the paper itself. The generalpicture of memory problems are more important than the in-depth statistical andmethod analysis the paper concentrates on.

I’ve stressed all ofthese memory problems for a reason: I think you should show this magic as worsethan useless and I think this is the most sensible way to tackle it. It’s not alie if you honestly think it’s true and our memories are incredibly prone toflaws especially when we’re stressed or in pain.

To put that a bit morebluntly: what we think is factually true canchange if we’re in pain.

And those falsememories can persist and feel just as ‘true’ as accurate memories.

The next thing I thinkyou really need to consider are the police officers themselves. There’s lessresearch on torturers then torture victims but what we have overwhelminglysuggests that torturing other people causes severe mental illness in thetorturer.

Idiscuss the kinds of effects it has in another ask here (the questionitself involves mentions of rape and sexual abuse but there are no graphicdescriptions in the question or answer).

Have a read through ofthat because whether you focus on any of the police as characters or not ifthis system comes down that’s a lot ofpeople with those symptoms who will be out of work. Their society is goingto have to come up with a way of coping with that.

That can take a lot ofdifferent forms. In Soviet Russia it was lethal purges. In South Africa it wasthe Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In the aftermath of the Bosnian war it’sbeen one of the most successful series of war crimes trials in history.

On the nicer end you’relooking at long term mental health programs and re-training programs, jailsentences for the worst offenders and a structured plan to get these peopleback into the community in a healthy way.

On the worse end it’signoring the problem and ending up with a lotof people who are violent, traumatised and can’t hold down a job anymore. Thatmeans a massive uptick in homelessness and problems related to addiction (iemore demand for health services then the set up can support).

Those are problems forthis society afterwards. During all of this the problems are gonna be a littledifferent.

This system will haveabsolutely destroyed the public’s trust in the police force. In a way that goesbeyond the ways torture normally destroys the public’s trust in the policeforce. There is normally a drop in people volunteering information to thepolice when the police torture but in most scenarios that’s because they’reafraid people they know will be tortured not because informants are at risk oftorture themselves. But everyone istortured in this scenario, including the witnesses and the people who reportcrimes.

Simply put people willstop reporting crimes.

The police might usethat to argue that crime has dropped and what they’re doing works.

In fact you’ll have asystem of more or less complete collapse. I don’t know whether crime wouldactually rise but it would certainly go unpunished.

With no onevolunteering information and a general culture of silence the police wouldprobably respond by arresting people at random. This is pretty common inpolicing systems that have come to rely on torture.

Not only does this meanmore brutalised, injured people and less trust in the police it also creates aculture of fear. Because under these circumstances people tend to assume that there is a reason the police took the peoplethey did. They assume the raids and the disappearances are to do with someunder lying logic even when none exists.

I think the best thingto read for the sort of societal affects you might see is Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. And luckily it’snow available for free over here.

The only parts of Fanon’sbook I’ve read in detail are his psychiatric notes on patients he treatedduring and after the Franco-Algerian war. These included torture victims,torturers and the families of both groups.

But the majority of thebook is about the injustice of colonialism, shaped by Fanon’s experience of France’sbloody, unjust policy of mass detention and torture of Algerians during thewar. (For further reading on France’s torture practices in Algeria see H Alleg’sThe Question)

You’ve essentially gota society where there is no law enforcement and at the same time citizens areperiodically and randomly pulled off the street and tortured. There’s going tobe a lot of fear and a lot of distrust of authority. People may or may not haveformed their own parallel social systems already (with their own law enforcersand their own back-room courts).

And that’s now edgingtowards @scriptsociology’s area of expertise. This is going to be an intensely fracturedsociety with a lot of genuine grievances and a lot of really profoundly illpeople who’ll need help. I strongly suggest consulting @scriptsociology if youwant this society to be rebuilt or come together, because it’s a lot easier forsocieties in this situation to fall apart rather than come back together.

That may not havecovered anything but I think it’s a decent broad overview. If you’ve got any morequestions feel free to ask as soon as the box is open again. :)

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#tw torture #tw police brutality #fantasy ask #police torture #effect of torture on victims #effect of torture on torturers #psychological effects of torture #effects of torture on society #effects of torture on public trust #Anonymous

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