Torture-tainment & Desensitization

We live in an age of technology.  And while technology has given us many advantages it has also taken something from us: our ability to recognize and react to violence.

As advances in technology have been achieved, society as a whole has regressed. I attribute this to the amount of free time the average American now has at his or her disposal. Technology, in my mind, is inherently linked to machines. As machines have developed they have taken on both menial and labor-intensive occupations that people are now free from performing. This freedom is mostly spent in attending to visual medias such as television and films. And here is where the desensitization comes in.

Television programs and films have increased the amount of Torture-tainment, a genre of visual media in which acts and moments of torture are depicted, in their content.  This constant exposure to violent scenes leads to a diminishing emotional response in those who watch and even to a lack of recognition that an act that violates human rights has taken place.  

The Hunger Games, both a book trilogy and a four film franchise, has been read and watched by hundreds of people. Its main target audience is adolescents.  At first glance, The Hunger Games seems to follow the protagonist Katniss Everdeen as she enters a life or death situation in lieu of her sister which in turn sets off a catalyst of reactions that end up with the oppressed people of The Hunger Games world to rise up against its government, the Capitol. 

With this rudimentary understanding, The Hunger Games appears to be a narrative of Good triumphing over Evil with overtones of Love conquering all. However, what most people gloss over is the methods that the Capitol used to maintain control: torture. Viewers and readers recognize that the government of The Hunger Games is not a functioning one, they categorize it in terms of tyranny and abuse of power. What they don't see or overlook is the systematic killings of 23 youths with one forced-killer surviving the genocide, often with psychological trauma. 

New Yorker staff writer Amy Davidson likens The Hunger Games to a story of counterinsurgency and wonders whether its popularity is stemmed from America's involvement in multiple wars. This not only speaks to a desensitization of torture but also a demand for violence by the public. 


This desensitization to violence is not a new idea. It can be traced back to the 1970s to German-American novelist Kurt Vonnegut and the publication of his book Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Through this book Vonnegut published his concerns of society failing to react to images of mass death and violation of human rights that filled the newspapers and filled the television screens during the duration of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Vonnegut himself was a veteran of World War II. 

Vonnegut may have been advocating for society to recognize its worrisome relationship with acts of violence and degradation of the human body in the early 70s, but it appears that society took no heed. With major blockbuster films such as Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Deadpool (2015) America's relationship with violence, and by extension torture, appears to be stronger than ever. 

What does it say for the future of America that its most seen films and television shows are constantly screening images of torture- an act that demeans the human body?  

Enhanced Interrogation Techniques and Police Misconduct: Different Matters or Related?

For the purposes of this blog entry I want to define torture as "the infliction of severe bodily pain, as punishment or a means of persuasion" (OED). 

During Professor Lazo's lecture I learned about different euphemisms for torture ("special methods of questioning" and "refined interrogation") as well as how and why those who use methods of torture justify their use. Professor Lazo focused on CIA operatives and military personnel who worked in Guantanamo Bay and other black sites to combat "the War on Terror." Those operating against labeled "terrorists" used a scenario known as "The Ticking-Time Bomb" as justification for their actions. This scenario includes gathering information from a captive terrorist who may have knowledge about other attacks that have yet to be conducted by the terrorist group they align themselves with. In such a position, interrogators claim they need to apply "moderate physical pressure" in order to prevent the loss of large quantities of life. 

While learning about the standardized methods of torture the United States enacted on its incarcerated international detainees I was learning in another class of similar instances here within the the country's borders: police and tortured confessions.   While reading the chapter "Freely and Voluntary" from Steve Bogira's book Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse I came across instances of Chicago law enforcement officers using "coercion" on suspects of murder cases in the 1980s.  In an inquiry conducted by Cook County police department's Office of Professional Standards, defendants were found to be "bagged" or suffocated with plastic bags or electroshocked with the machine's clips being placed anywhere from the ears to the genitalia(175-177).  

David H. Bayley, a Dean and Professor at the School of Criminal Justice at the State University of New York examines police rational in law breaking in an article titled "Law Enforcement and the Rule of Law: Is There a Tradeoff?" In this article Bayley asserts that public safety and career success has a lot to do with it. "Police see the raw hurt that criminality inflicts" and are tempted to violate the rule of law in order to attain "speedy justice" (139). The  police system is also a reward-based one in which the higher number of cases "solved" equates to medals and promotions; in order to meet certain quotas officers found themselves breaking the rule of law and justifying their actions by claiming to work  for the "greater good." 

Not only are these two institutions charged with enforcing law and protecting United State citizens (one from dangers abroad and one from domestic dangers), they also seem to find torture a preferred method for extracting confessions. They also both claim to be saving lives and preventing situations where lives can be potentially put at risk. 

Now here come the moral dilemmas: 

• Is it right for the lives of some to be endangered to potentially save the lives of many?
• Do the ends really justify the means?

Many who are against "enhanced the interrogation techniques" used by the CIA argue that when someone is under extreme physical duress, they will begin to confess anything and everything the interrogator(s) want to hear. Similarly, police officers in Cook County , Chicago in the 1980s received the murder confessions they wanted to hear to close a case. However, in the 1990s these "confessions" would come back to haunt officers as defendants began to speak about the beatings, suffocations , electroshocks, and threats that pressured them into giving falsified confessions. 

Bayley in the same article that examined police justifications for law breaking also listed the disadvantages of police lawbreaking. Some of the points he made were that violating the rule of law :

1. Contributes marginally to crime deterrence
2. Reduces enforcement effectiveness
3. Weakens the authority of the law
4. Scapegoats the police
5. Wastes community resources (142-145). 

While what Bayley wrote about was specifically police officers, I would go so far as to attribute these to organizations such as the CIA because these institutions have become more and more militarized. These militarization is perhaps the problem. I feel that many Americans are worrying about what we as the United States have done to (or not done) to international detainees; perhaps we also need to direct our vision inward and examine what our criminal justice system is doing to its own citizens.