Torture is a crime under international law. According to all relevant treaties, and under customary international law, it is absolutely prohibited and cannot be justified under any circumstances. This prohibition is binding on every country, regardless of whether it has ratified the Convention Againt Torture and/or other international treaties in which torture is expressly prohibited. And yet, torture is practiced by most countries in the world, including the US, Israel, and many other countries that consider themselves to be well developed democracies.
Governments try to justify use of torture for national security reasons, such as the “ticking time bomb” scenario wherein a desperate government agent has no choice but to torture a person to induce them to give up the location of the bomb before it kills hundreds or even thousands of people. Such manufactured narratives have reinforced people’s incorrect assumption that torture is a necessary evil, even though the notion that torture is efficient for extracting useful intelligence has been widely debunked by intelligence agents, military generals, national security personnel, and torturers themselves.
More accurately, torture is effective at destroying individual lives and families, as well as tearing apart communities, and destroying social movements. And this is precisely the aim of many oppressive governments that implement widespread torture regimes against those it considers enemies of the state. But do you realise that torture against children is a well documented although not well enumerated horror around the world?
While there are no official or reliable statistics to measure the magnitude of the problem, we know many details and locations from the stories of the children themselves, the medical exams that document the torture they endured, and the psychological evaluations that assess the ongoing trauma.
Torture of children happens during times of peace and during times of political upheaval and armed conflict. Children in high-risk groups include those who are part of religious or ethnic minorities, children living on the street, children living apart from families, children in conflict with the law, child soldiers and those associated with militias, and children in detention. The so-called wars against terror, in which countries attempt to justify unlawful, arbitrary and prolonged detention of “suspected terrorists” have exposed many children to inhuman conditions, torture, and sexual violence.
Synergy for Justice, with our longtime partner, LDHR, has forensically documented numerous cases of Syrian children who were detained and tortured over the past decade. We have trained the doctors documenting child cases to understand the developmental stages of children, the impacts that trauma at a young age can have, and the survivor-centric, trauma-informed and child-sensitive approaches they must use to build trust and ensure that they do no harm in the process. Every child case must be handled with extreme care so as not to retraumatise while examining, interviewing, and documenting evidence for court. Many children suffer from anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, anger issues, sleep problems, difficulty concentrating, and a host of other physical and psychological symptoms following experiences of torture.
Understanding the profound impacts that torture produces in adults, and especially in children, we watch with growing concern as the Israeli government continues to arrest and detain children without charges. Human rights groups have documented several cases in which children as young as 12 years old have been detained and tortured in Israeli custody. Just last month Defense for Children International -Palestine (DCIP) shared the story of a 14-year-old boy who was beaten and strangled during interrogation and detention by the Israeli government.
“Israeli forces routinely subject Palestinian child detainees to systematic ill-treatment and torture following arrest,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director at DCIP. “These latest allegations are a particularly disturbing reminder that Palestinian children in Israeli custody are vulnerable to all forms of violence. The international community must pressure Israeli authorities to end the practice of detaining and torturing Palestinian children.”
DCIP notes on its website that since 2000, the Israeli military authorities have detained, interrogated, prosecuted, and imprisoned approximately 13,000 Palestinian children. And while Israel has vigorously attempted to deflect criticism of its human rights record, NGOs, UN agencies, and credible journalists are increasingly paying attention and reporting with alarm on the impunity with which children - Palestinian children - are being detained and tortured in Israeli custody.
On this International Day of Support for Victims of Torture, we ask you to dig a bit deeper and learn a bit more about the myths surrounding the efficacy of torture, the truth about its devastating impacts, and the impunity with which so-called democracies continue to employ this horrifying tactic of individual and social destruction.