Torturers, Killers, and Their Work
Violence workers: Police torturers and murderers reconstruct Brazilian atrocities.
By Martha K. Huggins, Mika Haritos-Fatouros, Philip G. Zimbardo
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. 293 pp. ISBN 0-520-23447-2 $21.95
Review by Darius Rejali
Why do people do violence? The general public has its own answer to this question. Many believe in what might be called the “dispositional hypothesis”, that those who engage in violence have dispositions to do so, dispositions rooted in their biological or personal history. To be sure, such people exist, but expert research in this area has shifted in the last decades towards another answer. This is the view that under the right circumstances, practically anybody can perform extremely violent acts. The “situational hypothesis” relates to one of the striking facts of the twentieth century, that most violence in that century was organized violence, grounded in institutions and led by people who, in most cases, turned out to be no different than the average population.
Nevertheless, the suspicion remains that for certain kinds of violence, notably torture, disposition rather than situation matters more. Torture involves such direct contact to the violence that it is hard to imagine that torturers don’t have a disposition for the work they do. Even police subscribe to this view, blaming most illegal police torture on the ‘few bad apples’ that somehow escaped screening during recruitment.
Is this true? The fact is we know very little about torturers. But this situation is now remedied with the appearance of Violence Workers, winner of the “Best Book for 2003” Award from the New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS) and the American Society of Criminology´s Division of International Criminology (DIC). What makes this book so striking is that it unites three different scholars, a sociologist and two psychologists, who have over the last few decades brought us enormous insight into the question: Why do people do violence? Zimbardo’s experiments in the 1960s and 1970s showed the circumstances in which practically anybody might undertake acts of violence. Haritos Fatouros has now followed up her well-known article on the training of Greek torturers (“The Official Torturer,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1988, 18, 1107-1120) with a full-scale study (The Psychological Origins of Institutionalized Torture, Routledge, 2002). Huggins has written extensively on the organizational effects of institutionalized torture and the American involvement in torture training in Brazil in the 20th century. (Political Policing, Duke 1998).
In Violence Workers, these three authors collaborate to bring the accumulated insights of their past work to bear on torturers from Brazil. The title of the book, Violence Workers, draws attention to the fact the violence is a kind of work, labor intensive and hard. It focuses on the work conditions for extreme violence and the way in which other values (professionalism, secrecy, democratic monitoring) affect work performance. The title also signals that the book covers not only torturers but also those involved in other violence work, such as killing, offering a comparative measure for torture work.
Thinking through these issues is difficult enough, but finding the violence workers is even harder. What facilitated Haritos-Fatouros’ original work on Greek torturers was the fact that all of them had been tried publicly; one began with some understanding of who the torturers were, what they had done, and where they resided. But this was not available for the Brazilian torturers. In Brazil, the transition to democracy was not facilitated by trials. The violence workers had disappeared into society quietly. Here and there, as in a notorious prison outside Sao Paulo, former torturers had to be housed separately from the regular inmate population. But in general, former violence workers covered their tracks. Not only did these men have no incentives to talk about their past, they were in some cases determined to keep their past a secret. And even if they did talk, they had every incentive to present the past in ways most suited to their present needs and vocation.
Blunt as it is about these issues, Violence Workers still understates the highly dangerous nature of the Brazilian research that came to an abrupt end when the researchers themselves felt in genuine jeopardy. The final sample size, twenty-three individuals, is smaller than even the researchers had hoped, but it represents an amazing amount of courage and fortitude against considerable odds. And intelligence, for the self-conscious way in which Violence Workers discusses the methodological problems of locating and interviewing the violence workers is exemplary for anyone seeking to do field work of this sort (Chapters 2-4). The researchers explain the scholarly impediments to doing violence research (biases of documentary materials, problems of narrating atrocity stories); then turn to strategies for locating secretive individuals in a post-democratic context, specifying clearly (for the first time as far I am aware anywhere) the critical strategies used by those that do investigative work of this sort; and then the encounter with the violence workers themselves. Here they discuss interviewing strategies, the problem of recollection and self-justification since the atrocity work, and the effect of the gender of the interviewer on the willingness of violence workers to talk or mislead.
Those trained in the experimental tradition in the social sciences might well wonder whether all this danger and difficulty was necessary for such a small sample size. After all, could one not set up a laboratory experiment to examine the conditions under which ordinary people might become violence workers? The work of Milgram and Zimbardo showed with a fair degree of precision the kinds of variables that moved people in this respect: anonymity of the violence workers, distance or proximity to the violence, dehumanization of victims, incremental involvement of participants in applying pain, and the willingness of higher authorities to assume responsibility (what has been called ‘free floating responsibility’). Although experimenters cannot perform these experiments again (and for good reason), subsequent, less extreme experiments have confirmed the importance of this range of variables in motivating violence work. Why then go through all this trouble to find the violence workers themselves? It is reassuring to know that many of these same variables are present in the lives of actual violence workers, but was it really necessary?
Violence Workers demonstrates that, difficult though this work might be, there are important social scientific reasons to undertaking this work. Consider for example a policeman who has performed murder and torture serially over a number of years. One might be able to explain, using the experimental framework, how this ordinary person came to perform his first act of violence. But are these the same factors that explain the policeman’s persistence in subsequent acts of violence? His rise among his peers to a position of mentor? Or his management of the death squad? Anonymity, dehumanization, distance, and bureaucratized violence can only explain so much. They do not explain intra-group variations in atrocity careers, the difference between the ordinary policeman who does one act of violence and falls back into ordinary life and the one who goes on to serial atrocity work.
Laboratory experiments adopt a simultaneous model of causality, showing situational factors can combine simultaneously to lead ordinary people to perform a violent act. They do not even begin to broach the problem of serial atrocity, regularized violence work. Violence Workers postulates a sequential model of causality, trying to capture the dynamics in interactions and organizations that generate and sustain violence work (p. 139). The focus on sequential causality moves the focus away from explaining the initial act of violence to explaining career trajectories, from the performance in a laboratory experiment to the construction of the laboratory itself, which is too often taken as a given. It sets out to explain not just the behavior of the lower order policeman at a single act of violence but the motivations of the facilitators of violence (the “experimental designer”) who were once low-level participants themselves. In experiments, the organization of authority is presupposed and the critical factors are already in place, but this understates the amount of work that has to be done (organization, boundary maintenance etc.) to sustain the violence work once individuals are recruited into the atrocity work.
Violence Workers shows the effects of atrocity work not over a single day or even several repeated experiments, but over the course of lifetimes. It explains how some became organizational mentors, offering on-the-job training, while others did not, acting like “lone wolves.” It shows the importance of learning coping skills to handle the everyday stress of atrocity work. It identifies the critical reinforcing role of secrecy (again not present in public, externally evaluated experimental situations) that generates in-group/out-group distinctions and creates the carefully insulated world of atrocity workers. It identifies ways of talking about violence within the group that sustain the violence workers’ moral universe in the absence of an overarching ideological commitment (most notably the discourse of professionalism) (Chapters 9-11).
An important step in becoming a violence worker is figuring out ones “proper emotional and operational role within a team and organization” (p. 177). For policemen who become serial violence workers, rather than just the one who committed a few acts of violence, a critical part of this is figuring out what kind of man they are and how that relates to their institutional identity. In this respect, Violence Workers takes up not only the causes of violence, but also the meaning of violence for the participants. We know that the meaning of a situation is an important factor in generating violence work; even in the Milgram experiments, the participants understood the electric shock they were applying as part of an “educational” process. Serial violence workers cannot deceive themselves in this simplistic way, they know what they are doing, but their work is deeply tied to their gendered self-identification, the kind of men they understand themselves to be. Violence Workers shows the different effects of different conceptions of masculinity on recruitment and later violence work (Chapters 6-8).
One of the most suggestive findings of Violence Workers comes in the final empirical chapter, “Hung Out to Dry” (Chapter 12). This chapter examines the incidence of job related burnout among the twenty-three violence workers. It turns out members of death squads (“killers”) experienced lower job related stress than torturers. And those that maintained collegial relations with other violence workers, families and non-police friends were better capable of handling job-related burnout. Ironically, the very factors that that sustain organized violence – the high levels of secrecy for example – also undermined the ability of serial violence-workers to cope.
It is hard to sympathize with these men of course, but the fact that ordinary people can become torturers and torturers can then become victims is not simply an abstract problem. In the world we live in, yesterday’s torturers very rapidly become tomorrow’s torture victims. A journalist recently described to me how a torture victim ran into one of his torturers in a torture recovery center in the United States. When he asked what the man was doing here, he was told he too was a torture victim. And not long ago, I met with Canadian immigration officials who wanted to know if there was any way of identifying torturers who present themselves as torture victims when they applied for refugee status. Thus while it is easy to dismiss the problem of used up torturers, the problem has genuine practical dimensions for those who deal with torture victims in medical and legal settings. Violence Workers offers the first glimpse into the lives of these men. The fact is that we know more about the victims of torture, on whom there is a rich literature, than the torturers themselves.
Violence Workers is thus a multifaceted work, bridging concerns in psychology and sociology. It generates methodological and substantive insights for those involved gender studies, human rights work, and treatment of torture victims. Was Violence Workers worth the danger, the time, the difficulty and the stress? Probably the authors are the only ones who can answer that. Has it amplified what we know about why people do violence? On that point, there can be no doubt.