Torture has been one of the dominant international human rights issues of the last fifteen years. Yet, the vast majority of incidents of torture have remained undocumented. This is perhaps inevitable, as torture is very hard to document. States invest considerable resources into hiding torture from view and denying that it takes place at all. Victims can also be too afraid to come forward, human rights organizations have limited resources. But the biggest documentation gap when it comes to torture and ill treatment, is among the poor — particularly across the Global South — who are often left out of the equation entirely.
Research we have been carrying out with local partners in Kenya, Nepal and Bangladesh suggests that international — and to a lesser extent domestic — human rights organizations can significantly under perceive the extent of torture and ill-treatment against the poor. There are five key dispositions that have lead to these blind spots. First, torture is treated as an extraordinary event, fundamentally different from more mundane and everyday encounters with public officials. This can leave to one side the “mundane” and “everyday” nature of much of the torture experienced by the poor. We are thinking here, for example, about informal traders, sex workers, street children, or ghetto youth who are perceived to be legitimate targets of disciplinary, extortionist or just arbitrary violence. These marginalized groups are routinely stopped by the police, threatened, and severely beaten. The violence rarely takes place in police cells or prison, but more often than not in the street, in the back of a van, or in their own homes. For many of the poorest residents of Kathmandu, Dhaka and Nairobi, and many other places in the world, their everyday interactions with public officials can be marked by violence and coercion.
A street vendor in Nairobi, Kenya. It is often informal traders, sex workers, street children, or ghetto youth who are the targets of…