Working with torturers

I am trying (operative word is trying) to ready an article for submission and hopefully publication. I routinely ask myself, everyday I think, why did I embark on this research? I have been asked this on numerous occasions. Why do research with torturers? The closest is probably that it fell on my lap and I could not allow men who were so distraught by their own behaviour face the journey of exploration alone. I have also always been aware of my own guilt with regard to apartheid and how I have benefitted by that evil system. I have never tortured, but I knew I had I had done nothing to prevent what was wrong and had benefitted from it.

As I write the article, I revisit my thoughts on my experiences working with men who have tortured. I am unaware of any work on the impact on the researcher or therapist who works with perpetrators of torture and other atrocities.

Initially I felt as though the participants were inviting me into an abyss. Wilson and Thomas (2004, p. 19) refer to the abyss experience as archetypal and define it as: "individual encounters with extremely foreboding psychological experience, which typically involve the confrontation with evil and death; the experience of soul death and the spectre of nonbeing; the sense of abandonment by humanity; the sense of ultimate aloneness in the universe and despairing; and the cosmic challenge of meaning." They are referring to work with trauma victims. I worked with men who caused this in others and in themselves and invited me to join them in their journey of attempting to understand why they tortured and killed. They needed to reconstitute themselves and re-establish meaning in their lives.

Looking back, I ask whether this has had any long-term effects on me? I developed empathy with the participants in my study. It was the only way to avoid pseudospeciation. If I decided they were not like me, "of a different species" the following step was dehumanisation and that is a building block for committing atrocities. In order to have empathy , I had to be aware of my capacity for evil. I had to know that although I have never tortured, it was a mere accident of birth that I had not.

I found that once I became aware of my ability for evil, I could work with perpetrators. I became aware of an interlinked universe and could allow both victims and perpetrators in the room. I shared humanity with all of them. I was victim and perpetrator.