Introduction

As this book has charted so far, there are various ways in which violence can be interpreted and recognized. For the most part, academic and legalistic frameworks often depend heavily on fairly narrow legislative definitions, specifically the Convention Against Torture and its protocols, which I defined as orthodox legalism in Chapter 1. Those working at grassroot or practitioner level more often combine lived experience with legal understandings, defined as legalist hybridity, or indeed a more free-flowing focus on experience as the most significant factor in approaching survivors of torturous violence, defined as experiential epistemologies.

This chapter moves to focus almost exclusively the latter of these three categories. It is here that I draw in the oral histories of women who have survived violence at various stages of their lives, all of whom, at the time of undertaking oral histories and ethnographic research (2016– 2018) were seeking asylum or had recently obtained refugee status.

Women's words in a chamber of echoes

The first point of note is that the accounts outlined in this chapter do not adhere to the legal specificities addressed in earlier chapters – and deliberately so. As you will see, unlike accounts from organizations documenting torture, such as Freedom from Torture or the Danish Institute Against Torture, the narratives here are not confined to the legal definition of torture – indeed, few include the infliction of violence from state officials, and even fewer where the perpetrator was working in an official capacity at the time of violence.

This is the key pattern that ultimately brought this book about. Speaking with women, as well as psychologists, psychotraumatologists and other key practitioners, the use of sustained and often extreme violence may not always amount to torture in this sense. Over the years, I have spoken with survivors of rape, multiple perpetrator rape, forced pornography, sexual and domestic trafficking, rape by border guards, sexual harassment in asylum accommodation and camps, burning, scalding, beating, threats, intimidation, imprisonment, so-called ‘false imprisonment’, and forced abortion. The most common perpetrator was a partner or husband, outside of state capacities, and there have even been occasions when abuse was ongoing without whole communities or support groups realizing for some years.