Just Violence

Torture and Human Rights in the Eyes of the Police

Rachel Wahl

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781503601024
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Politique d'éducation

Police who engage in torture are condemned by human rights activists, the media, and people across the world who shudder at their brutality. Stark revelations about torture by American forces at places like Guantanamo Bay have stoked a fascination with torture and debates about human rights. Yet despite this interest, the public knows little about the officers who actually commit such violence. How do the police understand what they do? How do their beliefs inform their responses to education and activism against torture?

Just Violence reveals the moral perspective of perpetrators and how they respond to human rights efforts. Through interviews with law enforcers in India, Rachel Wahl uncovers the beliefs that motivate officers who use and support torture, and how these beliefs shape their responses to international human rights norms. Although on the surface Indian officers' subversion of human rights may seem to be a case of "local culture" resisting global norms, officers see human rights as in keeping with their religious and cultural traditions—and view Western countries as the primary human rights violators. However, the police do not condemn the United States for violations; on the contrary, for Indian police, Guantanamo Bay justifies torture in New Delhi. This book follows the attempts of human rights workers to both persuade and coerce officers into compliance. As Wahl explains, current human rights strategies can undermine each other, leaving the movement with complex dilemmas regarding whether to work with or against perpetrators.

Chapter 1

Human Rights Education and State Violence

N’S EXASPERATION WAS EVIDENT. It appeared to be borne of working too hard for too long without seeing results—the suffering of caring so much about something for which there seemed to be little hope. As the program coordinator for the India office of a major NGO’s police reform program, she conducts human rights trainings for police, as well as writes reports on police violations. “Sometimes the brutality is so bad,” she lamented, “you feel like training is not making a difference.”

Like so many of the human rights educators I interviewed, N has a dark view of the police. When I asked her why the police torture suspects, she replied, “One, they think they will get away with it. Two, they don’t know how to interrogate people without torture.” In other words, police behavior can be explained by immorality and incompetence. But when I asked her directly if the police think what they are doing is right, she said, “They think they are punishing rapists and criminals because the justice system is so bad the court will let them off. But that is none of their business.”

In this interaction, she both acknowledges and rejects the moral self-conception of the police. The assumption that the first reason police use torture is simply “because they can” indicates a highly pessimistic view of their nature. And although she seems aware of their self-understanding, she quickly dismisses it as illegitimate. Like many dedicated human rights workers, she is consumed by the brutality about which she hears on an almost daily basis from victims as well as from police themselves. It is no wonder she states that police who use torture are “rotten people” and jokes that the only way to reform the police is to purge the current force and start fresh.

And it is not only the police about which she is pessimistic. “The trainings are very bad,” she sighed, explaining that most human rights trainings for police inform them of international and domestic laws without explanation of their relationship or of how to implement them. She tries to improve upon this in the trainings she conducts by explaining the connection between global and national laws, and elaborating on what precisely police must do to uphold them.

As she continued to discuss the shortcomings of the trainings, however, it became clear that legalism without practical guidance was not the only problem. “I hate to mention human rights because you are shot down right away,” she reflected. She explained, “There is so much hostility. They say, ‘Human rights activists are pressuring us and they don’t understand policing.’” Her view of police as violating rights simply because they can, and of trainers as ineffective due to officers’ animosity, leaves her agonized about whether police human rights trainings serve any purpose.

She is far from alone in this view. The director of another human rights NGO in New Delhi is even more vehement. He once regularly conducted human rights trainings for state police colleges. He tells me that he no longer accepts the government’s invitations to conduct such trainings, seeing the trainings, as well as the police, as hopeless. Like N, he insisted that the police use torture simply because there is nothing to stop them. As such, nothing short of punishment for police will change the situation. Human rights education is a “smokescreen” the government uses to “keep NGOs happy” and to fool the international human rights community, he asserted. Without real accountability that allows victims to sue police and that ensures police are punished, he said of human rights trainings, “it is all bunkum.”

As these human rights activists and educators insist, removing the legal impunity police enjoy may indeed be the most important measure for reducing torture. Currently in India, it is necessary to obtain the permission of the government in order to press charges against an officer. Human rights workers emphasize that this inability to prosecute for torture is the primary impediment to stopping it. Yet the human rights regime has long been criticized for an overemphasis on legalism and an underemphasis on attitudinal change. Human rights education is seen by many researchers and practitioners as an important corrective, a means to go beyond the law to transform how people think.¹

Moreover, educators’ view of police as hopelessly resistant and responsive only to punishment may be stoking the resistance they encounter. By focusing so squarely on the need to punish the police, and by assuming that police operate according to only ignoble motivations, educators are limited in their capacity to understand the way officers perceive themselves and their actions.² This focus obscures a fuller picture of how police make judgments and the constraints, incentives, and ideals that matter to them. For educators who believe that human rights trainings may still be worthwhile in spite of their limitations, this understanding is crucial.

Human Rights Education (HRE)

International institutions, domestic NGOs, and many national governments embrace HRE as a means of spreading a “culture of human rights.” According to some scholars, education represents the current direction of the movement as a whole: although human rights workers focused first on drafting treaties and later on establishing institutions, they now concentrate in large part on spreading their message through education.³

According to the United Nations, HRE “constitutes an essential contribution to the long-term prevention of human rights abuses and represents an important investment in the endeavor to achieve a just society in which all human rights of all persons are valued and respected.”⁴ The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) accordingly funds local initiatives, creates education and training materials, and develops resources such as a Database on HRE. The OHCHR also coordinates the United Nations World Programme for Human Rights Education, which began in 2004 following the 1995 United Nations Decade for Human Rights Education.

Some methods have won consensus among scholars as “best practices” for HRE. Rights should be promoted not just in the content of lessons, but also in the means of instruction. In other words, in addition to providing students with knowledge of rights and with the skills and motivation to uphold them, educators should respect their students’ rights and encourage the students to reflect for themselves on what they learn.⁵ Some scholars especially emphasize the importance of using critical approaches in HRE and draw heavily on the Brazilian educational theorist and activist Paolo Freire’s model of facilitating dialogue that eschews direct instruction and traditional student-teacher relationships.⁶

There are many different approaches to HRE, however, and not all fulfill these aims. HRE scholar Monisha Bajaj points out differences related to the social position of the learners and program administrators.⁷ Elites such as governments and international organizations are more likely to emphasize “global citizenship” and international laws. HRE designed within and for marginalized communities, in contrast, usually aims to inspire learners to advocate for their own rights and provides them with the tools to claim those rights. Similarly, Felicia Tibbitts differentiates between a “values and awareness” model that is meant to socialize learners by imparting information and an “activism-transformation” model premised on changing what learners believe and what they are willing to do. She laments that the former approach typically fails to use participatory methods or encourage critical reflection. As a result, she predicts that at best, such approaches can prepare learners for more transformational methods and, at worst, be perceived by students as overly ideological and do little more than convey information.⁸ This presumes that with better instruction, people across the world might come to accept human rights ideals, whereas with insufficient pedagogy, they are most likely to ignore or reject these messages. But how the ideals of human rights actually spread is not well understood.

The Spread of Human Rights through HRE

HRE is most often studied in two ways. Neoinstitutional sociologists often take it as evidence of the dissemination of contemporary liberalism, which they call “world culture.”⁹ Educational scholars typically study specific programs to evaluate their outcomes.¹⁰ Although the former focus on the spread of HRE itself and on variables exogenous to its content, such as the legitimacy adopting HRE might bring to the government, education researchers typically focus on how well the content of HRE is learned.

This book instead asks what happens when state agents take up to this set of ideas, not to provide evidence that world culture has spread or that a specific program is effective, but to understand how the agents of the state respond to contemporary liberal principles and what happens to these principles when the agents interpret and use them.

Sociological studies have offered rich insights into how the increase in HRE reflects wider global trends. For example, Garnett Russell and David Suárez argue that “HRE gained traction at the global level because the broader social movement reflects widely held cultural scripts about progress, justice, and the individual,” as well as because it spread concurrently with a worldwide expansion in schooling.¹¹

These scholars view NGOs as a primary “carrier” of world culture.¹² But what precisely happens to this culture when educational NGOs attempt to explicitly teach it is not typically the subject of their analysis. Although research has revealed a great expansion of human rights topics in textbooks and curricula across the globe, the effect of this on human rights protection or even on beliefs about rights is uncertain.¹³ Does HRE not only reflect but also expand world culture, producing modern citizens and state officials in its wake?

Educational researchers have shown that particular programs are effective at spreading human rights beliefs and even behaviors. For example, an extensive study by Monisha Bajaj revealed that an NGO program of great breadth and depth in India had a transformative effect on students and teachers alike.¹⁴ In other cases, studies suggest that HRE increases knowledge or “awareness” and improves “attitudes,” but with unclear implications for how people approach their lives and work.¹⁵

Moreover, not all research shows entirely positive effects. A study of an Amnesty International program at a high school in England revealed how the discourse of rights, on the one hand, was coopted by the disciplinary goals of the school administrators, and on the other hand, helped to destabilize that same administration when students and teachers engaged in protests against school leadership.¹⁶ This suggests that who uses rights discourse, and why, matter for what the spread of this global script means, as scholars who emphasize the importance of domestic reasons and interpretations attest.¹⁷

HRE for the Police

If who uses rights discourse matters for the meanings that are attached to it, then its use by state agents raises particular questions. But scholars and practitioners rarely inquire as to what state agents mean when they speak in terms of rights. Instead, HRE for state officials is lauded by international organizations as increasing human rights protections and by scholars as signifying the diffusion of a global culture.¹⁸ But the result of educating state agents in human rights and their subsequent use of this discourse is ambiguous. The lack of a clear and positive result should not be surprising, as HRE for actors such as police sets itself no small task: to transform through ideas and information what are often centuries of violence and inequality.

In their most ideal formulation, educators’ aims are premised on a substantive conception of reason. They imply that if police understand certain principles, then they will know to transform their beliefs and behavior. This “knowing” is technical and ethical. If the police are given information about what is legal and illegal, and persuaded that torture is wrong, then they will stop using it. Less ideally, educators seem to be engaged in half-hearted due diligence: they suggest that if they educate police, then at least the police cannot say they did not know the law. Such educators concede that information and moral persuasion are unlikely to change police behavior, but reason...