What counts as torture, and how we come to know it.
The archive can say more than any single witness can. This page sets out the definition the project works from, how a facility file is built, and the limits of what can be claimed.
Definition
Định nghĩaTorture at three levelsThe project works from a definition read at three levels. Each level names a different subject: a person, an environment, and an institution. The archive documents all three, and approaches them in that order — working outward from the person.
At the level of the individual, torture is a process that uses pain and injury, fear, humiliation, the disruption and control of bodily functions, and the manipulation of time, environment and the senses in order to break a person. Its purposes typically include extracting information, forcing a confession or a denunciation; punishment; intimidation or coercion; and remaking the victim’s identity or view of the world to the torturer’s design.
Although inflicted from outside, torture is experienced as a physical, mental and emotional war against oneself, in which the victim is forced into an active part in their own suffering. The harm torture does is real, but the mark it leaves on each prisoner varies. Every victim takes torture in a shape of their own, and gives it many different meanings.
Torture takes place inside — and is made possible by — a torturing environment: the physical conditions of detention, the methods of torture, and the practices, relationships and human interactions at the facility. Together these attack and destroy the personhood of the prisoner. The torturing environment is this project’s central object of documentation.
At the level of society, torture is a social institution of power and rule. That institution enables acts of torture, produces torturing environments, and secures impunity for those who carry them out. Torture is inflicted by state personnel, or takes place with their acquiescence. Through the victim, the state sends a message about its power and the reach of that power, and warns off resistance. This produces silence, self-censorship and a paralysis of the will to resist — securing public acceptance of the status quo. In turn, torture survives on precisely that public indifference and acceptance.
Practice
Thực hànhA method for each levelEach level of the definition is approached by a different piece of work. The archive cannot start from the top down: the individual account comes first, the facility is reconstructed by cross-checking, and only then can anything be written about the system. Each step supplies the evidence for the next.
The project collects accounts of torture and imprisonment in two ways: in-depth interviews and contributions from the community. For the first, the project conducts an interview of roughly 90 minutes built on a detailed question set about the experience of detention and torture. The questions organise the material along the course of a criminal case: arrest, pre-trial detention and investigation, serving the sentence, and life after release. Dividing it by time helps the witness describe in more detail the conditions of the places where they were held.
After the interview, the material serves two purposes. First, the project edits it into a first-person account and publishes it in the “People” section. The wording and content are kept as they were in the interview; the project removes only repetition and anything that has to go for anonymity.
Second, the material is used for analysis and cross-checking. Each witness is treated as a case of torture and assessed using the Torturing Environment Scale (TES) developed by Pau Pérez-Sales (2017). The project also compares one interview against other interviews and sources to build an overall picture of the facility and of the prison system in Vietnam.
For the second route, the project collects accounts contributed by the community. These vary in detail and structure; the project analyses them the same way as interviews. Where the detail is high, the account is kept as a specific case in the “People” section, and the patterns in it are used for cross-checking against other data.
To understand a facility, the project cross-references material from in-depth interviews, community contributions, state information, published sources and satellite imagery. Cross-referencing keeps the presentation of information even-handed, and produces an overall picture that no single source can give. Depending on how much information exists, for each facility we aim to describe the practices that are common there and the interactions between prisoners and guards.
Information about facilities is reachable through the Map. There you will find an overview; for more depth, read the detailed summaries linked from the Map or in the “Prisons” section. Each facility entry is updated as further accounts are collected, until saturation is reached.
Working from the individual accounts of witnesses and from the facility entries, the project cross-references Vietnamese legal texts and published sources in order to analyse the prison system and the criminal justice system. Through this, the project aims to understand how the prison system operates in Vietnam, the torture-related problems that can arise at each stage of a case, and the role of the state in the fact that torture has not been brought to an end. This work is written up as a report and appears in the “System” section.
Principles and Ethics
Nguyên tắc và Đạo đứcThree commitmentsBecause the project cannot enter the facilities where torture takes place, or witness the process itself, it cannot fully establish that an event occurred on the strength of a single source alone. To establish authenticity, the project works towards saturation of information — the point at which gathering further data, interviews or observations about an event yields nothing new.
The project gives the victim its full respect when they recount their own experience of torture. Held in the same place and subjected to the same methods, each victim feels and remembers it entirely differently. At the level of the individual, therefore, the project undertakes to keep the account as it was told; it edits only for safety and confidentiality.
For each witness, the project replaces the real name with a randomly chosen pseudonym for their safety. Where another prisoner is mentioned, the project considers using their real name if it puts them at no further risk — for instance where that person has died. Beyond anonymising the witness, in anything made public the project removes patterns of information that, taken together, could identify the witness.
The method exists so that the record can be cited.