#Henreitta Lacks

[scripttorture]

So I have a character She's mentally pretty unstable and has lack of empathy, kills and cannibalizes (yes I can go on but I hope you get the idea) I know torture etc leaves traces. But I wonder how much it will affect somebody who basically hurts others just as much... if not worse? I'm still exploring this 'story line' so I really want to investigate properly! Also I wonder how she would look at her abuser. In my head she ignores it all but still fears him and has a grudge yet can't lose him?

Add on: The torture is more lab experiment based. She's 'immortal' and somebody who is just like her had captured her and put her in a lab. He's a sadist but he used the excuse of lab experiments and science. The guy is just like her. They both can't kill each other and they will meet again. But this story line is pretty fresh. I like the lab experiments but I want to know the effects before I continue this. I will probably change a lot about this tho. I need to see if it's necessary and such.

Hmmmm OKwell it sounds like there are several different questions here I’m going to tryand address them all as best I can.

 The firstquestion seems to be about whether being tortured would have a serious effecton someone who is also a torturer.

 Thesecond is about how she’d relate to the person who tortured her.

 I’d alsolike to address your scenario though.

 You saidyou like the idea of lab experiments. They play pretty heavily into a veryunrealistic trope about torture.

 Tortureisn’t and by its nature can not be scientific.

 Scienceis a method. It’s the idea that we can understand the world better throughobservation and repeated experiment. It requires a degree of control, both overwhat you do and the environment you do it in. It needs to be reproducible.

 Tortureby its very nature isn’t any of thosethings.

 Torturersaren’t controlled (though they often claim to be their behaviour does notsupport the claim). Torturers rarely bother to exert control over theenvironment they torture in. And the variance between individuals, bothphysically and mentally, means that reproducibility is impossible.

 If youwant any kind of realism you’ve got two options with your scenario. You ditchthe torture or you ditch the science.

 The firstoption doesn’t mean she isn’t being hurt. What it means is that any hurt is secondary to scientific results. That isunethical and non-consensual experimentation. You can find examples of howthat’s happened historically by looking up Japan’s Unit 731 from World War 2and by looking up the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment in the US.

 I’d alsorecommend ‘The Immortal Life of HenriettaLacks’ as a good summary of unethical experiments performed on blackpeople, mentally ill people and prisoners in the US. (I found it a veryinteresting and easy-to-read book which goes out of its way to explainscientific concepts in a straight forward way.)

 Thesecond option means ditching the scientific trappings and being honest aboutwhat this is: torture pure and simple.  

 Theimpression I’m getting from your summary is that the second option would be abetter fit. It’s less complicated which means that you have more space toconcentrate on the two characters and their relationship with each other, whichseems to be what you’re most interested in.

 I’dsuggest motivation more along the lines of what Rejali calls ‘CivicDiscipline’, where people are tortured as ‘punishment’ not necessarily becauseof anything they’ve done but because the torturer sees them as less human than themselves. A real worldexample would be police officers beating up homeless people for being in aresidential part of town.

 Oh and-random tangent- did you know the Russian language distinguishes between twotypes of cannibalism? Eating someone who is already dead and killing someone toeat them. (This came up in reading for the planned Starvation masterpost)

 Back tothe questions.

 Thepsychological effects of being tortured will not be reduced by your characteralso being a torturer. The information we have on torturers and the way tortureaffects them is all anecdotal at this point. But it shows a very clear pattern: torture damages torturers. Thepsychological effects are actually roughlythe same as the psychological effects of being tortured. The effects areweaker for the torturer than they are for the torture victim.

 I don’thave any data on someone who was both.

 However I would be very surprised if the symptoms weren’texacerbated- That being tortured would make the symptoms she’d already havefrom being a torturer much much worse (and vice versa).

 You sayshe has a lack of empathy- that won’t protect her from symptoms.

 Have alook at my Masterpost on the common effects of torture and think about whatsort of symptoms work for the character and your story. I think for what you’vedescribed having violent tendencies and uncontrollable anger might work, sowould dissociative symptoms.

 Torturingand continuing to torture essentially means that she won’t be recovering fromthose symptoms. They’ll be getting worse, slowly over time.

 Thesecond question, how she’d relate to her torturer, is a little trickier for me.

 Youshould consider looking atScriptTraumaSurvivor’s blog, they’ve had a lot ofcontact with abuse survivors and they’d be able to give you some perspective onwhat that relationship looks like from the inside.

 I don’thave that kind of first hand experience, what I know all comes from books, andI think that’s an important distinction when we’re dealing with a topic astricky as this one.

 From whatI understand there are as many ways for a victim to relate to a torturer asthere are responses to trauma.

 All ofthese are possible- She could panic every time she sees him or hears him speak.She could be absolutely furious with him and try to hurt him every time shesees him. She could shut down around him, dissociate and feel like she’s notreally there or like she’s reading from a movie script rather than actuallytalking to him. She might think that she somehow ‘deserved’ what he did to her,effectively blaming herself for being tortured.

 I’m notsaying that you should go with one of those responses, just trying toillustrate that there’s a really range of options, all of which are realistic.What sort of thing you should pick depends on what works for your charactersand your story.

 There are a few things you should probablyavoid, such as having her easily forgive him or making their interactions easy-It’s not going to be easy. Whatever happens and even if a lot of time haspassed you’re going to have some very strong emotions (and symptoms) croppingup every time they come into contact. But ultimately what that looks like foryour character is up to you.

 And you don’t need to apologise to me if your characters are awful people. I’ll probably have read worse. I want to help all of you write awful people well. 

I hope this helps. :)

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[not100bees]

okay it’s really not that complicated. in the past, which is also the future and the present, the son of rich virginians gets stung by a lot of wasps. this has a lot of repercussions not all of which are immediately obvious. at the same time in an enchanted forest (we’ll get back to it) a future latin teacher and extremely recently former rich kid is making a... bad life decision lets say and murdering his kind of dumb roommate at aglionby academy an incredibly prestigious boarding school for rich douchebags. these events WOULD have nothing in common besides happening on the same time if they both didn’t take place on a ley line, a concept that basically everybody is familiar with but the book is going to act as if you’re dumb and know nothing about this incredibly arcane concept. anyways to yada yada over some ley line fuckery the rich kid that was stung by hundreds of wasps gets to live! despite his incredibly severe allergy to them. as he’s being saved he’s told that this is because of owen glendower real life welsh king which gives the boy, named gansey (well really richard gansey III but he doesn’t like that so everybody calls him gansey), something of a complex and he wants to find the legendarily lost resting place of owen glendower (which may grant wishes???) anyways. also in virgina, henreitta to be specific, blue sargent is growing up. the daughter of a psychic that also grows up in a house full of psychics, blue is not a psychic. which you think WOULD give her a complex but she’s mostly chill about it. one weird thing about blue is despite her lack of psychic powers, her being in the room makes psychic powers stronger. oh also other weird thing blue has been told by all the psychics in her life that if she kisses her true love he’ll die. oh and one last weird thing she’s half tree. it’s not explained very well and i’ll probably give up before we get to the part where it matters. anyways. blue’s a teenager now and her “famous“ aunt neeve (who is psychic) (and has a late night tv show) (fancy) shows up. neeve gets blue to do a saint marks day eve vigil which is when all the spirits of the people are going to die in the coming year are going to march down the ley line. well blue’s writing down names when she can see one spirit who identifies himself as gansey “that’s all there is“ before walking away. her aunt tells her that seeing a spirit on saint marks day eve can only mean two things, either she’s his true love or she’s going to kill him. given the procephy hanging over probably both. spooky! man they just let you type as much as you want no word limit. anyways. i’m bored now and i’ve only covered the like. first two chapters and some backstory. but they’re quite good.

[scripttorture]

I came across your Torture in Fiction tab where you reviewed a Doctor Who episode and mentioned your love of the show so I'm going to mention exactly what I'm writing. It's basically a Bill/Heather story after they leave together and I'd like to accurately take into account the type of consequences (short term and long termr) of the entire turned into a cyberman ordeal. So any input would be highly appreciated.

Anon, I think I love you. Lesbian romance in the stars with one of my favourite characters, you are too kind.

 Let’s start at the beginning.

 For those unfamiliar with Doctor Who, the Cybermen are a recurring foe. The idea behind them is that they are people, cybernetically enhanced people with all the ‘unnecessary’ bits removed. Like the ability to feel pain or hope or love. The ultimate aim of the Cybermen is to make everyone else like them. They believe that not having emotional connections makes them superior.

 And in one of Bill’s stories she gets turned into a prototype Cyberman. Except due to some unique circumstances the programming doesn’t quite take. Bill is left with a Cyberman body but her thoughts, personality and ability to feel are intact.

 Through more unique circumstances (which depending on your interpretation may include Bill dying and being resurrected-) Heather restores her body as it was pre-Cybermen.

 We’re never told exactly what happens to Bill. But it’s clear from the context that the procedure is painful and not consensual.

 We do see Bill for a few days afterwards. She struggles to accept that she’s a Cyberman and doesn’t seem to know how to process what she’s been through. She seems more or less OK, but given the short time frame we see her for it’s difficult to say if this is a bad portrayal or not. For some people it takes a while for things to sink in and for symptoms to become apparent.

 Going forward I’m going to assume that’s the case for Bill.

 I’m going to make a couple of other assumptions because there isn’t anything in reality which lines up that well with the Cybermen.

 There is not anything that can really 'take away' all emotions. Some drugs can result in emotional blunting as a side effect, but less intense emotion is not the same thing as no emotion. The intense, invasive surgical procedures that are implied to make a Cyberman are completely fictional, and probably wouldn't be survivable in reality.

 It's a scenario that you'd expect to be traumatic: an extremely painful, invasive act that re-structures the entire body and is done without consent. Given the particular circumstances in Bill's story, it's tempting to compare it to non-consensual medical procedures.

 As a black, lesbian woman who is aware of both modern politics and history it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume Bill can make the same comparisons I have. Black women have been subjected to forced sterilisation and used for medical experimentation within living memory (see The Immortal Life of Henreitta Lacks for a discussion of unethical experimentation in the recent past).

 Heather is less likely to be aware of this history and these issues.

 As I said there isn't anything that lines up exactly; I keep thinking of forced sterilisation, though this often doesn’t cause lasting physical pain. It also brought to mind some of the… less ethical ‘treatments’ and ‘experiments’ in recent history.

 We’ll assume that Bill has a realistic memory of what happened, that the experience was traumatising and that she isn’t in physical pain.

 I’d also make the argument that turning someone into a Cyberman could be considered torture in the legal sense. It’s done by a group that effectively controls territory, to people who are under their power. It causes suffering and in Bill’s case it is arguably done to punish the Doctor.

 You’ve read the blog before so you probably know the drill when it comes to the common long-term symptoms of torture. Here’s the Masterpost should anyone else want to have a look. I’ll get back to symptoms in a moment.

 In the short term I think that it’s likely Bill would experience something similar to modern survivors of ‘clean’ tortures.

 ‘Clean torture’ is a term Rejali uses to describe techniques that don’t often leave obvious external marks. These are no less dangerous then other methods; people can still be seriously injured, disabled or die because of clean torture techniques.

 But the lack of obvious marks makes it harder to prove a person was tortured. And when the public perception of torture is that it always leaves scars many survivors find they’re dismissed, belittled and denied services.

 People don’t believe they were tortured. Because we are taught that torture ‘must’ leave marks.

 And Bill has just come out of the Cyber-conversion process unscarred. In a world where most people believe that turning back once you’ve been made a Cyberman is impossible.

 This is likely to be a factor if she tries to get professional help as well as in everyday interactions.

 Bill herself might assume that her symptoms are overblown or somehow put on; that they’re not warranted because her body has been perfectly restored.

 When it comes to more long term symptoms, the right choice will always depend on the characters and the story you want to tell.

 Personally I wouldn’t want to give Bill suicidal tendencies or an addiction because I feel like those are symptoms that could shift the story away from the central relationship. I think they’re symptoms that usually demand more focus and that can make balancing them with the central story more difficult.

 I usually suggest that authors try to include memory problems in a realistic way and I think they’d be an especially good fit here. (The Masterpost summarising the most common forms of memory problems survivors have is here).

 Essentially I think that you could use memory problems to highlight how Bill’s time as a Cyberman has affected her mind. So much of our identity and self-image is rooted in our memories. Finding flaws in them, especially around important things, can shake our sense of self.

 And that ties in to the way Cybermen are consistently used in Doctor Who to denote the loss of self. All of the common memory problems could be used to raise these philosophical questions and tie Bill’s symptoms more firmly to the plot.

 Insomnia is a symptom I always find a little difficult because it has so many knock on effects.

 The worsening of reaction times, alertness, coordination, combined with the pain and shakes and occasional visual hallucination or micro-sleep means that insomnia isn’t a symptom I’d recommend for a character like a superhero. If you want the character to consistently win fights then it’s not a good pick.

 Similarly the long term effects on creativity, reasoning, concentration, emotional processing and learning mean it’s a bad pick if the character is supposed to be an inventive genius.

 One of the nice (but underutilised) things about Doctor Who is that the way the stories are typically structured means that not every character has to be exceptional at everything. Bill’s strengths were not superhuman physical combat or exceptional genius (even though she was incredibly intelligent); they were compassion and her ability to form fast, strong friendships with just about anyone she meets.

 Insomnia could fit your story but I think it depends on what you want the characters to do on a regular basis.

 Chronic pain could be a good fit.

 The conversion process radically changed Bill’s body, a change that she more or less refused to accept was real during the story. In those circumstances physical pain can be an interesting addition: it simultaneously acts as a reminder of what Bill suffered and ties her to her restored body now.

 And since chronic pain in torture survivors can be psychological, or a combination of psychological and physical, there’s no reason why Bill’s body couldn’t be perfectly healed while experiencing chronic pain.

 This is also a symptom that characters can be more proactive about. She can try things and find solutions much more quickly then she might be able to for something like depression. Stretches, exercise, mobility aids, organisation, painkillers and forward planning can all be helpful. And early success could help you to show the character feeling more empowered, reclaiming her body.

 I’m not sure if difficulty relating to others would be a good pick, considering Bill’s canonical strengths. However social isolation could be interesting as an obstacle to gradually overcome.

 Going beyond the usual symptoms- Have you read any of the Doctor Who comics? Because I keep thinking of The Flood, which was a Cyberman story with the Eighth Doctor.

 It had a rather wonderful Cyberman design and had the Cybermen attempting to persuade large numbers of people to volunteer for Cyber conversion. They did it by chemically manipulating the emotions of an entire city; making feelings unbearably intense and then offering the conversion process as a solution.

 Bill kept her feelings but she would have known she was supposed to lose them. And she’d go from that to having incredibly intense feelings. Because she’d have developed trauma symptoms.

 She might be tempted to view her symptoms as the ‘natural’ consequence of regaining full capacity for emotion, rather then due to trauma. Latching on to a physical, rather then psychological, difference.

 I’d also consider whether all of this changes Bill’s relationship with her own body. Relief at getting it back might be accompanied by a heightened awareness of changes, even natural ones.

 I think if I was writing this I’d be tempted to add in little details, triggers or self-soothing behaviours tied to her body.

 The Cyberman chest unit for that design looks heavy. Does compression around her chest make her panic? Do rubber gloves feel horrible? Does the sensation of something going over her face, like the ‘mask’ on these Cybermen, prompt intrusive memories?

 The ‘handles’ on the head were supposed to suppress emotion in this version. Could Bill reassure herself that they’re gone by touching her own hair? Do short sleeves feel ‘better’, because she can feel the sun, wind or rain against her skin? Does she wear her earrings more often, because the weight of them and the way they move is comforting?

 Good luck with your story. I hope this helps. :)

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