...Over thy wounds now do I prophesy,
Which, like dumb mouths, do ope their ruby lips,
To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue—
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men…
-Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene I
In my customary role of perennially didactic annoyance, I’m going to give you some information about lashing. That’s lashing, as in “being bound with one’s hands fastened above one’s head while being beaten across the back, shoulders, and buttocks”.
But first I’ll tell you why it’s relevant: A 20-year-old woman who was gang-raped by 7 men in Saudi Arabia has had her sentence doubled. Her original sentence? 3 months in prison and 100 lashes.
Yes, the rape victim’s sentence.
The woman is being punished for her lawyer’s public discussion of the case- as the Saudi court put it, “her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media”. 200 lashes are what she will now receive, and since lashing is not something with which we in this country are familiar, let me give you a rundown on what exactly is going to happen to her.
Lashing is, as I said above, a punishment in which the hands are tied above the head of the prisoner to limit movement and expose the greatest possible skin area to the whip or cane. In Saudi Arabia, the traditional whip has been replaced by the bamboo cane in the case of women, probably between 50 to 100 years ago; it was around that same time that being lashed to death fell out of favor as a punishment.
Presumably this change came about because of humanitarian considerations (yes, I realize the irony in using that phrase to describe the substitution of beating to death with beheading). Although unconsciousness from hypovolemic shock (shock resulting from blood loss) is the inevitable result of continued flogging, it takes different victims different amounts of time to reach unconsciousness, time in which they will suffer extensive trauma and excruciating pain. (Even after unconscious, one Victorian observer wrote, “the prisoner’s body convulsed at every stroke of the whip”.)
Bamboo canes are less likely to leave permanent scars than a whip. They are also used because, although they cause massive edema and hemorrhage in the soft tissues of the back, they do not cause enough blood loss to allow the victim to bleed to death in a relatively short time. It is to ensure that the prisoner does not die that a doctor is present to monitor the proceedings, that the flogger holds a copy of the Qu’ran under the arm which swings the cane (to ensure that his arm does not have momentum enough to inflict bone-breaking force), and that lashes are typically inflicted in sessions of 50 each, spaced over 2-3 weeks (with variations depending on the size and health of the prisoner).
So, now that you have a brief methodology and history, let me give you the forensic pathology of what is going to happen to this young woman.
When a bamboo cane hits flesh it causes, in pathological terms, blunt trauma resulting in extravasation- crushing of soft tissue and the rupture of small- and medium-sized blood vessels. The blood diffuses from the injury, often along fascial planes- it spreads in the direction the tissue lies- forming ‘tramline’ bruises, consisting of two parallel bruises separated by an undamaged section of skin. This unbruised strip of skin results because the impact of the cane forces blood from the vessels at all points of contact, emptying them and making them incapable of leaking blood.
The skin surface is split or torn, the force of the blow damaging all layers of the skin, so that the lacerations will bleed profusely. Ragged wound edges are also characteristic, since the skin has been torn apart rather than having been cut. The healing process may take weeks or months depending on the severity and number of the wounds, and severe scarring is not uncommon.
She’s been sentenced to undergo this 200 times.
On top of having been gang-raped.
These people are our allies.
Ah, justice.
Labels: human rights, international politics, torture
My heart is broken.
I'm not in pain.
Unlike many others versed in heartbreak, I've always thought it odd when people spoke of it as connected to sorrow, to feeling of any kind.
When something breaks, it also empties.
I knew that my course in International Health Law and Bioethics was going to be challenging. I even knew that it would be so on a personal level.
I knew already, when the professor told us we would have a section on Nazi doctors, some of what I would see- after all, as Professor Beres once told me, I majored in atrocity: laws of war, crimes of war, crimes against humanity. I've studied them all, spoken to Holocaust survivors.
But I didn't know that it was doctors whose ideology drove the Nazi regime. That practicing physicians who espoused eugenics inspired Hitler's madness.
That the largest group in the SS- 40%- was doctors.
I have seen pictures, before, of what was done. Heaps of bodies. Rows of corpses so emaciated they didn't look human at first glance. Crematoriums belching unending gouts of oily, obscene smoke to a sullen, black-smeared sky.
But this- torture and mutilation and laceration and maiming inflicted carefully, deliberately, repeatedly.
Individually.
Rather than on the anonymous jumble of limbs and features of people entering a gas chamber, on a person on a table with her face clear before them as they destroyed her and only her.
Only one human being before them as they cut, injected, disfigured, brutalized.
Their patient.
They pursued "the advancement of science". They believed in science. Used it. Used other human beings without thought or compunction to feed the filthy maw of their ambitions, to pursue a profane betterment that sanitized those they sought to improve into fresh and perfect monsters, leaving under a healthy shell a putrid core of the corruption on which its outward appearance was built...
They were doctors. Doctors. They took the Oath to do no harm.
Did they feel, on entering medicine, as I feel? That this was the best way they could serve the human race? Did they love the sciences they studied, take fire with eagerness at the intricacy, the delicacy, the unimaginable wonder of it all...?
No. No. Even if they did it is different. We are different. This way lies madness.
They served the good of "society", not of their patients. When a Polish inmate, a doctor and freedom fighter, asked one of the doctors how they could do this to a patient, he answered that they were "preserving the health of society" by cutting out its infectious parts.
They served "society". Not their prisoners, their victims, their patients.
I am not like them. We are not like them. We must not be like them. We cannot allow this to happen. Ever. Ever. Even now this wound will never heal, the scar never harden, the stain never wash out of our profession.
And to prevent more like it, we must remind ourselves of what it is that people who shared it did.
Because we could. We could be like them. We could so easily act for the good of "society".
Reporting our patients to law enforcement for medical conditions. Influencing the patient into refusing or administering the treatments we choose, rather than giving them full choice. Glossing over the "informed" part of "informed consent".
And I have to know this contamination. Know it, gaze it in the eye, see it to its fullest extent: take in the full horror before me.
Take it in and make that terror, that unutterable destruction, a part of me.
Because it is true.
Because it happened. Because I have to know. And because in knowing, I cannot refuse the consequences and responsibilities of knowledge.
Because it must never happen again.
My head hurts. My body hurts.
But my heart? No. Still numb.
I can almost see sparks winking off the edges of splintered pieces, surrounded by the fluid thought and feeling once contained. Glinting in the light.
I have had pieces broken before. Repair is a skill that improves with practice.
And so I will mend this too.
In time. In time.Labels: bioethics, diary, human rights, medicine, torture
