#008 FiLiA Meets: Elizabeth Gordon - Non State Torture

Lisa-Marie: Welcome to the FiLiA podcasts. We are the daughters of those women who came before us. It is our absolute honor to have met so many incredible women fighting for the liberation of us all. Our role at FiLiA is to amplify the voices of those women via the FiLiA conference and these podcasts. Please take from them what you can in sisterhood and in solidarity.

Julian: Hello from the FiLiA team. I'm Julian, I'm one of the volunteers with FiLiA, and I'm here today to interview Elizabeth Gordon about her work on non-state torture. Thank you so much for coming today, Elizabeth, and would you like to start just by telling us a bit about yourself and your work? 

Elizabeth: Yes thank you, FiLiA, for inviting me to do the podcast. I very much appreciate your support and the opportunity to share my voice. I'm an artist and a feminist art activist. I survived non-state [00:01:00] torture in my childhood, and for the last nine years have been speaking out about these human rights crimes with the support of Jean Sarsen and Linda McDonald, of Persons Against Non-State Torture in Canada. I'm also very pleased to be supported by FiLiA in exhibiting my artwork at FiLiA conferences and FiLiA art exhibitions for the last five years. I’m very proud that we had a panel on non-state torture, which I spoke on at the 2015 FiLiA conference. I use my art, my speaking and my writing to name and recognize non-state torture as a specific form of mainly men's violence against women and girls and to raise awareness of the torture of children in families, by families and their like-minded friends in criminal networks and in [00:02:00] pornographic child crime scene photos and films.

Julian: And just for anybody who's listening who's not familiar with the term, what is non-state torture? 

Elizabeth: Non -state torture is torture perpetrated by private persons, like parents, other relatives, intimate partners. Not perpetuated by state officials. 

Julian: And what makes it important to differentiate it from the terms child abuse or domestic violence?

Elizabeth: All are horrific and the difference for me is that torture, the perpetrators of torture, their perverted pleasure, if you like, is the destruction of the self of the person they torture in near death ordeals. That's how I can describe it. 

Julian: And when you've spoken out about non-state torture, which you have done obviously, at FiLiA and within your work and your art, how important do you feel it is to raise awareness of this?

Elizabeth: It's very important because persons who have been tortured have been missed out really. They're invisibilised because we talk perhaps about children or adults who've been abused, but we're not really naming torture. That's discrimination, and it also makes it very difficult, for example for me, I wasn't able to find torture informed support, if you like, to help me recover and heal from the impact of the torture, that it had on me. I still can't find those services in the UK. 

Julian: What sort of services would help? If someone were setting something up or or seeking to provide a [00:04:00] service for those who've survived non-state torture, what would it look like?

Elizabeth: For me, it would look like feminist and human rights based, and it would be non-pathologising. Because too often, I think, the symptoms or the way in which you are when you have been tortured, can be misinterpreted. From my own perspective, if you're very vulnerable, you might be having triggers or panic attacks and those could be misinterpreted as a psychotic episode or a schizophrenia. Whereas actually they may be a response to the torture or actually a torture ordeal being expressed through your body. It's very important to have torture informed care. 

Julian: And what is it that's prompted you to commit to this work over the last nine years? 

Elizabeth: My herstory is that I grew up in an environment of torture inflicted by my parents, a relative known as an uncle, and their like-minded friends, and I was also trafficked to men who tortured me. My mother was labeled by psychiatrists with paranoid schizophrenia and was addicted to prescription drugs and her torture violence was relentless day and night. The torture ordeals inflicted by my father, the uncles and the other men began when I was an infant and took place in my home, their homes, the woods at the back of the house, a barn and other places. I dissociated so as not to be overwhelmed and die in the pain of the torture. And the torture ordeals got compartmentalised or frozen in time in body talk, sensory and emotional memories. So nine years ago was a watershed time for me. Due to a stressful life event, having not really remembered these events, these torture ordeals, I had, in a way, a vague memory of them. All of a sudden they just flooded. I was in flashbacks the whole time and it was very debilitating. So I reached out, I looked online and found the website of Persons Against Non-State Torture. I contacted Jean and Linda, and we began a dialogue. Since then I've been healing and recovering, and drawing has played the most important part of it really, because horrification and [00:07:00] torture can render you speechless. What I found was that if I drew the ordeal I could then get relief from it because I could share it, talk about it, and heal from it and put it in the past. That's actually how I was processing the torture. The memories that had got frozen in time in the present were able to go into the past. It is, I think, normal for that to happen. I have now probably a couple of hundred, at least, of these show and tell stick like drawings. What had brought me to using my art in activism was that it had taken me so many years to be able to speak about what has happened. Had I perhaps been to a centre where I'd seen listed in terms of services for women and girls, torture by family and in trafficking and exploitation, I would have walked straight in the door for some support. But I never saw that  and that's a lot of time without support and a lot of time having not healed. Those services are not there for women and girls who've survived domestic torture. So that's how I began my art activism, with that determination that that shouldn't happen to anyone else, that we really need that named and recognised so we can get non-pathologising, feminist, human rights based support for women and girls who have been tortured.

Julian: And what can we do as FiLiA to support your work? And to support women and girls who are still recovering? 

Elizabeth: What you are doing already, which is supporting me with a podcast, talking, and the conferences, the panels of non-state [00:09:00] torture and supporting the work of Jean Sarsen and Linda McDonald. I think we're still in naming mode. I think we still are needing to name and talk about torture. Let's talk about torture. It's horrible. It's painful. It's unbearable. It makes you feel ill. But we have a responsibility to the children who are still being tortured in families. We have a responsibility to the women and girls who have not been able to name their atrocities and get justice in law. 

Julian: And when you say that it's focused on women and girls, do you have any statistics or anything to indicate that? Is this something that predominantly affects women and girls or is it neutral there?

Elizabeth: Yes, I do. The Internet Watch Foundation Annual Report, which was published in April 2018, is striking really. They state 80, 000 instances of child sexual abuse imagery. Fifty-five percent of the children were under 10, two percent of the children were under 2. Thirty-three percent of the images were Category A: showing sexual activity between adults and children involving penetration, rape, or sexual torture.What's very striking is that eighty-six percent of the images were girls and seven percent were boys. The remainder were nonspecific. I feel it is important to educate our children about their human rights not to suffer torture by anyone, state or non-state, and that these rights belong to all children. This means that children will be able to stand up for their human rights and protect each other now and as adults. That's why I think it is a feminist issue, because it's linked to the pornography industry and it begins with infants in childhood. 

Julian: Those are really sobering statistics.

Elizabeth: Yes. 

Julian: Thank you so much, Elizabeth, for using your voice, your expertise and your speech to do this podcast. It's been very educational to hear about it. That is such a powerful thing to do, to encourage more learning and to raise awareness about these issues. We will look forward to continuing to work with you in every way that we possibly can. So thank you very much.

Elizabeth: Thank you.