“HUMAN RIGHTS AND CRIMES OF THE STATE: THE CULTURE OF DENIAL”

 

Stanley Cohen (1993)

 

 

 

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1  THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DENIAL   

                                                           

Orthodox psychoanalysis sees denial as an unconscious defence mechanism for coping with guilt and other disturbing psychic realities.  Freud originally distinguished between ‘repression’ which applies to defences against internal instinctual demands and ‘denial’ (or what he called ‘disavowal’) which applies to defences against the claims of external reality.

                With a few exceptions, pure psychoanalytic theory has paid much less attention to denial in this sense than repression (but see Edelstein, 1989).  We have to look in the more applied fields of psychoanalyis (or its derivatives) for studies about the denial of external information.  This yields a mass of useful material.  There is the rich literature on the denial of knowledge about fatal disease (especially cancer and more recently, AIDS) affecting self or loved ones.  More familiar to criminologists, there is the literature on family violence and pathology: spouse abuse, child abuse, incest etc.  The concept of denial is standard to describe a mother’s reaction on ‘discovering’ that her husband had been sexually abusing their daughter for many years: ‘I didn’t notice anything’.  In this case, the concept implies that in fact the mother did ‘know’ – how could she not have? – but that this knowledge was too unbearable to confront.

                The subject of denial has also been dealt with by cognitive psychology and information theory.  Of particular interest is the ‘denial paradox’: in order to use the term ‘denial’ to describe a person’s statement ‘I didn’t know’, you have to assume that he or she knew or knows about what it is he or she claims not to know (otherwise the term ‘denial’ is inappropriate)’

                Cognitive psychologists have used the language of information processing, selective perception, filtering, attention span etc., to understand the phenomenon of how we notice and simultaneously do not notice (Goleman, 1985).  Some have even argued that the neurological phenomenon of ‘blindsight’ suggests a startling possibility: that one part of the mind may know just what it is doing, while the part that supposedly knows, remains oblivious of this.

                We are all familiar, from basic social psychology, with the notion of cognitive bias: the selection of information to fit existing perceptual frames.  At the extreme, information which is too threatening to absorb is shut out altogether.  The mind somehow grasps what is going on, but rushes a protective filter into place, steering information away from what threatens.  Information slips into a kind of ‘black hole of the mind’ – a blind zone of blocked attention and self-deception.  Attention is thus diverted from facts or their meaning.  Thus, the ‘vital lies’ sustained by family members about violence, incest, sexual abuse, infidelity, unhappiness.  Lies continue unrevealed, covered up by the family’s silence, collusion, alibis and conspiracies (Goleman, 1985).

                Similar processes have been well documented outside both the social psychology laboratory and intimate settings like the family.  The litany by observers of atrocities is all too familiar: we didn’t see anything’, ‘no one told us’, ‘it looked different at the time’.

                In addition to the psychoanalytical and cognitive theory, there is also the tradition in philosophical psychology concerned with questions of self-knowledge and self-deception.  The Sartrean notion of ‘bad faith’ is of particular interest in implying – contrary to psychoanalytical theory – that the denial is indeed conscious.

 

 

2   BYSTANDERS AND RESCUERS                                 

 

Another body of literature more obviously relevant (and more familiar to criminologists) derives from the victimological focus on the bystander.  The classic ‘bystander effect’ has become a cliché: how witnesses to a crime will somehow disassociate themselves from what is happening and not help the victim.  The prototype is the famous Kitty Genovese case.  (One night in New York in 1964, a young woman, Kitty Genovese, was savagely assaulted in the street just before reaching her apartment.  Her assailant attacked her over a period of forty minutes while she struggled, battered and screaming, to reach her apartment.  Her screams and calls for help were heard by at least 38 neighbours who, from their own windows saw or heard her struggle.  No one intervened directly or by calling the police.  Eventually a patrol car arrived – too late to save her life.)

                Studies of the bystander effect (Sheleff, 1978) suggest that intervention is less likely to occur under three conditions:

 

1         Diffusion of responsibility – so many others are watching, why should I be the one to intervene?  Besides, it’s none of my business.

2         Inability to identify with the victim – even if I see someone as a victim, I won’t act if I cannot sympathize or empathize with their suffering.  We help our family, friends, nation, in-group – not those excluded from our moral universe (Journal of Social Issues, 1990).  In fact, those who are outside our moral universe may be blamed for their predicament (the common experience of women victims of sexual violence).  If full responsibility is laid on the political out-group (they provoked us, they had it coming), this releases you form your obligation to respond.

3         Inability to conceive of effective intervention – even if you do not erect barriers of denial, even if you feel genuine moral or psychological unease (‘I feel so awful about what’s going on in Bosnia’, ‘I just can’t get those pictures from Somalia out of my mind’), this will not necessarily result in intervention.  Observers will not act if they do not know what to do, if they powerless and helpless themselves, if they don’t see any reward in helping, or if they fear punishment if they help. 

[…]

 

 

3  NEUTRALIZATION THEORY

                                           

More familiar ground to criminologists is the body of literature known as ‘motivational accounts’ or ‘vocabulary of motives’ theory.  The application of this theory in Sykes and Matza’s (1957) ‘techniques of neutralization’ paper is a criminological classic.  […]

                The theory assumes that motivational accounts which actors (offenders) give of their (deviant) behaviour must be acceptable to their audience (or audiences).  Moreover, accounts are not just post facto improvisations, but are drawn upon in advance from the cultural pool of motivational vocabularies available to actors and observers (and honoured by systems of legality and morality).  Remember Sykes and Matza’s original list; each technique of neutralization is a way of denying the moral bind of the law and the blame attached to the offence: denial of injury (‘no one got hurt’); denial of victim (‘they started it’; ‘it’s all their fault’); denial of responsibility (‘I didn’t mean to do it’, ‘they made me do it’); condemnation of the condemners (‘they are just as bad’) and appeal to higher loyalties (friends, gang, family, neighbourhood).

                Something very strange happens if we apply this list not to the techniques for denying or neutralizing conventional delinquency but to human rights violations and state crimes.  For Sykes and Matza’s point was precisely that delinquents are not ‘political’ in the sense implied by subcultural theory; that is, they are not committed to an alternative value system nor do they withdraw legitimacy from conventional values.  The necessity for verbal neutralization shows precisely the continuing bind of conventional values.

                But exactly the same techniques appear in the manifestly political discourse of human rights violations – whether in collective political traits (note, for example, the Nuremberg trials or the Argentinian junta trial) or official government response to human rights reports (a genre which I am studying) or media debates about war crimes and human rights abuses.  I will return soon to ‘literal denial’, that first twist of the denial spiral which I identified earlier (it didn’t happen, it can’t happen here, they are all liars).  Neutralization comes into play when you acknowledge (admit) that something happened – but either refuse to accept to accept the category of acts to which it is assigned (‘crime’ or ‘massacre’) or present it as morally justified.  Here are the original neutralization techniques, with corresponding examples from the realm of human rights violations.

 

  • Denial of injury – they exaggerate, they don’t feel it, they are used to violence, see what they do to each other.

  • Denial of victim – they started it, look at what they’ve done to us; they are the terrorists, we are just defending ourselves, we are the real victims.

  • Denial of responsibility – here, instead of the criminal versions of psychological incapacity or diminished responsibility (I didn’t know what I was doing.  I blacked out, etc.) we find a denial of individual moral responsibility on the grounds of obedience: I was following orders, only doing my duty, just a cog in the machine.  (For individual offenders like the ordinary soldier, this is the most pervasive and powerful of all denial systems).

  • Condemnation of the condemners – here, the politics are obviously more explicit than in the original delinquency context.  Instead of condemning the police for being corrupt and biased or teachers for being hypocrites, we have the vast discourse of official denial used by the modern state to protect its public image: the whole world is picking on us; they are using double standards to judge us; it’s worse elsewhere (Syria, Iraq, Guatemala or wherever is convenient to name); they are condemning us only because of their anti-semitism(the Israeli version); their hostility to Islam (the Arab version), their racism and cultural imperialism in imposing Western values (all Third World tyrannies).

  • Appeal to higher loyalty – the original subdued ‘ideology’ is now total and self-righteous justification.  The appeal to the army, the nation, the volk, the sacred mission, the higher cause – whether the revolution, ‘history’, the purity of Islam, Zionism, the defence of the free world or state security.  […]

 

 

IMPLICATORY DENIAL

 

The forms of denial that we conceptualize as excuses, justifications, rationalizations or neutralizations, do not assert that the event did not happen.  They seek to negotiate or impose a different construction of the event from what might appear the case.  At the individual level, you know and admit to what you have done, seen or heard about.  At the organized level, the event is also registered but is subjected to cultural reconstruction (for example, through euphemistic, technical or legalistic terminology).  The point is to deny the implications – psychological and moral – of what is known.  The common linguistic structure is ‘yes, but’.  Yes, detainees are being tortured but there is no other way to obtain information.  Yes, Bosnian women are being raped, but what can a mere individual thousands of miles away do about it?

                ‘Denial of Responsibility’, as I noted earlier, is one of the most common forms of implicatory denial.  The sociology of ‘crimes of obedience’ has received sustained attention, notably by Kelman and Hamilton (1989).  The anatomy of obedience and conformity – the frightening degree to which ordinary people are willing to inflict great psychological and physical harm to others – was originally revealed by Milgram’s famous experiment.  Kelman and Hamilton begin from history rather than a university laboratory: the famous case of Lieutenant Calley and the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war in May 1968 when a platoon of American soldiers massacred some 400 civilians.  From this case and other ‘guilt-free’ or ‘sanctioned’ massacres, they extract a rather stable set of conditions under which crimes of obedience will occur.

 

  1. Authorization: when acts are ordered, encouraged, or tacitly approved by those in authority, then normal moral principles are replaced by the duty to obey.

  2. Routinization: the first step is often difficult, but when you pass the initial moral and psychological barrier, then the pressure to continue is powerful.  You become involved without considering the implications; it’s all in a day’s work.  This tendency is reinforced by special vocabularies and euphemisms (‘surgical strike’) or a simple sense of routine.  (Asked about what he thought he was doing, Calley replied in one of the most chilling sentences of all times: ‘It was no big deal’).

  3. Dehumanization: when the qualities of being human are deprived from the other, then the usual principles of morality do not apply.  The enemy is described as animals, monsters, gooks, sub-humans.  A whole language excludes them from  your shared moral universe.

 

The conditions under which perpetrators behave can be translated into the very bystander rationalizations which allow the action in the first place and then deny its implications afterwards.  As Kelman and Hamilton show in their analysis of successive public opinion surveys (in which people were asked both to imagine how they would react to a My Lai situation themselves and to judge the actual perpetrators), obedience and authorization are powerful justifications.  And observers as well as offenders are subject to desensitization (the bombardment by horror stories from the media to the point that you cannot absorb them any more and they are no longer ‘news’) and dehumanization.

 

 

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