Social Science Research Council

WORKING WITH PERPETRATORS AND VICTIMS OF STATE VIOLENCE: NOTES FROM THE FIELD
By Leigh Payne

Since I began my project on the confessions by perpetrators of authoritarian state violence, I had a lot of people ask me how I could work with this material. Underlying the question was concern about my mental state. What people really seemed to want to know was: "what kind of perverse individual studies torturers and murderers?" I had a canned response. It went something like this: "Some days I simply cannot deal with the material. I can't face it. But on other days it feels like I'm reading a novel, one that engages me intellectually and emotionally, that enthralls me and disturbs me, but one that does not touch me directly. I think I can do this research because it is so foreign from my everyday life. I can distance myself from it. And I hope that I can use it toward some positive political end. "When I began to do the fieldwork, however, my relationship to the material changed. It began to touch my everyday life and I could not distance myself from it. I was coming into constant contact with victims and perpetrators. Every day, sometimes several times a day, I listened to their stories, I wrote up their stories in interview notes, and I analyzed them. I began to live with their stories and those stories became part of my life.

I had an easier time with perpetrators' stories, perhaps because they minimized what they, or perhaps because I could maintain emotional distance from them. In contrast, I could barely endure interviews with victims. Although I never wanted to hear what they had been through-I only wanted to discuss the impact of the confession-they invariably forced me to experience their torture. They seemed to say with their stories of torture that I could only understand the impact of the confession if I knew what they had been through.

These stories disturbed me. I found myself in tears during interviews, in the safety of my car after interviews, and when comfortably writing up interview notes hours later. As I wrote in one of my letters home: "If I weren't so capable at what I do, I would worry that I am becoming an emotional basket case."

I could not write off the impact of the project for long. The first confrontation came from a group of artists who asked the question about my interest in the project in a new way. They wanted to know what it was about the project that spoke to me personally-what was I trying to discover about myself in it? I could not, in other words, use my canned response. I found myself floundering and exploring with them different possible autobiographical notions to explain my interest. I had never thought of the project as personal.

Then I found myself in excruciating pain, an immobilizing physical pain in my neck, shoulders and back. When I began to attend to the pain, I began to probe the sources of that pain. And in that process, I learned both that I no longer had any distance from the project and that the project was deeply related to minor traumas I had faced in my own past.

The massage therapist I saw for the pain asked me to verbalize the pain. I described different spots she touched as "bullet size" pains in my back and "clutched fist" knots in my neck and "heavy shields" in my shoulders that I could not hold up. My spine and rib cage felt like a shielding structure aimed at protecting what was inside, but they were vulnerable and bending under the pressure of sustaining themselves.

When she began to work on the "bullets," a deadening sensation overcame me. I could not feel any flow of energy throughout my body. When she worked on the "clutched fists," I felt that she was beginning to untangle knots and gnarled emotions. I described these as victims and perpetrators all knotted up inside of me. They were knotted in me because I bore their stories in my body-complicated stories. Perpetrators see themselves as victims-victims of a system that convinced them to do things they would not have done otherwise. The victims of the apartheid repressive apparatus also saw themselves as perpetrators: they were prepared to, and sometimes did, perpetrate violence: blow up white policemen or churches or carry out other acts of violence to end apartheid. I became the bearer of these truths and contradictions. The pain I experienced came from the responsibility of bearing these stories and struggling to untangle them from each other and to keep myself from becoming tangled up in them.

As I wrote home: "The training I have had since I was a child, deepened through the types of research projects I have taken on in recent years, taught me to protect myself from pain and fear. But this shell itself has begun to crush me and cause pain." I went on to say, "I probably had to come to Africa, where I have so few crutches, to explore this pain, the protective shell, and the possibility of living without it."

Back in the U.S. academic milieu, I find myself nostalgic for those moments of rawness and awakening. The faded memories and scraps of writing have survived to remind me of the dilemma I still face: Do I write the book I really want to write and that exposes more of me than I am ready for my colleagues to read? Or do I write the safe and appreciated book that protects me under the disciplinary shell of comparative politics and crushes the creative process?


Leigh Payne is Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently Director of the Global Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison funded by the MacArthur Foundation and coordinator of the Legacies of Authoritarianism Project funded by the Ford Foundation. Dr. Payne has just completed her GSC fellowship tenure during which she was researching for her project "Unsettling Accounts: The Role of Perpetrators' Confessions in Reconciliation Processes." Dr. Payne obtained her Ph.D. in political science at Yale University and her M.A. in Latin American studies at New York University. Her current research is titled Unsettling Accounts and deals with the political impact of confessions made by torturers in Latin America, South Africa, Bosnia and Rwanda.