To date, Survivors of Torture, International has served more than 150 clients. Consequently, survivors fear that they will not be believed. In addition, many survivors have family members who live in danger of detention and torture in their countries of origin, and survivors fear for the safety of their families if they disclose the abuses. The fact that torture is such a shaming experience, usually involving rape or other forms of sexual assault or humiliation perpetrated against both women and men, also keeps survivors suffering in silence. Torturers brutally abuse their victims using physical and psychological tactics.
Some tactics are more sophisticated than others, but all leave long-term emotional scars.
Torture survivors throughout the world exhibit similar symptoms, including chronic pain in muscles and joints, severe depression and anxiety, intense and incessant nightmares, guilt and self-hatred, impaired memory, the inability to concentrate, the inability to form and maintain meaningful relationships and frequent thoughts of suicide. These are clinical terms, however, and often do not convey the misery that torture survivors endure daily. Clients who cannot eat without vomiting. Clients who experience panic attacks when they hear an automobile backfire. Clients who cannot turn off the lights at night because in the dark they see the uniformed men who raped them night after night.