Violence Workers: Police Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities

Of the 23 Brazilian policemen interviewed in-depth for this landmark study, 14 were direct perpetrators of torture and murder during the three decades that included the 1964-1985 military regime. These "violence workers" and the other groups of "atrocity facilitators" who had not, or claimed they had not, participated directly in the violence, help answer questions that haunt today's world: why and how are ordinary men transformed into state torturers and murderers? How do atrocity perpetrators explain and justify their violence? What is the impact of their murderous deeds - on them, on their victims, and on society? What memories of their atrocities do they admit and which become public history?

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Explanation of Illustrations List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgements Preface Introduction Chapter 1: Violent Lives Chapter 2: Reconstructing Atrocity Chapter 3: Locating Torturers and Murderers Chapter 4: Deposing Atrocity and Managing Secrecy Chapter 5: Biography Intersects History Chapter 6: Personalistic Masculinity Chapter 7: Bureaucratizing Masculinities Chapter 8: Blended Masculinity Chapter 9: Shaping Identities and Obedience: A Murderous Dynamic Chapter 10: Secret and Insular Worlds of Serial Torturers and Executioners Chapter 11: Moral Universe of Torturers and Murderers Chapter 12: Hung Out to Dry Conclusion: The Alchemy of Torture and Execution: Transforming Ordinary Men into Violence Perpetrators

About the Author :
Martha K. Huggins is Roger Thayer Stone Professor of Sociology at Union College. Her book Political Policing (1998) won two awards. Mika Haritos-Fatouros is Professor of Psychology at the School of Psychology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Philip G. Zimbardo is Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, author of several books, and 2002 President of the American Psychological Association.

Review :
"A groundbreaking work.... Its conclusions allow us to understand how state-sponsored violence is a social illness, and how easily moral boundaries can be destroyed.... Our lesson is to grasp carefully how the technique of transforming individuals into evildoers is a highly rational exercise of constructed hatred, the isolation of individuals, and the blurring of the border between duty and cruelty."-Maria Pia Lara, editor of Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives "It's rare enough that people study torturers. It's very dangerous fieldwork, demoralizing material to ponder over, and intellectually hazardous to put it together coherently. These authors do better than this: they come back with a book well worth thinking about. Thinking about torture these days is something we do less and less; one can only hope this book will be an antidote to so much thoughtlessness."-Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Modernity: Self, Society and State in Modern Iran