I became involved with human rights activism at the age of fourteen, but
it would be twenty-five years before I met a person who had survived torture. Many human rights activists and academics never meet someone who
has survived a grave violation such as disappearance, torture, rape, or
genocide, and certainly the vast majority of survivors never meet those
who speak on their behalf in the arena of international human rights advocacy. Indeed, at its highest institutional levels, and in spite of the intrepid
on-the-ground work of advocates and humanitarian agents, much human
rights work is divorced from the intimate struggles, pain, and trauma
experienced by individual humans, focused instead upon reporting on and
negotiating with governments, armed resistance groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), corporations, diplomats, and others about the
treatment of groups of people: dissidents living under repressive regimes;
ethnic minorities mistreated by state apparatuses; detainees confined without trial in the “war on terror”; women and girls violated and oppressed the world over.