“Welcome to the Disco,” Clive Smith, The Guardian, June 18, 2008, describes the CIA technique of torturing with music:

“Mohamed, the British resident who is still held in Guantánamo Bay, knows a bit about such torture. The CIA rendered him to Morocco, where his torturers repeatedly took a razor blade to his penis throughout an 18-month ordeal.

When I later sat across from him in the cell, he described how psyops methods were worse than this. He could anticipate physical pain, he said, and know that it would eventually end. But the experience of slipping into madness as a result of torture by music was something quite different.”

The article isn’t referring to the physical stress on the hearing of extremely loud music played continuously, although that’s torturous too.  It’s referring to the psychological stress.

Trivializing mental torture or even emotional injuries (of a serious kind)  by flippant remarks about “sticks and stones” is easy to do….because it is unthinking.

Psychological coercion is not about a few hurtful words, although critics might use that as a straw-man. Psychological/verbal/emotional violence, sustained over a period of years, months, and even days, can cause disability much greater than that caused by physical violence. Bodies and faces can be repaired with surgery.  It is often not possible to put back a broken spirit.

In any case, why is flippancy not directed at the notion of physical violence as well? After all, it’s just a few scratches, a few bruises. It’s just a broken bone.

What makes even the most trivial bodily injury or the slightest damage to property such a tremendous violation of rights,  but even the worst and most systematic verbal, emotional, and psychic injury non-existent?