Method 4: Electric Shocks

Electric shock torture methods haven't been around as long as many other widely used methods -- humans didn't figure out how to harness electricity until the late 19th century. Once established, however, electricity soon came into use as a method of torture. "Americans didn't just develop electric power," writes torture expert Darius Rejali, "they invented the first electrotorture devices and used them in police stations from Arkansas to Seattle" [source: Boston Globe]. Electrical shocks can be delivered using stun guns, cattle prods and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) devices.

Carl Purcell/Three Lions/Getty Images
Electroconvulsive therapy devices were developed in the 1930s and shown here used as therapy for depression around 1955. These devices are used in torture because they deliver pain and disorientation without killing the detainee.

This type of torture can be as crude as introducing a current to a victim via a cattle prod or other device designed to deliver a shock attached to a car battery. Shocks are used as a torture method because they're cheap and effective. One 22-year-old Chechen survivor recounts being tortured with electricity at the hands of Russian military personnel: "They gave me electric shock under my fingernails and under the nails of my little toes so later I had to have the nails removed from my fingers and toes" [source: Amnesty International Danish Medical Group]. What's more, shocks leave behind little obvious physical trace of the agony they produce. One expert suggests, "Torturers favor electric torture because it leaves no marks other than small burns that, one can allege, were simply self-inflicted" [source: Rejali].

On the next page, ready about sexual assault as a form of torture.