You may not know it, but today is International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, this was originally celebrated in order to totally eradicate the idea of torture altogether on the 12th of December 1997 and this day also stands against other inhumane treatment that people shouldn’t have to go through.
This day is also where people are remembered for some of the most terrible things that they have been through in their lives. This event this year to me is now more important than ever, due to the recent events that have taken place, in Manchester and of course more recently London, even though these events were dealt with what happened whilst the events were taking place could be deemed as torture for the many victims that have been effected.
Also people have suffered torture throughout history, suffering some of the most brutal punishments for crimes that were committed that we now no longer see as crimes, an example of this would be what Alan Turing went through, even though some of the work that he did saved us during the war, this didn’t seem to count for anything once it had been discovered that he was gay and then he was sentenced to chemical castration, before he committed suicide by cyanide poisoning. It was years after his death in 1954 that he finally received a pardon from the Prime Minister (Gordon Brown) in 2013 for the act of sexual indecency that he apparently committed. To me when someone does work to save the country(as he did) this shouldn’t have mattered to anyone wha he was doing behind closed doors, but of course it did and now thankfully his work lives on and still continues to this day within the different computer systems that we use on a day-to-day basis.
Different forms of torture still occurs even now across the globe and it is so important that we remember that whilst we may be in countries that are fortunate to have the things that we have around us, some people haven’t got the things that we take for granted in our country. To them our country would seem marvellous because they wouldn’t be able to even begin to comprehend what we’ve got over here in our countries.