Well it would cook his eye. I know that’s not the technical medical term but that’s effectively what you’re talking about. Denaturing the protein structure with heat until it can no longer function as it did originally.
He’d lose the sight in that eye, as a minimum. He’d probably have severe burns all around that side of his face.
So far as I know this has never been a common torture and I can give you an educated guess why. Dripping very hot oil on to anything is a hazardous activity. When the character is trying to drip hot oil on to a person, who will be struggling and lashing out even if he’s restrained, the chances of spilling that oil increase. Also oils are flammable.
Essentially I think that doing it like this dramatically increases the chances of the torturer either burning themselves or outright setting themselves on fire.
Which, don’t get me wrong, I would love to see you write that. Because I don’t think there are enough portrayals of torture backfiring on the torturer.
If you don’t feel that fits with your story I will be slightly disappointed at the loss of burny fail torturer I’d suggest using the methods torturers did historically. In India they would blind people by inserting a heated needle into the eye. You could also use a more general burning torture and have the character target that eye. A piece of heated metal held against the area was the most common method globally. It wasn’t commonly used to blind or targetted at the eyes but it would give you the effect you’re after.
Getting back to the victim character-
I am not a medic or a burns expert so I’d recommend doing your own research on facial burns. With the kinds of severe burns you’re suggesting there’s a significant infection risk.
There’s a lot of scar tissue, and this shrinks the skin. Around the face and neck this can have a very detrimental effect. If the burn covers large areas of the neck it can restrict breathing. If it goes over the mouth it can restrict movement there, effecting speech and the ability to eat.
I would generally suggest avoiding the neck area if you’re giving your character burns or scars. Realistically speaking the risk of death from serious complications afterwards is very high.
I think that if the character is lucky and the angle of the oil is right he could avoid large scale burns to his neck in your original scenario.
If you do stick with the oil idea think about where the oil will drip after it’s come off the character’s eye. Think about where it will flow.
That’s the limit of my knowledge when it comes to the physical effects.
The long term mental health effects are more or less the same regardless of what kind of torture someone survives. I’ve got a post about the common effects here.
Survivors don’t tend to experience everything on the list. The list is more- what’s possible. What an individual survivor actually ends up developing isn’t something we can predict or control though. We don’t know why some people get some symptoms and others get different symptoms.
Because we can’t predict symptoms I suggest approaching the problem as a writer and picking somewhere between 3-5 symptoms from the list that you feel fit the story best.
If you can use a symptom to create interesting obstacles and problems for the character that’s a good pick. Symptoms that fit with the theme of the story or give you chances to show the readers more about the character as a person are also good picks.
Memory problems are very common generally. I have a post about them here.
Chronic pain is more likely with severe burns. I don’t know enough about burns to say more then that though.
Torture that causes big obvious scars and obvious disabling injuries like these are rare nowadays. There has been some discussion about the difference that makes but be aware that I have less sources from survivors who were left scarred and obviously disabled.
Survivors often have a lot of intense feelings about their scars. Scarred survivors can report feeling that their scars are more obvious then they are, that they’re often being stared at and that it’s easy for people to ‘tell’ what they survived by looking at them.
I particularly remember hearing an interview with a survivor who had undergone plastic surgery to ‘correct’ a- facial scar I couldn’t even see in his ‘before’ photos. After he’d healed he reported great dissatisfaction with his surgery. He could still see the scar. I still couldn’t.
Feelings of shame and anger surrounding scars appear to be common. These are also really prominent when injuries cause a physical disability.
These feelings can be tied to internalised ableism but I think it’s important to acknowledge that there’s more going on here. Survivors struggle to find and keep jobs any way. Trying to support themselves and their families when they’ve got a disability they don’t know how to navigate yet, which serves as a physical reminder of what they experienced- it’s a big ask.
However- there’s an argument that when it comes to social reintegration people with obvious scars and disabling injuries have an advantage now over people who don’t.
This is because there are major problems today with survivors being barred from accessing help or services. It’s also because a lack of obvious scars is sometimes used to create doubt within a survivor’s community, to suggest that victims were not ‘really’ tortured.
Having obvious scars is suggested to reduce rejection by the community, lead to better access to medical care and more charitable support.
This was not necessarily the case historically. A lot of historical cultures used scarring tortures with the intent of making it ‘obvious’ a survivor had been convicted of a crime. If that’s your setting then there’s unlikely to be much of an advantage to having scars.
Unless you’re writing a story with significant resistance to the group that tortured this character. Opposing groups might take obvious signs of torture as a sort of- badge of honour, a way of identifying that this person is a fellow opposition member. This functions in a similar way to the idea of a community seeing scars and taking that as a sign the character has suffered ‘for’ them, hence lending all possible assistance.
Social rejection of acceptance has a profound effect on a survivor’s chance of recovery. People need communal support in order to lead full, happy lives with their symptoms.
I think I’ll end this by stressing that torture survivors can have happy, fulfilling lives afterwards. Symptoms don’t vanish, but people do learn to live with them.
I hope that helps. :)
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