Submissions

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Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.
  • The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author guidelines (please find the Author formal style checklist below), including that references adhere to APA guidelines and DOI is included where relevant.
  • Please also see the Torture Journal Author formal style checklist and ensure the article complies with these formal requirements. You may want to go through this systematically once the article has been through the peer-review process. Please stipulate this when you submit the article. 
  • FOR YOUR INFORMATION: If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, your paper will go through a double-blind peer review process.
  • The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect document file format.
  • Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
  • The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
  • For observational research designs, the Torture Journal encourages readers to align their designs to STROBE guidelines. Please familiarise yourselves with the checklists in the link provided before submitting the paper: https://www.strobe-statement.org/index.php?id=available-checklists

Author Guidelines

Checks for submission
Please ensure you have read the full Torture Journal author guidelines and ensure the article complies with these formal requirements. Regarding the latter, you may want to go through this systematically once the article has been through the peer-review process. Please stipulate this when you submit the article. 
 
For observational research designs, the Torture Journal encourages readers to align their designs to STROBE guidelines. Please familiarise yourselves with the checklists in the link provided before submitting the paper. 
 
Please also see the guidelines for submitting your article on our online submission platform here. 

Further information:

Selection of manuscripts will, amongst other things, be on the basis of the subject being worthy of investigation, as well as on the suitability and soundness of the research methodology and the soundness of the conclusions. Additionally, priority will be given to articles that provide original knowledge and information, particularly those with comparative and interesting or new perspectives.  Articles categorised as clinical trials, research methodology papers, data based population examinations, critical or explaining case descriptions may in some incidences be preferred.

The Torture Journal welcomes all submissions, and has a wish to promote submissions particularly from low and middle income countries. Where possible and if necessary, we will assist those working for the rehabilitation of torture survivors and the prevention of torture to make their submissions more publishable, especially those from non-English native speaking countries. (Please note, however, that publication of scientific articles cannot be guaranteed due to the integrity of the double-blind peer review system).
 
The Torture Journal will endeavour to provide succinct, relevant and timely feedback to authors on a manuscript, even when it is rejected.  The editors reserve the right to reject a manuscript at any time up to publication.

 

Research and Scientific articles

  • Research and scientific articles include an abstract, introduction, methods, results and discussion.

Review articles

  • Review articles provide a critical survey and examination of the literature of a particular subject of research which generally consist of Abstract, Introduction (including explanations of conflicts in the literature, and analysis of the field), Methods, Results, Conclusions and Outlook (including limitations of current knowledge and future directions to be pursued in research).

Case reports

  • The Torture Journal welcomes the submission of case reports with respect to unusual cases for any specific reason (either social, nosological, clinical or therapeutic).

Perspectives

  • A personal view or reflection in a clear narrative voice can also be submitted to the journal. It is intended that this section can add a more qualitative perspective to other scientific articles. Perspectives from torture survivors or field workers are particularly encouraged.

Research news

  • Please let us know at publications@irct.org if there is something you believe is newsworthy for the Torture Journal. Examples include items which may be of use or interest to the wider  sector, such as key or unusual papers published in another journal that are worthy of wider dissemination, or, literature that your organisation has produced

Statements

  • Official declarations made by professional bodies or committees which may be of value or interest to the readers related to the torture field.

Book and media reviews

  • Readers are welcome to contribute a book, film, TV, exhibition, or web review.

Debate and Comment

  • Debates and comments are commissioned largely to contextualise a review or scientific paper published in the same issue.

Letter to the Editor

  • Letters can be written in response to previous content published in the Torture Journal or be of  general interest.

Special section: torture in prisons

This call for papers aims to examine prisons and other detention facilities (immigration detention centres, juvenile detention centres, etc) as torturing environments

Torture Journal encourages authors to submit papers with a psychological, medical or legal orientation, particularly those that are interdisciplinary with other fields of knowledge. We welcome contributions related (but not limited) to:

  1. Conditions of detention as environments of torture: overcrowding, food, inhuman treatment, etc.
  2. Carceral geographies: emotional cartographies in detention spaces.
  3. Impacts of isolation and closed regime units. Alternatives.
  4. Use of mechanical restraints, chemical restraints and other methods of control and coercion. Intervention programs to abolish restraints.
  5. Challenges of forensic documentation in prisons and other closed institutions.
  6. Studies on reprisals against persons deprived of their liberty following monitoring visits to investigate allegations of torture.
  7. Violent institutional cultures. Generating and perpetuating factors, and intervention programmes on violent milieus.
  8. Violence by other inmates and staff. Methods of detection and prevention.
  9. Effectiveness of torture prevention measures: videotaping, civil-society monitoring, medical documentation of injuries and others
  10. Sexual torture and abuse in closed institutions.
  11. Short or adapted forms of the Istanbul Protocol for documenting torture during monitoring visits or short-time evaluations in closed institutions.
  12. Self-harm and suicide. Self-inflicted violence in closed institutions.
  13. Severe Mental Illness and Torture in closed institutions.
  14. Legal contours of torture in detention centres: legal reviews with a special focus on the intentionality and purpose criteria

SPECIAL SECTION ON ISRAEL & OCCUPIED PALESTINE

The Palestinian people have endured a protracted process of occupation by Israel. This has resulted in a plethora of documented instances of human rights violations. One year after the Hamas attacks on 7th October 2023 in Israel and Israel's military campaign and associated grave human rights violations in Palestinian territory and other related Arab countries, it is an important duty to analyse emergent issues from a human rights perspective and for the Torture Journal to do so on matters within its scope.

To conduct an analysis in the context of an ongoing war and enormous suffering is undoubtedly complex. But epidemiology and health sciences have insights to contribute which go beyond calls for a cessation of violence and thus there is an ethical duty to try to do so.

From this standpoint, Torture Journal encourages the submission of academic papers that contribute to a more comprehensive and evidence-based understanding of torture, ill-treatment, and associated human rights violations in the current context, including legal, psychosocial and community impacts and peace-building through justice.

In pursuit of this, Torture Journal, as a space for reflection on torture, its impacts and models of prevention and rehabilitation, has constituted a broad set of editors, based on its Editorial Board and invited guests from different fields, to ensure a plurality of perspectives and an evidence-based approach.

Torture Journal encourages authors to submit papers on the Israeli-Palestinian situation, particularly those which are interdisciplinary.

We welcome papers on:

  1. The definition of torture, torturing or coercive environments, and epidemiological studies on its prevalence and characteristics in the framework of the conflict and the occupation.
  2. Particular victim groups, locations, specific vulnerabilities, concerning risks, impacts and needs, including, for instance, mental health patients, older adults or pregnant women.
  3. The situation for children growing up under an ongoing and armed conflict – consequences and possible remedies.
  4. Impacts and care of health workers amidst the conflict.
  5. Aspects related to the situation in places of detention or deprivation of liberty, official or clandestine, including both detainees, prisoners, hostages or any other form of deprivation of liberty.
  6. Sociological, psychosocial or anthropological work in connection with the field of torture and coercive or torturing environments in both Israel and Israeli occupied territories.
  7. Legal discussions in relation to applications before International Courts.
  8. Psychosocial and community impacts and interventions within the population.
  9. Forensic assessment of cases based on the Istanbul Protocol.
  10. Effective rehabilitation practices for civil society amidst the conflict.
  11. Transitional justice, peace-building and justice interventions involving torture survivors.

Due to the complex nature of the topic the Board will take particular editorial approaches. The Journal will not accept opinion pieces, reflections or letters to the editor which are not partially, and preferably totally, based on data or an academic analysis and review. Papers based on epidemiological studies will have to provide access to instruments and data for purposes of cross-checking, if the reviewers consider it necessary.

Submission guidelines

Deadline for submissions: 30th April 2025

For more information. If potential authors doubt the suitability of their contributions, they can send an outline of the paper to the Editor-in-Chief for additional guidance.

- Pau Pérez-Sales, Editor-in-Chief (pauperez@runbox.com)
- Berta Soley, Editorial Assistant (bso@irct.org)

Submission guidelines and links

Special Section Editors: Malcolm Evans (UK), Jens Simon Modvig (Denmark), Daniel Weishut (Israel), Tania Herbert (Australia), John Schiemann (US), Mahmud Sehwail (Palestine), Nora Sveaass (Norway)

Copyright Notice

The Creative Commons Licence  Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) covers both the Torture Journal and the IRCT web site. The publisher will not put any limitation on the personal freedom of the author to use material contained in the paper in other works which may be published, provided that acknowledgement is made to the original place of publication.

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and informing readers of associated IRCT and research/scientific initiatives considered on interest to readers of and contributors to the journal. They will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.

Information about a user will be saved as long as the user is active. If the user has been inactive for a year, the user will be contacted by e-mail. If the user does not respond to this e-mail, the user account and information about the user will be deleted after 1 month. If the user has participated in editorial work (e.g. as an editor, guest editor, or reveiwer), or has submitted an article to a journal, the user account and information will be saved for 3 years after the last editorial job or submission.