A rant about strappado

Strappado is a very simple tie. It requires no special skills, no fancy technique. It requires only one rope. It results in permanent, irrepairable injury to the victim, and that's intentional, that's what it was developed to do.

Very simply, you tie the victim's wrists together behind their back, and then you hoist them up by their tied wrists.

For many people, it results in the dislocation of both shoulders. Shoulders that have been dislocated are permanently weakened, and are very much easier to dislocate again. This is exactly why, before you suspend anyone, you should ask them if they have ever dislocated a joint before, and you should not suspend them even partially from a limb which has previously dislocated.

Strappado does not work for everyone. Medieval torturers used to tie weights to the ankles of particularly strong or particularly light individuals, in order to ensure their shoulders would dislocate. But they did not routinely tie weights to the ankles, because they knew from experience that they did not need to. Just one rope, one knot, one hoist, and pop, pop, lots of pain and permanent injury. Very simple.

Strappado can also kill. Wikipedia claims that 'This kind of torture would generally not last more than an hour without rest, as it would likely result in death'. It also records that a prisoner in Abu Ghraib, Manadel al-Jamadi, died after only half an hour of strappado.

What proportion of people does strappado without ankle weights work for? I don't know, I don't suppose anyone now alive knows. I don't want to know. Will strappado work for this person I'm about to tie right now? I don't know and I never want to find out.

These days, experienced riggers talk about doing strappado. And if you are an experienced rigger and know the risks and work very carefully, you can do a partial strappado which is reasonably safe.

So let's talk about what's required to make a partial strappado reasonably safe. You need to take the majority of the person tied's weight on something else, at least a chest harness. You have to make sure that no failure of the rig could cause the chest harness to let go which would not also cause the strappado to let go.

You will see, on this site and others, occasionally pictures of a person lifted onto their tiptoes in a partial strappado. This is one of the famous 'stress positions' used by modern torturers in places like Guantanamo Bay in Cuba or Abu Ghraib in Iraq or Stare Kiejkuty in Poland. Provided the victim - and I'm using the word victim unironically here - remains on their feet and with their feet remain firmly on the floor, this can be argued to be "safe".

But if the victim loses their balance, or gets cramp in their legs, or faints, or you pull just a little too hard on that lift rope, then pop, pop, lots of pain and permanent injury.

So don't do this, and don't post pictures of it. Yes, you almost certainly did get lucky - you wouldn't be posting pictures if you didn't get lucky. You'd be too busy phoning for an ambulance, or sitting in an emergency ward, or dealing with the ruins of your wrecked relationship. But if we keep posting pictures of even partial strappados, sooner or later someone will get unlucky.

Probably, that person will be inexperienced. Probably, they will not have known the risks. They will just have seen pictures of ties experienced riggers have done, probably with quite elaborate safety measures which aren't visible in the picture, and thought "that looks fun".

Indeed, probably that does happen, already, more than we know. People tend not to post to Fetlife boasting about scenes that have gone horribly wrong.

So yes, if you're experienced, and you understand anatomy, and leverage, and you carefully arrange your chest harness and hip harness to take most of the weight, you can do partial strappado reasonably safely, and it does, let's face it, look properly hard-core because it is properly hardcore.

But if you're posting pictures of even partial strappado, please be sure to say that it's only partial and to warn that this is a really dangerous tie. And if you're teaching a rope 101, please be sure to explain that strappado is a really dangerous tie and why it's a really dangerous tie.

Because the thing about bondage is that we mostly quite like the people we tie. We mostly don't want to cause them permanent injury. On the whole, we don't want to actually kill them.