It’s not about feeling less empty/bleak about that poor child’s torture and murder, it’s about not equating brutalization and torture with justice.
eg my sexual assaulter being assaulted would not give me any feeling of justice and it wouldn’t make me happy. The person who sexually assaulted my assaulter wouldn’t be a ‘hero’ in my eyes or ‘exacting justice’. They’d also be a rapist.
Basically I don’t want to live in a society where violence and cruelty is celebrated in any form. I want perpetrators to spend their time in prison and stay away from the rest of society. I don’t think that brutal torture is a way forward in terms of justice.
The painful truth is that there will never be justice for Sara Sharif, because any form of ‘justice’ doesn’t undo the torture inflicted upon her or her murder. Urfan Sharif being tortured doesn’t undo her years of suffering and pain. Torturing Urfan in this co text is literally pointless. If it’s pointless violence then it’s gratuitous- torture for a sense of satisfaction and enjoyment. Is this something we want to encourage as a society?The only thing we can do is to try to ensure that Urfan can never harm another person like that again, and to create a society where no child is hurt like that again.
So: how do we make sure that Urfan never harms someone again? it makes sense for prison as a punishment because he’s frankly psychopathic to inflict that level of pain and distress onto a child. We can’t have someone like that in society. We can’t have someone like that interacting with children or vulnerable people, therefore he can’t be allowed back into society. Plus, prison is a punishment, which is necessary.
Onto my second point: how to stop something like this from happening again. As satisfying as I grant you it would be, we can’t allow Urfan sharif to be tortured because we are civilized people and shouldn’t condone torture and brutalisation. We shouldn’t take pleasure in torture or allow it to happen because we are not like Urfan Sharif. Violent impulses which drove Urfan to kill and maim- pleasure in inflicting pain, a belief that torture and pain is ‘justified’ if you are in the right- should not drive us.
if we say, ‘violent torture is acceptable when the person being tortured is bad’, we are still sending the message to people that torture is ok, good- even to be celebrated. Yes the bastard deserves what he did to Sara a thousand times over, but we shouldn’t allow it to happen because we don’t want to celebrate violence, because celebrating violence normalizes violence and means it is more likely to happen again.