So it's probably best to at least try to define some of the terms such as 'trauma' 'abuse' and 'torture'.
Trauma I believe to have originated from modern psychology - I mean, you could now say having a bad meal or simply something you don't like is 'traumatic'. You don't for example, see tribal cultures, complain of 'trauma'. Aztecs would have simply gathered together, blew their death whistle, and charged forth. If you was a caveman, and you lived next to a volcano, you would move cave when you realised it was going to blow. The Romans got wiped out in part by a volcano, but they also developed exceptional techniques of war; spectacular formations that would outsmart a pride of lions and still permeate modern politics. Yet, even before them, the Greeks had invented clandestine warfare and used the gift of storytelling to delineate opponents. You didn't not hear in troops from the last centuries great wars complaints of PTSD, yet it has entered common parlance.
I believe that psychology being able to identify such conditions is partly why it has been weaponised. There's loads of military intelligence officers on twitter that complain of PTSD, same for news stories of other departments such as online child exploitation, where they are in a system where they have to view graphic imagery, navigate missiles, and manage high emotions. Now imagine your the boss, or in any position of power, the weight on your neck is going to give you some idea the damage trauma can do, its impact on health, and also the balance between that and simply war. The neuroscience of it is also well understood. Because of the repetitive aspect of doing that kind of work, it builds up into a kind of insidious, pernicious trauma. You hear it described as CPTSD. And in the right circumstances and without an appropriate framework it can be debilitating, and essentially destroy a person. So, therefore you have a weapon, and it's used at macro levels from big world events, to more surprisingly, targeted micro levels. And the best of all, you do not even have to have physical contact with a person to be able to subject them to huge and highly reckoned trauma.
Abuse is something you might think would be covered by law. I mean there are all kinds of laws governing different kinds of abuse, including non physical abuse. It usually consists of a perpetrator/victim situation. It would be very rare for the victim to be in a position of greater power than the perpetrator. In the case of state, if all the people banded together, hoping for some kind of revolution, they could probably give it a good shot, and in all likelihood result in violence. So in order to assert itself, for the public interest, people are banded together into different groups, itself a kind of abuse, at the deepest level, however, what's known a necessary abuse, to the extent of several countries seeing militia groups. The same happens on the internet; hives are created, opinions are manipulated, and content is given some extent of control. You could not adequately claim in a court of law that is an abuse of person, as it justified in the public interest, a far less of an public abuse than a militia group. Yet, when it becomes directed at an individual, a different criteria exists, that you would expect to be covered by law, except that it doesn't, because it can be classified as public interest.
Torture is generally thought of again as a physical thing, or even on a spiritual or metaphysical level, a fact of life. In the film Sansho the Baliff, the poor woman sings 'Isn't life torture'. Actions of torture are another historical component of war and usually consist of a combination of physical harm combined with psychological manipulation. Generally, I would say that abuse combined with threat is enough to consist torture. So you could say, simply having to do things you don't want to do otherwise you'd die, and you probably will anyway, is what makes life a spiritual torture for people.
What it's said that is done in torture camps and black sites, the prisoner is stripped naked, often sexually humiliated, subject to sensory deprivation, and in many cases having a phallic device inserted into their anus. The justification; perceived threat. And also, in various regimes a political prisoner may be tortured in more gruesome ways, removal of limbs, stress positions and to the point of death. That's an easily perceivable and generally undeniable reality.
What I will get to in my next post (after i read your replies) is a more subtle and arcane form of torture.
It has been referred to as Non Touch Torture.