The Crucifixion of Jesus

Front matter

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THE CRUCIFIXION OF JESUS

Torture, Sexual Abuse, and the Scandal of the Cross

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: A Salvadoran Execution

Naked Prisoners at Abu Ghraib 8

Introduction

A Salvadoran Execution

Jesus . . . endured the cross, disregarding its shame. (Heb. 12:2)

This book offers a re-reading of crucifixion from the perspective of torture practices past and present. The Romans believed that pain and death could both be endured heroically. Some forms of execution therefore risked doing the opposite of what was intended. Instead of diminishing the condemned victim they risked transforming the condemned into a heroic martyr. Victims might redeem themselves in public memory by dying well. To prevent this, crucifixion was intended to be sickening and unspeakable, so degrading and overwhelming that a noble or heroic death for the victim was unthinkable. It was designed to not only end life but to disgrace the memory of the victim. It destroyed not only the man but also his reputation and standing as a man.' This made crucifixion a perfect penalty to demonstrate the death and disgrace that enslaved people, rebels, bandits, and anyone else who resisted Roman authority would face.

The sense of offence prompted Paul to refer to the cross as a ‘scandal’ or ‘stumbling block’ (1 Cor. 1:23). It is the shame of the cross rather than the pain of the cross that is recognised in Hebrews, which speaks of looking to Jesus who ‘endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God’ (Heb. 12:2). The shame and scandal of the cross are quite often mentioned in contemporary Christian writing and Christian preaching. Yet to modern eyes, a traditional image of the crucifix is unlikely to be seen as deeply shameful, scandalous, or unspeakable. The pain of crucifixion is all too clear in these images, but the disgust and offensiveness associated with crucifixion in the first century are harder to understand.

From his arrest at Gethsemane until his death at Golgotha, Jesus was a political prisoner. Chapters 1—3 of this book show how the torture and mistreatment of political prisoners might offer a renewed understanding of the scandal of the cross which acknowledges the role of sexualised violence. To do this, the book draws on reports of prisoner abuse from recent times and from what can be discerned from the Greco-Roman world. With these sources in mind, the book turns to the well-known passages in the gospels with an important question: what role did sexualised violence play in the stripping, mocking, and crucifixion of Jesus?

This has been a difficult book to write, and it will almost certainly be a difficult book to read. But the book is driven by the conviction that the biblical text matters. It is also shaped by the belief that recognising and confronting violence— especially sexual violence—matters. The book is therefore offered with the hope that a reading of Jesus’ experience which is attentive to sexualised violence can contribute to better responses to sexual violence.

Using recent torture reports for a reading of first-century crucifixion may at first seem strange. To focus specifically on sexualised elements of torture may seem stranger still. As Natalie Wigg-Stevenson says: “Like most Christians, perhaps, it never occurred to me that the torture Jesus experienced in the crucifixion could be interpreted as, have included or entailed or, even, be hermeneutically re-constituted as a form of sexual abuse’ (Wigg Stevenson 2022, 668). The central claim of the book—that the violence to which Jesus was subjected should be properly named as sexualised violence—is offered with the awareness that this understanding is still unusual, and likely to be unsettling, despite the work which is increasingly published in this area. Part of the reason that it is disturbing to explore this claim is that sexual violence is often accompanied by shame, stigma, and silence. In many instances, sexual violence becomes, literally, ‘unspeakable violence’ (Tombs 2006). To write about crucifixion in this way is to open a conversation after a long silence. The book explores the twin dynamics of ‘violence and silence’ in the crucifixion story. It concludes with some implications of this argument for faith and practice in the church.

Academic writing invariably reflects personal interests and something of an author’s biographical journey. It is appropriate for readers to ask how, and why, I have focussed on torture, sexualised violence, and crucifixion. For me, the challenge began with a question: how could the approaches advocated by Latin American liberation theologians offer new insights into crucifixion?

My interests in liberation theology go back to a chance discovery in an Oxford bookshop. In autumn 1985, I was starting my second year as an undergraduate student in philosophy and theology. I picked up the SCM 1981 edition of Gustavo Gutiérrez’s book A Theology of Liberation in Blackwell’s Bookshop. The cover showed two dramatic scenes which grabbed my attention. One scene showed a group of white-helmeted militarised police; the other showed the deprivation and poverty of a family in a Peruvian slum. The contrast was stark. I had spent the summer of 1985 travelling in Peru and had witnessed the inequalities of life there. The poverty and structural violence I had witnessed had not featured as topics during my first year reading theology and philosophy, but here was a book that put them centre stage on the front cover. Reading Gutiérrez’s work changed my understanding of what theology is and why it matters (Tombs 1995, 2002a, 2015).

Trying to understand more about liberation theology re-orientated my studies as an undergraduate and led to a year of master’s study at Union Theological Seminary in New York. The year at Union both cemented and broadened my interest in liberation theology. Courses with James Cone, Cornel West, Beverley Harrison, and Aloysius Pieris were each inspirational in their different ways. Above all, I remember the powerful classes with James Cone, and especially one piece of advice he offered those he taught. He told us that when we read theology, we should not just look at the questions that a theologian is addressing. We should also think about the questions that a theologian is not asking. He wanted students to be aware of the silences that shape theology, above all the silence of white scholars around black experience of injustice, racial oppression, and institutional violence (Cone 2018).

During my year at Union (1987—88) I was a member of the seminary’s task force on Central America. I took a keen interest in church opposition to the US government support for right-wing military regimes in Central America (Smith 1996). In the summer of 1988, I travelled by bus from New York to Mexico, and then on to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. The recent history and current reality of poverty, inequality, and violence were very clear to see. In El Salvador, I visited a friend working for a church agency in an area heavily contested in the civil war. Throughout the country, the impact of the 12-year armed conflict (1980-91) was palpable: tensions about who might be spies, checks and searches of travellers on the busses, and one night, a firefight in the distance.

In 1993 I started a part-time PhD at Heythrop College, London. Heythrop was a Jesuit-founded theological college and provided an opportunity to explore liberation theology in El Salvador more deeply. I was particularly interested in Jon Sobrino’s Christology and made further visits to El Salvador in the summers of 1996 and 1999 to learn more about Sobrino’s work. The armed conflict had finished, but many of the underlying problems remained. Sobrino wrote on the ‘crucified people’ and insisted on the need for a response that takes the suffering of the cross seriously. Sobrino recognised crucifixion as a lived reality made present in the injustice and suffering of the context. He brought the crucifixion of Jesus into dialogue with the oppressed—and crucified—of El Salvador, and vice versa.

The subtitle of Sobrino’s book, The Principle of Mercy. Taking the Crucified People from the Cross, captures the power of this distinctive outlook (Sobrino 1994). The mutual connections between the crucified people and the crucified Christ generate a demand for action. The Christian response to this demand should not be to gaze at the cross in either admiration or pity but to feel called to action.

For Sobrino, Jesus’ crucifixion is a challenge: to recognise alongside Jesus those who are currently crucified, and to do everything possible to take them down from their crosses. As he puts it:

We hope to establish, in this volume, that the sign of the times . . ., par excellence, is ‘the existence of a crucified people’-—in the words of Ignacio Ellacuria—and that the prime demand on us is that we ‘take them down from the cross’.

(Sobrino 1994, vii)

Back in London, following the 1996 visit, I read an account of an execution in El Salvador from 1983. This account led me to the work behind this book. It was the witness testimony, described by Salvadoran teenager Brenda Sánchez- Galan (Golden and McConnell 1986, 64—65; Smith 1996, 53). Sanchez-Galan had worked as an assistant in a medical centre for refugees near the capital San Salvador supported by the Lutheran Church. The military accused the medical centre of supporting political reforms and giving medical treatment to those opposed to the government. At one point, the military arrested the medical centre’s Swiss doctor, tortured him, and detained him for six months. Eventually, he was released following pressure from the Swiss embassy. The security forces then targeted others at the medical centre. One night, soldiers abducted one of Sanchez-Galan’s coworkers.” They tortured and raped her at the national guard headquarters. The next morning, the soldiers dragged her out into the public square. They made her bend over and a soldier shot her in a sexualised execution.

After the execution, SAanchez-Galan and her infant daughter sought refuge with the Lutheran Church, who helped them move to safety in Mexico City and then across the border to Texas. In 1984 she was one of the first Salvadoran refugees on a modern form of the ‘underground railway’ to be arrested in the United States. It was in Texas where she was able to tell her story to those who helped her. She repeated it in her testimony in court.

By the time I read the story in the 1990s, sexual violence during armed conflict had started to receive much greater international media attention than it had been given in 1983. The use of sexual violence in the ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia (1992-95) and genocide in Rwanda (1994) had shown quite clearly that sexual violence during conflict is not just an individual crime. Rather, it has a political dimension that requires more systemic analysis. Reading the story told by Sanchez-Galan brought home the role of sexual violence in the Salvadoran conflict. Liberation theologians, whom I greatly admired, had written such powerful works on the violence against the poor. Yet for some reason very little attention had been given to sexual violence. Jon Sobrino offered extraordinary insight into the cross and ‘crucified people’ of El Salvador, yet his work said little on sexual violence in torture and nothing explicit about sexual violence and the cross.

The Sanchez-Galan testimony prompted me to take a detour in my Christological research. I started to investigate the issue of sexual violence in the Salvadoran conflict in more depth. I hoped to understand what lay behind such an act of sexualised violence and also why it did not receive more attention in theological works. How were those who suffered sexualised violence to be helped down from the cross? How was this possible if the form of crucifixion they experienced was never spoken about? What I expected to be a relatively short detour into an important but brief side issue became a long-term interest. Eventually, ‘unspeakable violence’ became the primary focal point for my PhD on crucifixion (Tombs 2004). To understand what was behind the violence, and the silence which surrounded it, I was drawn into reading torture reports and truth commission publications documenting a wide range of prisoner abuses in detention during military dictatorships and repressive regimes in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, El Salvador, and Guatemala during the 1970s and 1980s.° It was disturbing reading. An evocative title for an Amnesty International collection on worldwide torture reports from that time is A Glimpse of Hell (Forrest 1996). Reading these reports might be described as an education in ‘the classrooms of hell’.*

My first opportunity to present on the new direction in my work was at the Society of Biblical Literature International Meeting in Krakow in 1998. I had submitted a proposal for a paper on the interpretive principles of liberationist hermeneutics in Latin America. However, I decided instead to offer a reading of crucifixion influenced by liberationist biblical hermeneutics, specifically by contextual awareness of Latin American state terror and torture practices. The paper was published the following year in Union Seminary Quarterly Review (Tombs 1999, 2018).°

The article argued that Roman approaches to crucifixion could be better understood in light of two insights from the study of torture under authoritarian regimes in Latin America. First, crucifixions as public punishments should be understood as spectacles of ‘state terror’; that is, they serve a political purpose of social intimidation. They are not just punishments against an individual but hold a message for anyone who might oppose Rome. Second, the prevalence of nudity and sexual violence in torture suggests that a sexual dimension is not an incidental detail in torture but an integral element of the terror. The article then examines how both of these insights might help towards a reading of Roman crucifixions.

First, there is clear and explicit biblical evidence for the repeated stripping and exposure of Jesus before a whole cohort of soldiers in the praetorium. This is followed by naked exposure before the crowd at crucifixion. This punitive stripping and forced nudity deserve to be recognised as sexual humiliation, which constitutes sexual abuse.

Second, in addition to naming Jesus as a victim of sexual abuse on account of the stripping, the article considered the possibility that Jesus may have experienced rape or sexual assault, which is not recorded in the text. To be clear: this is not explicitly attested in the text, and no firm conclusion is possible. Nonetheless, the possibility of further assault should be acknowledged. The question deserves to be asked, even if it cannot be answered with certainty.

This book revisits the article and draws on subsequent work in my PhD, and other work since then, on the questions it raises. Chapters 1-3 will follow the narrative sequence and focus successively on the stripping, the mocking, and the crucifixion.

Chapter | will address the repeated strippings in the praetorium and the naked exposure on the cross as forms of sexualised violence which are common in torture. Stripping and enforced nudity are appropriate starting points for investigating Jesus’ experience of sexualised violence both because they come first in the narrative and because they are clearly and explicitly attested in the gospels. This chapter argues that the stripping and nudity offer compelling evidence for Jesus to be acknowledged as a victim of sexualised violence and therefore a victim of sexual abuse. This is not just an acknowledgement of how the stripping should be understood in today’s terms but also an appropriate way to see its significance at the time.

Chapter 2 asks whether Jesus might have been subjected to further sexual assault in the praetorium as part of the mocking. Might the ‘mocking’ of Jesus have included more than the gospel texts disclose? It is unlikely that there will ever be a definitive answer. However, the chapter will suggest that reading the biblical text alongside both recent and ancient torture accounts raises disturbing questions. The disturbing account in Josephus of soldiers mocking statues of the daughters of Herod Agrippa after his death in 44 CE suggests questions for the mockery of Jesus as King of the Jews in c. 33 CE.

Chapter 3 turns to the cross itself. It returns to a particularly confronting element which was mentioned in passing but not developed at length in my earlier work (Tombs 1999). The first-century Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger mentions that some crucifixions could involve the extreme sexual violence of genital impalement. How are Seneca’s words to be understood? What might such crucifixions involve? This chapter investigates how crucifixion might be viewed in relation to impalement and whether crucifixion could have included penetrative sexualised violence. It suggests that more work is needed on this question.

The material in Chapters 1-3 is challenging and in many ways repugnant. This is hard to avoid when recounting events that by their nature are intended to dehumanise and degrade the victim and terrorise and sicken those who witness them. It is not the purpose of this research to shock or distress readers, but the sequence of chapters in an attentive journey to the cross is inevitably shocking and distressing. Stripping, mocking, and crucifixion narrate something of a staged ‘descent’ into the depravity of torture, including sexualised violence. The progression of violence addressed in Chapters 1-3 might be one way to view the Christian confession that Christ ‘descended into hell’.

The questions I had about what liberation theology might offer that started for me that day in Blackwell’s Bookshop in 1985—and which later led me to reflecting on ‘unspeakable violence’—have unfortunately continued to be relevant, even urgent. Recent years have been marked by further revelations of sexual violence against detainees and torture victims. The scandals of US forces at Abu Ghraib in Iraq (2003-04) and ongoing torture reports from many other countries (e.g., Sri Lanka, Syria, Libya, South Sudan, Ukraine) have underlined that sexualised violence in torture is a global phenomenon.

This work has led to reflection on painful and difficult testimonies, often at first hand, of torture, both in Roman times and up to the present day. Over the years, I have had the opportunity to work with many groups of Christians in Bible study and reflection, as well as work through these issues with colleagues at academic conferences. People sometimes ask, ‘what positive purpose is served by this research?’ or ‘what is gained by investigating the “way of the cross”?’ Chapter 4 offers a brief response to these important questions by focussing on victim-blaming, stigma, and the recovery of dignity.

If we understand crucifixion differently, we may also discover new insights into the Christian understanding of resurrection. In this reading, resurrection is not just the physical restoration of the body, but it also affirms the restoration of dignity as God’s embodied response to crucifixion and all that crucifixion involved. The Christian tradition affirms the importance of seeking and telling the truth, even truths which might be painful, disturbing and in some ways ‘unspeakable’. In fact, the Christian tradition affirms that truth can be liberating and set us free. This is not an easy path, but it can be explored with a reassurance that nothing that a person might be forced to endure can separate that person from the love of God (Rom. 8.35—39).

I believe that a key challenge to Christian faith is to acknowledge the cross and speak of salvation despite the cross. Over the centuries, much has been said about finding salvation in the cross, or through the cross. I follow Sobrino’s lead here: the proper task for Christians is not to glorify or romanticise the suffering of the cross but to resist the cross and find ways to take victims down from cross. A guide for Chapter 4 is therefore how the understanding of the cross in Chapters 1-3 might help bring others down from the cross. Thus, whilst Chapters 1—3 address one scandal of the cross by focussing on the scandalous violence Jesus experienced, Chapter 4 addresses a very different scandal of the cross. It looks at how resurrection might be seen in the shadow of the cross, and how human dignity might be recovered and restored despite the horror of the cross.

1 Because the focus on the book is on crucifixion as a form of sexualised violence against male victims—and against Jesus of Nazareth in particular—I will usually refer to victims of crucifixion as men. There is evidence that women were crucified as well as men, but explicit reference to women being crucified are very rare. The clearest is Josephus’ account of a freedwoman named Ide who was crucified in the time of Tiberias (Antiquities, 18.80). Other writings suggest that women were included in mass crucifixions but give little detail. For example, Tacitus reports that at the time of Pedanius Secundus, the ancient tradition of crucifying all slaves in the household was upheld despite the sex, age, or innocence of the majority. Four hundred slaves were executed against the protests of the people (Annals, 14:45). Although the word ‘punishment’ (supplicium) is used in this passage—rather than the word ‘cross’ (crux)—it is reasonable to understand punishment as ‘slaves’ punishment’ (supplicium servile), which was a euphemistic reference to crucifixion. If this was the usual practice then presumably women and children were also crucified in other cases as well, even though sources do not usually report this.

2 Regrettably the name of the executed health worker is not preserved in these accounts.

3 On using torture reports in theology and biblical studies, see Cavanaugh (1998), Neafsey (2014), Aguilar (2015) and Menéndez-Antuna (2022).

4 The phrase ‘classrooms of hell’ was used on social media in a polemical way to condemn the theological education I supposedly must have received to write of Jesus as a victim of sexual abuse. Although the comment was intended to be dismissive, in some ways it captured an important truth about the research.

5 The article was reprinted in 2018 with a retrospective response and reflection from Fernando Segovia, who had been a co-chair of the session (with Jeremy Punt) when the paper was first presented. See Tombs (2018) and Segovia (2018).

‘They stripped him.’ (Matt. 27:28)

Introduction

This chapter draws on torture reports and political prisoner documentation to discuss the stripping of Jesus. It provides an overview of how stripping and enforced nudity can be used in detention centres to humiliate prisoners, with particular attention to the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib (2003—04). Attitudes towards nudity in Roman Judaea are analysed. The chapter also examines the strippings in the praetorium and then turns to the stripping and enforced nudity on the cross. Finally, the chapter discusses why the stripping of Jesus should be named as sexualised violence and a form of sexual abuse.

Naked Prisoners at Abu Ghraib

Following the approach advocated in liberation theology, the reading of Jesus’ stripping that is offered in this chapter will be a contextual reading (Tombs 1995). It follows an initial analysis of the lived experience of stripping and enforced nudity endured by torture victims in more recent times. This is to develop a clearer sense of the significance and impact of stripping and nudity in the present, in order to notice its use and think more seriously about its purpose in the past. To do this, I turn especially to the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq by US military police (MP).'

On arrival at Abu Ghraib, prisoners were stripped and searched. This initial stripping at a detention facility can serve a legitimate security purpose, to identify anything detainees might use as a weapon. However, it also signals an important transition for prisoners. From this point, they are stripped of autonomy and under the complete control of the guards. The stripping formalises this change and makes clear the power of the guards in contrast to the powerlessness of the prisoner.

Once inside the facility, stripping can subsequently be used to repeatedly remind prisoners of their new position. Stripping and enforced nudity in detention were often used at Abu Ghraib without any security justification. It is sufficient that these enact a relationship of abusive control and embarrass and humiliate a detainee.

Clothing is more than a physical covering; it also has psychological and social significance. It helps someone to know and to express who they are, and to communicate their standing in relation to others. Repeated stripping and periods of enforced nudity during detention may appear relatively minor forms of mistreatment. But the psychological impact is more potent than first appears. The power to strip becomes an effective way to undermine a prisoner’s sense of both physical safety and psychological security. In terms of physical safety, nakedness heightens the threat of violence and increases the sense of physical vulnerability. In terms of secure psychological identity and social standing, the forcible stripping of clothing is connected with the stripping of dignity and self-confidence. Stripping and nakedness can therefore be used to erode a prisoner’s sense of self and of who they are as a human being and as an individual. It can also be a first step to different forms of other sexualised violence during torture.

Photos taken at Abu Ghraib in October-November 2003 were reported by a whistle-blower in the military in January 2004, and publicised by the media in April 2004. One of the most searing images, from 5 November 2003, shows a figure standing on a crate with electrical wires attached to his fingers. His body is covered by a dark loose sack-type garment, and his head is hooded by another sack. He stands with his arms outstretched in a manner that is suggestive of a crucifixion pose. In another notorious photo, a naked prisoner is shown crawling out of his cell. He is tethered by a leash around his neck, and the leash is held by a female guard, subsequently identified as MP Lynndie England. In other photos, prisoners are standing handcuffed against railings and bars. Some are struggling to support themselves and are slumped in uncomfortable positions as if they have been left to stand like this for a considerable period.

Whilst each of these images is acutely disturbing in its own way, one feature characteristic of many of the photos is nudity. In some photos the prisoners are either entirely naked, or they are wearing only a hood, or some covering on their head, while their bodies are fully exposed. The International Committee of the Red Cross visited Abu Ghraib in October 2003. It reported that abuses against detainees included ‘the practice of keeping [prisoners] completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness’ and parading prisoners naked in front of guards and other prisoners (Danner 2004, 6). When questioned about this, the military authorities explained that this practice was ‘part of the process’ (Danner 2004, 6-7).

Prisoners experienced the stripping as an intense violation. One prisoner, Hayder Sabbar Adb who features in the photos (prisoner 13077), describes his protest when he was ordered to strip:

Then the interpreter told us to strip. . . . We told him ‘You are Egyptian and a Muslim we can’t do that’. When we refused to take off our clothes, they beat us and tore our clothes off with a blade.

For many prisoners being stripped was a repeated and routine mistreatment. Interrogators at the prison directed the night-shift guards to prepare a prisoner for interrogation and ‘Make sure he has a bad night’ (Danner 2004, 9). A ‘bad night might involve physical beating and further stripping and hooding to intimidate and humiliate the prisoner. To add further humiliation, the prison had a large box of pink women’s panties which were sometimes used as make-shift hoods on male prisoners. The male prisoners were especially embarrassed when female guards witnessed their nakedness or participated in other abuses related to their nudity.

The Bush administration claimed that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were unauthorised and denounced the perpetrators as ‘bad apples’ and rogue operators. However, multiple reports support the view that the stripping of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was a routine part of the interrogation process. It was ‘standard operating procedure’ in what was euphemistically described as ‘enhanced interrogation’. Further disclosures of abuses at Guantanamo, and Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, as well as concerns over special ‘renditions’ of prisoners for aggressive interrogation in the post-9/11 era of a so-called Global War on Terror suggest that sexual humiliation through stripping was widespread (Begg 2006, 191).

In 1994 the United States ratified the UN Convention Against Torture: officially, torture is not, and cannot be, condoned, justified, excused, or sanctioned. Along with the Geneva Conventions, this UN treaty should have provided detainees with solid protection against cruel treatment. The Bush administration paid lip-service to the conventions in principle, and insisted that torture is wrong. Yet in practice US policy undermined the Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions by justifying and endorsing harsh interrogation procedures. Furthermore, one of the ways that the United States sought to get around the prohibition against torture was to approve practices which put less emphasis on direct violence and drew more on humiliation, sensory deprivation, and self-inflicted pain, rather than on directly inflicted physical violence.

Sensory deprivation at Abu Ghraib frequently involved temporary blinding, which helps to explain why hooding was so common. Stress positions were also widely practised at Abu Ghraib. Stress positions were a means to inflict severe physical pain over a prolonged period whilst avoiding obvious physical marks. Prisoners were forced to stand for hours, hand-cuffed to railings, and often with arms outstretched. Stress positions offer a level of deniability because they do not leave contact marks and if included in records can be described in understated ways. The pretence that this is not torture or cruelty or inhumane treatment could only be maintained by ignoring the enormous gap in power between prisoner and guard, alongside the fact that a guard could force a prisoner to maintain the stress position long beyond the point when it became unbearable.

Even so, the pretence was a useful device, especially because of a legal ruling by the European Court (Ireland v UK, 1978) in relation to Northern Ireland. The judgement in this case set a legal precedent for torture, inhuman treatment, and degrading treatment, and drew a distinction between, on the one hand, some use of stress positions and, on the other, torture. The judgment did not suggest that all stress positions constituted acceptable practice, or were legally permissible, but it offered an opportunity for the US administration to argue that stress positions could be distinguished from torture. This could then be used to claim that the administration upheld the prohibition against torture while permitting ‘acceptable’ stress positions.