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Cultural and Economic
Barriers to Protecting Children
from Ritual Abuse and Mind
Control
By Catherine Gould, Ph.D.
Dec. 1995
How are we to understand the phenomenon
of ritual abuse in the 1990's? Throughout the Western world, increasing numbers
of therapists and other helping professionals are hearing accounts from children
as young as two and adults ranging into the ninth decade of their lives describe
mind-numbing accounts of abuses consisting of sexual sadism and pornography,
physical torture, and highly sophisticated psychological manipulation which,
taken together, we have come to refer to as ritual abuse.
The evidence is rapidly accumulating that the problem of ritual abuse is
considerable in scope, and extremely grave in its consequences. Among 2,709
members of the American Psychological Association who responded to a poll, 2,292
cases of ritual abuse were reported (Bottoms, Shaver, & Goodman, 1993). In 1992
alone, Childhelp USA logged 1,741 calls pertaining to ritual abuse, Monarch
Resources of Los Angeles logged approximately 5,000, Real Active Survivors
tallied nearly 3,600, Justus Unlimited of Colorado received almost 7,000, and
Looking Up of Maine handled around 6,000.
Even allowing for some of these calls to have been made by people who assist
survivors but are not themselves survivors, and for some survivors to have
called more that one helpline or made multiple calls to the same helpline, these
numbers suggest that at a minimum there must be tens of thousands of survivors
of ritual abuse in the United States.
Evidence also continues to accumulate that the ritual abuse of children
constitutes a child abuse problem of significant scope. In 1988, Finkelhor,
Williams and Burns (1988) published the results of a nationwide study of
substantiated reports of sexual abuse in day care involving 1,639 young child
victims. Thirteen percent of these cases were found to involve ritual abuse.
Other studies of ritually abused children have been relatively small. Kelly
(1988; 1989; 1992a; 1992b; 1993) reported on 35 day care victims of ritual
abuse, Waterman et al. (1993) reported on 82 children complaining of ritual
abuse in preschool, Faller (1988; 1990) studied 18 children who had disclosed
ritual abuse in their preschool, and Bybee and Mowbray (1993) from the Michigan
State Department of Mental Health identified 62 children alleging ritual abuse
in their preschool and 53 children who reported seeing others be ritually
abused.
Snow and Sorenson (1990) studied 39 children reporting ritual abuse in five
neighborhoods in Utah, and Jonker and Jonker-Bakker (1991) reported on a total
group of 98 children, at least 48 of whom were believed to be victims of ritual
abuse. The latter case is the only one cited here which was conducted outside of
the United States. Unfortunately, these statistics tell us little about the
actual prevalence of child ritual abuse. Much more telling are the data these
researchers have collected regarding the effects of ritual abuse on child
victims. In Faller's (1994) review of the literature from which these studies
are drawn, most of the studies which were selected included a control group of
children with sexual abuse histories but no reports of ritual abuse. It is very
telling that in every case in which the symptomatology of the ritually abused
children was compared to the symptomatology of the sexually abused children, the
ritually abused children showed considerably more symptoms of trauma.
In the Finkelhor et al. (1988) study, ritually abused children showed
significantly more symptoms of trauma than did sexually abused children. Kelly
(1988; 1989; 1992a; 1992b; 1993) showed that ritually abused children had
significantly higher scores on the Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist than did
sexually abused children, indicating more severe symptomatology on the part of
the children who had been ritually abused. Waterman et al. (1993) found that
both therapists and parents rated ritually abused children as showing more
behavioral symptoms on the Achenbach than sexually abused children. Other
assessment instruments used in this study found ritually abused children to
function less well at the time of termination from therapy than did sexually
abused children.
Faller (1990) found that more ritually abused children than sexually abused
children suffered from sleep, emotional, and behavioral problems, as well as
phobias and problems with sexual acting out.
A great deal of literature has been amassed on the often extreme and
debilitating effects of child sexual abuse on its victims, effects which may
last a lifetime. To have four comparative studies as methodologically sound as
the ones presented above all illustrating that ritual abuse causes even greater
effects on child victims than does sexual abuse should give us as a nation
serious pause. The data reflecting the grave consequences of ritual abuse on
children has been coming in for over five years now. Yet we, a nation with
mandated child abuse reporting and computerized accounts of numbers of children
reported to have been sexually, physically, and emotionally abused each year,
still have no systematic means of collecting data on numbers of children
reported to have been ritually abused! We could, relatively easily and for
minimal expense, obtain statistics on the number of cases of ritual child abuse
being reported in the United States each year simply by adding one additional
category on the child abuse reporting forms which mandated reporters must
complete when they file a child abuse report. Given the accumulation of data
illustrating not only that children reporting ritual abuse are profoundly
negatively impacted by those experiences, but that they are even more severely
impacted that are child victims of sexual abuse, how can we give any weight at
all to the skeptical position that ritual abuse memories are no more that screen
memories for incest experiences that are actually worse, suppressed from
awareness and replaced by accounts of impossibly bizarre rituals?
If children claiming to be ritually abused were in fact sexually abused only,
then clearly their symptomatology should be similar to and no more serious than
that of sexually abused children. The psychological condition of ritually abused
children matches the accounts they give of what has been done to them not only
in the severity of their symptomatology, but also in its particulars. That is to
say, not only do ritually abused children appear more disturbed than sexually
abused children on traditional instruments like the Achenbach, they also
demonstrate symptoms which relate in direct and obvious ways to the abuse
experiences they describe. For example, because ritual abuse usually involves
traumatic confinement, ritually abused children often fear elevators, closets,
and other small spaces. Because these children have often had urine and feces
smeared on their bodies and put in their mouths, they may smear themselves or
others with urine or feces, or develop phobias of the bathroom.
Because many of these children have witnessed torture and killing, and have been
threatened with death of themselves and their loved ones, they often fear that
they or their family members will be killed. And so on. (See Gould, 1992 for a
more complete account of the symptomatology that characterizes ritually abused
children).
The nature as well as the severity of ritually abused children's symptomatology
gives eloquent and tragic testimony to the fact that ritual abuse does indeed
exist, in all the horror described by its victims, both young and old. Perhaps
no skeptic has done more to obfuscate the issue of ritual abuse than Kenneth
Lanning of the FBI, who for years has maintained that no substantive evidence
exists for the reality of ritual abuse (Lanning, 1991). (As investigative
journalist Civia Tamarkin has noted, for decades the FBI also told the American
public that the Mafia did not exist in the United States (1991)). "No
bodies...No adult witnesses," as Parenting magazine put it so succinctly, and so
erroneously in their March 1994 article "The Satanism Scare" (Ruben, 1994). And
why do accounts like the ones given by the 37 ritually abused adults in the
Young et al. (1991) study, and the 14 ritually abused families in the Kelly
(1992a) study, of group sexual assaults, human sacrifice, forced cannibalism and
the like not constitute eyewitness accounts to so-called experts like Lanning? I
am personally aware of scores of adult survivors with memories of ritual crimes
(contrary to the position of many skeptics, most of these memories were
retrieved without hypnosis or chemical assistance; many were in fact retrieved
outside of therapy) who have made concerted attempts to bring these crimes to
the attention of law enforcement.
The vast majority of these survivor accounts have been met with absolute
indifference and inaction on the part of local law enforcement agencies, as well
as the FBI, who might reasonably be expected to investigate the charges of
interstate trafficking of children and pornography which are commonly made by
ritual abuse survivors. Not only do skeptics such as Lanning choose to ignore
eyewitness/victim accounts of ritual criminal activity, they apparently also
choose to overlook the significant number of cases of ritual abuse in which
perpetrators have confessed to their crimes. In the Bottoms et al. (1991; 1993)
study of 2,292 cases of ritual abuse, perpetrators in 30% of the child cases
confessed to abusing one or more children, and perpetrators in 15% of adult
cases confessed to perpetrating as well. In the case studied by Snow and
Sorenson (1990), two adolescent perpetrators admitted to charges of abuse. Both
of these sets of data require further analysis to determine which acts of ritual
abuse were confessed to by what number of perpetrators. Corroboration and
eyewitness accounts offered by children should also be given serious attention
when therapists and investigators can demonstrate that no contamination of the
children's disclosures has taken place. In the case studied by Jonker and
Jonker-Bakker (1991), children from different schools and different locales gave
accounts of perpetrators, abuse locations, and abusive acts that were mutually
corroborating.
Accounts of tunnels under the McMartin preschool given by children claiming to
have been ritually abused at the school were fully corroborated when the
existence and location of the tunnels were documented by a professional team of
archaeologists (Summit, 1994). If it were not enough to have a substantial
amount of data from well-controlled studies demonstrating the grave
psychological impact which ritual abuse has on children, to have eyewitness
accounts of significant numbers of adult and child survivors, to have
perpetrator confessions of ritual abuse crimes, and to have a whole variety of
types of corroboration of children's accounts of ritual abuse, the number of
ritual abuse cases in which criminal convictions have been obtained should
certainly put to rest any remaining questions about the existence of ritual
abuse.
It has become fashionable in the last several years for the media to minimize
and even dissemble about the data which so strongly support the existence of
ritual abuse. Amazingly, this has happened even in relation to ritual abuse
cases in which criminal convictions have been obtained. Parenting magazine
(Ruben, 1994), for example, asserted that "far more cases (of ritual abuse) end
in acquittal" than in conviction. In fact, 58% of the ritual abuse cases in the
Finkelhor (1988) study that went to trial resulted in convictions. In the Kelly
(1992b) study, convictions were obtained in 80% of the ritual and sexual abuse
cases combined; since there were no significant differences between the rates of
criminal conviction in these two groups, we can surmise that convictions were
obtained in approximately 80% of the ritual abuse cases Kelly studied. Finally,
and most significant given the thousands of cases studied, convictions were
obtained in 11% of all ritual child abuse cases studied by Bottoms et al. (1991;
1993). All three sets of data need to be further analyzed to determine in which
cases acts of ritual abuse other than child sexual abuse per se were entered
into the court record, and on which charges the perpetrators were convicted.
It is because ritual abuse cases are being seen in greater numbers in courtrooms
across the United States, and convictions are being obtained, that one by one
states are passing laws against crimes that occur virtually exclusively within
the context of ritual abuse. In September of this year, California became the
sixth state in the country to pass a law against specific acts of ritual abuse.
How can it be that, with significant numbers of criminal convictions of
perpetrators of ritual abuse and laws against ritual abuse on the books in a
growing number of states, with the clinical data amassed by thousands of
therapists in the United States and internationally, with physical evidence like
the tunnels found under the McMartin preschool corroborating children's reports
of abuse, that we cannot reach a consensus that ritual abuse constitutes a
serious problem for us as a nation, and demands to be addressed? Why is it that
media accounts of ritual abuse are often filled with so much obfuscation that
the public is left wondering whether ritual abuse might not in fact be the
"urban myth" or "mass hysteria" that certain skeptics have made a virtual career
out of saying that it is?
I propose that there are two major factors at work in this elaborate national
dance of deception and denial. The first is economic, and the second
sociocultural. The economic reasons for the denial and minimization of ritual
abuse are in one sense obvious. Survivors of ritual abuse, especially those far
enough along in their recoveries to have moved through the horrific memories of
group sexual assaults and bloody sacrifices, usually find that underneath those
traumatic ritual memories is a previously dissociated knowledge of having served
the cult/perpetrator group in ways that are unambiguously economic. For example,
women survivors often discover that they have served as prostitutes for the
cult, sometimes since childhood, and frequently for little or no financial
compensation. Within the frame of the cult-created Multiple personality disorder
(Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID, in the new diagnostic nomenclature)
from which most ritual abuse victims suffer, the core personality in such a
survivor usually knows nothing of her cult involvement or of her cult "job".
In other words, her core personality does not wonder why her work as a
prostitute never earns her any money, because she has no idea that she (or, more
accurately, one of her alters) is prostituting. The alter who works as a
prostitute does so because she has been programmed to function in this manner,
usually from early childhood, with extreme torture, and knows no other way of
life. (See Neswald, 1991 and Gould & Cozolino, 1992 for a more complete
description of how ritual abuse deliberately creates alters programmed to serve
particular cult functions). Survivors of ritual abuse who I have treated, or on
whose cases I have consulted, have also discovered that they have worked for the
cult/perpetrator group as bookkeepers and money launderers, as drug dealers and
couriers, as pornography subjects, as programmers/torturers of children, as
computer programmers, as investment specialists, as legal advisers, and even as
government agents, always outside the conscious awareness of their core
personalities. Rarely has a case come to my attention in which the survivor was
well paid for her contributions to the financial advancement of the
cult/perpetrator group which she (unconsciously) served.
Most often as the survivor accesses the memories that are buried under countless
layers of torture trauma, she has to contend not only with the rude awakening
that since birth she has lived a life of unspeakable pain and horror outside her
conscious awareness, but also that she has been literally enslaved to a
perpetrator group, since her activities have been dictated by others and enacted
outside her own free will, with little or no financial remuneration. In fact,
survivors who have generated sometimes millions of dollars for their perpetrator
groups, often are virtually penniless when they come to therapy, and are treated
for very low fees. When we understand the fact that ritual abuse is usually
perpetrated by groups which are deeply involved in organized crime, the
underlying incentives of these cult/perpetrator groups becomes clear. While
ritual abuse is certainly an integral part of some kinds of satanism, it is most
likely that the deeper reason for the prevalence of ritual abuse is that, simply
put, it reliably creates a group of people who function as unpaid slaves to the
perpetrator group.
Because their core personalities are amnestic to their cult activities, these
ritual abuse victims pose little threat to their controllers. Without extensive
therapeutic help, cult victims are usually unaware that they work for the
cult/perpetrator group and are therefore incapable of contemplating quitting
their cult jobs. Neither can they turn higher-ups in to the authorities for
their criminal activities, since they have little or no conscious access to
information about what activities they or their superiors are involved in.
Clearly, the groups who create these unpaid subjugates have considerable
economic incentive to do so. How much money do these groups actually generate,
and is it enough to impact the culture at the level of, say, media-created
public opinion? This, of course, is the cloudy part of the economic argument for
why ritual abuse is as widespread as it is, in families and in preschools, and
why we as a society have been so slow to recognize and respond to the
seriousness of this problem.
It is by definition difficult to know who belongs to groups whose membership is
highly secretive, especially when many of the membership themselves are amnestic
to their involvement. Therefore, it is difficult to assess the degree to which
members of these groups influence media accounts of ritual abuse, derail ritual
abuse investigations by law enforcement, are instrumental in getting children
complaining of intrafamilial ritual abuse sent back to an abusing parent, or
hire officials to make public statements on behalf of a national law enforcement
bureau to the effect that no substantial evidence of ritual abuse exists. No
doubt it will take serious, well-coordinated efforts on the part of local and
national law enforcement to gather the data that will be needed to know how
powerful and deeply entrenched these ritually abusing, criminally involved
groups actually are. In the meantime, we as a nation must examine how deep our
commitment to child protection really is. Mothers Against Sexual Abuse (MASA),
headquartered in Los Angeles, continues to find, despite vigorous efforts at
change, that judges across the country are more likely to award custody to
fathers than to mothers, even when the child has complained of abuse by the
father and those complaints have been substantiated by psychological or medical
findings.
I am personally aware of dozens of cases across the United States in which a
child has disclosed severe maltreatment in the form of ritual abuse in a
preschool, and the case has never been properly investigated, other parents with
children in attendance at the school have never been notified, the school has
not been closed down, and no charges have been filed.
Organizations like Believe The Children of Chicago are aware of cases like these
numbering well into the hundreds. In both intrafamilial and extrafamilial child
abuse cases like those described above, the more extreme and ritualized the
abuse, the less likely the child is to be granted protection and the
perpetrators are to be apprehended.
Clearly this has to do exclusively with cultural bias, not what is in the best
interests of the child, since, as the research makes amply clear, the negative
impact of ritual abuse on the child is extremely grave. In my opinion, we in the
United States deny the reality and seriousness of ritual abuse, especially as it
impacts on children, in part because it threatens our images of ourselves as
Americans. The thinking of the skeptic often goes something like this. Hideous
crimes involving torture and mine control "don't happen here." They happen in
third world countries, which do not have the freedoms "guaranteed" by our
democratic form of government. There would be no purpose served by having a
fascist type of group torture United States Citizens, as this kind of
terrorization is designed to overthrow an existing government, and ours by its
very design cannot be overthrown. And certainly there would be no purpose served
in torturing children. Since they don't vote and don't form coalitions of any
kind, extremist groups would have no interest in coercing them into
socio-political compliance.
What this argument misses is the fact that, when mind control is put into place
with very young children, through the torturous programming that is the essence
of ritual abuse, then reinforced and further developed as the child victims get
older, by the time those children reach adolescence and adulthood they have
become valuable resources for the perpetrator group to exploit. That
exploitation may or may not be political, but it is certainly economic. To fully
grasp this at a cultural level requires the general public to come to grips with
a level of understanding of human nature still barely comprehended within the
mental health community; that is, that the normative response to severe trauma,
especially in early childhood, is dissociation and amnesia for the traumatic
events, and that this response can be manipulated by sociopaths and programmed
cult members to create individuals amnestic to both their traumatic histories
and their behaviors in the world of abuse and criminality into which their alter
personalities have been indoctrinated.
Until law enforcement personnel, public policy makers, the judiciary, the child
protection system and others who are involved with the protection of children
and the betterment of society come to understand this new paradigm, ritual abuse
is likely to continue to be minimized in both its scope, its impact, and the
insidious way it has of multiplying when left unchecked. The paradigm shift
which will need to take place in order to provide truly effective treatment for
ritual abuse victims, and in order to successfully curb this extreme form of
brutality in our culture is certain to be a difficult one to achieve. (See Gould
& Graham-Costain (1994a; 1994b) for an account of treatment guidelines for
ritually abused children). It calls into question not only the belief most
Americans have that systematic brutality on a large scale does not and cannot
exist in this country, but also our belief that we operate from our free will,
and that that freedom of thought and action is inviolable. To become fully aware
of just how vulnerable to utter violation and manipulation that free will really
is when sociopaths and programmed cult victim members are allowed access to
children demands that we put far greater efforts into safeguarding our
children's welfare than we ever dreamed would be necessary. The price tag
emotionally and financially for putting that awareness into practice will be
very high indeed. But the price of ignoring or minimizing the impact of ritual
abuse on our children and on our society will surely prove intolerable.
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