Rebuttal to the Report from the SMART 2009 conference

copied with permission from
http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/rebuttal-to-the-report-from-the-smart-2009-conference/

Rebuttal to an attack on our recent conference in August 2009.

Our ritual abuse conference went really well this year. Many excellent researchers from several countries presented data backing the existence of ritual abuse crimes in a variety of settings.

Unfortunately a journalist attended our conference without permission. This person on a website for radiofreesatan, where he is a DJ and is described as “an unscrupulous journalist.” This journalist paid to enter the conference with a check. He stopped payment on the check after the conference.

Our conference brochure, which all that register are required to read, states “Members of secret organizations, acting out perpetrators, and/or members of unsympathetic organizations are excluded from the conference. This is for the protection and safety of those in attendance.”

Also, it is clearly announced at the beginning of the conference, “Please note that media people are not allowed in the conference at any time without the written permission of SMART.”

Less than one week after the conference, he placed a vicious article on a major Internet newspaper personally attacking some of the conference attendees, the field of DID and memory. Attacks included disparaging remarks about one’s appearance and voice as well as claiming child abuse survivor accounts at the conference were fictional. Fortunately, with the hard work of many people, this article was removed from a major Internet newspaper after four days.

The author repeats the rebutted attacks on the field of DID and ritual abuse made over twenty years ago. The scientific research on DID shows it to be a solid and robust phenomenon that had been misdiagnosed as schizophrenia for over half a century. The research he cites “offer(s) no evidence that either stable alter personalities or the range of clinical features typically associated with MPD can be created in the laboratory.” Accurate information on DID and rebuttals to skeptics can be found at http://ritualabuse.us/research/did/

He also attacks the phenomenon of recovered memory. Yet recovered memory has been found to be a proven and verifiable phenomenon in many cases with fairly high accuracy rates. For more information on this, see http://childabusewiki.org/index.php?title=Recovered_Memories

He repeats the same misstatements made about “panic” made twenty years ago. Yet, ritual abuse crimes and their incident rates have been shown to be very real. For more information on this, see http://childabusewiki.org/index.php?title=Ritual_Abuse and http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/

This author’s first article concludes with several misstatements about what he claims was stated at the conference about the FMSF. However, this was not stated. This is another misstatement made by the author.
In essence, his article contained insults, personal attacks, misstatements, misrepresented and slanted data.


The following are some comments posted on the website below the article attacking our conference before the article was permanently removed from the Internet. Some of these comments were removed from the page by the author, yet comments calling the conference coordinator a “pedophile” more than once were allowed to stay up.

Click here http://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/rebuttal-to-the-report-from-the-smart-2009-conference/ for the rest of the article.