R. Kelly posts bail - 10 Felony Counts, Cardinal Pell - Pope's top financial adviser convicted of child sex abuse, The Survivorship Ritual Abuse and Mind Control 2019 Conference

 

- R. Kelly leaves Chicago jail after posting 100K bail for criminal sex charges
- 'Surviving R. Kelly' Executive Producer Reacts to R. Kelly Charges and Singer Being Unable to Make Bail
- Cardinal George Pell, Pope Francis' top financial adviser, convicted of child sex abuse
- Anglican Church priest arrested for series of sex crimes committed during time with Fresno church
- The Survivorship Ritual Abuse and Mind Control 2019 Conference

 

R. Kelly leaves Chicago jail after posting 100K bail for criminal sex charges
Jayme Deerwester, USA TODAY Feb. 25, 2019

R. Kelly has been freed from jail in Chicago after posting bail following multiple charges of criminal sexual abuse, the Cook County Sheriff's Office confirms to USA TODAY.

 

Earlier Monday, Cook County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Sophia Ansari told USA TODAY that the R&B singer, who spent the weekend in jail, posted $100,000, or 10 percent of the $1 million bond set Saturday.

The terms of Kelly's release prohibit him from having any contact with females under the age of 18.

Earlier in the day, Kelly pleaded not guilty to 10 felony counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse. He appeared in an orange jumpsuit during his arraignment on four separate indictments.

 

The indictments describe the case of four women – three of whom were underage at the time of the alleged sexual abuse. Kelly, who was acquitted of child pornography charges in 2008, has denied wrongdoing....
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2019/02/25/r-kelly-pleads-not-guilty-criminal-sex-abuse-case/2978510002/

 

'Surviving R. Kelly' Executive Producer Reacts to R. Kelly Charges and Singer Being Unable to Make Bail
2/25/2019 by Jackie Strause

The ecosystem that enabled R. Kelly's alleged toxic behavior, including sexual abuse claims dating back decades, partly explains why the Grammy-nominated R&B singer can't make bail, Surviving R. Kelly executive producer Dream Hampton said Monday.

 

"He has gone broke holding women in his studio," Hampton said during a CBS This Morning interview when reacting to the charges Kelly now faces. "This lifestyle that he has, moving women — girls — state-to-state where their parents can't find them, he's gone broke doing this."

 

Kelly was arrested Friday on 10 counts of aggravated sexual abuse involving four females, three of whom were minors. He remains jailed after a judge on Saturday set his bond at $1 million. Kelly's attorney, Steve Greenberg, said meeting Kelly's $100,000 bail payment while he awaits trial is complicated, blaming mismanagement and bad contracts for why the singer isn't wealthy despite decades of success. According to CNN, Kelly also owed more than $169,000 in unpaid child support and $166,000 in unpaid rent on his Chicago recording studio, which he has since vacated.

 

On Monday afternoon, Kelly pleaded not guilty on the sex abuse charges and remained jailed as of the time of this story.

 

Lifetime's hit docuseries Surviving R. Kelly has played a key role in Kelly's indictment. After its debut in January, Chicago prosecutors began seeking information and sent a call out for alleged Kelly victims to come forward. The explosive claims in the six-part doc included sexual abuse allegations from multiple women, several who were underage at the time of the alleged assaults, who were interviewed on-camera....

Hampton, a filmmaker and activist, and her team spoke to many women for Surviving R. Kelly to paint the doc's horrifying, detailed picture of how Kelly's alleged abuse spanned 30 years. Many women were featured in the doc, and Hampton says she and her team spoke to many more who would corroborate claims, but who wouldn't participate on camera for fear of being harassed. Hampton has said she believes Kelly's behavior went on for so long because many of his victims were black women and society has a "knee-jerk reaction to protect black men" at the expense of black women....

 

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/surviving-r-kelly-executive-producer-reacts-r-kelly-charges-1190440

 

Cardinal George Pell, Pope Francis' top financial adviser, convicted of child sex abuse

Rod McGuirk, Associated Press Feb. 25, 2019

MELBOURNE, Australia – The most senior Catholic cleric ever charged with child sex abuse has been convicted of molesting two choirboys moments after celebrating Mass, dealing a new blow to the Catholic hierarchy’s credibility after a year of global revelations of abuse and cover-up.

 

Cardinal George Pell, Pope Francis’ top financial adviser and the Vatican’s economy minister, bowed his head but then regained his composure as the 12-member jury delivered unanimous verdicts in the Victoria state County Court on Dec. 11 after more than two days of deliberation.

 

The court had until Tuesday forbidden publication of any details about the trial.

The convictions were confirmed the same week that Francis concluded his extraordinary summit of Catholic leaders summoned to Rome for a tutorial on preventing clergy sexual abuse and protecting children from predator priests.

 

The jury convicted Pell of abusing two 13-year-old boys whom he had caught swigging sacramental wine in a rear room of Melbourne’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral in late 1996, as hundreds of worshippers were streaming out of Sunday services.

 

Pell, now 77 but 55 at the time, had just been named the most senior Catholic in Australia’s second-largest city, Melbourne.

The jury also found Pell guilty of indecently assaulting one of the boys in a corridor more than a month later.

He faces a potential maximum 50-year prison term after a sentencing hearing that begins on Wednesday. He has foreshadowed an appeal.

Pell had maintained his innocence throughout....

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/02/25/cardinal-george-pell-convicted-child-sex-abuse/2986107002/

 

Anglican Church priest arrested for series of sex crimes committed during time with Fresno church

By Corin Hoggard and Jason Oliveira
2/15/19 FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) --

Fresno Police have arrested an Anglican Church priest for a series of sex crimes during his more than a decade with the local church.

 

Jesus Antonio Castaneda Serna was arrested early Sunday at the Central Fresno church he started -- Holy Spirit.

 

Twenty-two parishioners have come forward to say they'd been victimized by the Anglican Priest but according to police many of the victims are undocumented and afraid to report the crimes to law enforcement.

The arrest comes after a 13-month investigation. Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyers believes the sex crimes date back years and could have hundreds of victims....

 

Two victims did speak to detectives and say Serna would invite them to his Shaw Avenue office where he would perform what he called a "healing ritual" that involved a massage table, oils and would then turn into sexual contact.

The two male adult victims said Serna told them the repeated rituals would remove a curse or earn them forgiveness for their sins....

https://abc30.com/fresno-police-arrest-anglican-church-priest-for-series-of-sex-crimes/5156232/

 

The Survivorship Ritual Abuse and Mind Control 2019 Conference

When:
Regular Conference - Saturday and Sunday May 4 - 5, 2019
Clinician’s Conference - Friday May 3, 2019

Where:
Courtyard Marriott Long Beach Airport
Long Beach, California

 

Survivorship is one of the oldest and most respected organizations supporting survivors of extreme child abuse, including sadistic sexual abuse, ritualistic abuse, mind control, and torture. Survivorship provides resources, healing, and Survivorship community for survivors; training and education for professionals who may serve survivors; and support for survivors’ partners and other allies. The organization functions as a support for survivors who may be isolated emotionally or geographically.

 

Survivorship, an organization for survivors of ritual abuse, mind control and torture, will be having a conference from May 3 - 5, 2019 at the Courtyard Marriott in Long Beach, California. The purpose of the conference is to help survivors of ritual abuse and their allies. The conference is for survivors, co-survivors, supporters and helping professionals.

 

Conference speakers will include Dr. Alison Miller, Dr. Randy Noblitt, Joseph Lumbasi and Neil Brick.

 

https://www.webwire.com/ViewPressRel.asp?aId=235304

https://survivorship.org/ritual-abuse-and-mind-control-2019-conference/

 

Malignant trauma and the invisibility of ritual abuse, Origins of Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist Terms, Neighbors of polygamist cult issue - FLDS

 -  Malignant trauma and the invisibility of ritual abuse

-   Origins of Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist Terms and Symbols - A Glossary

-  Neighbors of polygamist cult issue warning to Minnesota - FLDS

  

 

Malignant trauma and the invisibility of ritual abuse

Michael Salter

Salter, M. (2019) Malignant trauma and the invisibility of ritual abuse,
Attachment: New Directions in Psychotherapy and Relational Psychoanalysis, 13(1), forthcoming.

 

Introduction
This paper draws on psychoanalytic understandings of malignant trauma to explain the invisibility of ritual abuse. Ritual abuse refers to the misuse of rituals in the organized sexual abuse of children (Salter, 2012). Ritual abuse is typically practiced in extended family networks and criminal groups that participate in the production and circulation of child exploitation material (CEM).

 

Despite claims that ritual abuse is a hoax or a product of false memories, cases of ritual abuse have been substantiated in child sexual assault prosecutions since the 1980s, including major cases in Canada (Steed, 1995), Belgium and England (Kelly, 1998), the United States (Ellzey, 2007) and Wales (Morris, 2011). Invisibility is a consistent theme in the lives of victims and survivors of ritual abuse. While there is now a considerable literature on the therapeutic treatment of ritually abused children and adults (e.g. Badouk Epstein, Schwartz, & Wingfield Schwartz, 2011; Miller, 2012; Schwartz, 2013), ritual abuse is largely unrecognized outside of the trauma and dissociation field as a distinct form of exploitation. International efforts to develop a coordinated response to the ritual abuse of children in the 1990s in countries such as Australia, the UK and USA were halted or reversed in the face of a media-driven backlash (Salter, 2017).

 

The invisibility of ritual abuse remains as a doubled trauma for survivors, who endure the effects of past or current abuse amidst the denial of that abuse (Matthew & Barron, 2015), and a vicarious trauma risk for therapists, who treat a profoundly vulnerable and needy client group against a backdrop of professional uncertainty and skepticism (Scott, 1998). This paper uses qualitative data from interviews with ritual abuse survivors and mental health practitioners to argue that the trauma of ritual abuse and its invisibility are co-constitutive. Cultural and familial environments shaped by an infantile dread of human vulnerability are the primary conditions of possibility for ritual abuse, as this dread prompts enactments of traumatized cruelty within contexts with scant capacity to acknowledge or address this form of violence. The mechanisms for the reproduction of ritual abuse are thus submerged within psychosocial structures of normalization, exploitation and dissociation.

 

The article begins with an explanation of malignant trauma and its applicability to ritual abuse, before examining the social and psychological processes within which ritual abuse victimization is rendered undetectable. The article discusses the enforced disappearance of ritual abuse from public policy and how the provision of care to ritual abuse survivors has become contingent on its denial and erasure. The article closes by reflecting on the role of therapists and others in interrupting the malignancy of ritual abuse, and the possibilities of crafting cultural resources and moral frameworks to transform the dread at the core of ritual abuse....

 

Conclusion
Theories of malignant trauma offers solutions to the gordian knot of ritual abuse, and the specific dilemmas and paradoxes that it poses: How could parents commit such atrocities on their own children? Why would paedophile rings engage in bizarre ritualistic behavior? And how could networks of child torture flourish amidst the surveillance of the contemporary state? This article illuminates the psychosocial structures within which ritual abuse is concealed and reproduced, in which the intergenerational transmission of ritual abuse is secured through projective cruelty in the embodied resolution of autistic-contiguous anxiety. While the ritual and religious dimensions of ritual abuse channels the vitality of the autistic-contiguous mode into atrocity, it remains concealed within the collective dread of perpetrators, victims and bystanders.

 

This study of ritual abuse provides further evidence for the critical importance of addressing the mechanisms and contexts within which familial sexual violence is intergenerationally transmitted. Gentile (2017) observed the focus of psychoanalytic scholarship on trans-generational trauma on the Holocaust and other forms of mass genocide. Despite the existence of “only a handful of articles that describe sexual violence through the lens of trans-generational trauma”, she notes that the majority of cases she observes in clinical work involve “generations of domestic violence, sexual violence and profound neglect” (p 170). With between 10% and one third of therapists reporting contact with survivors of organised and ritual abuse (Salter & Richters, 2012), identifying and treating familial cultures of sexual violence is vital to the disruption of malignant trauma.

This article argues that ritual abuse survivors are victims of a persistent failure of cultural memory, in which the evacuative responses of perpetrators to dread are reproduced by bystanders and larger systems and processes. The invisibility of ritual abuse is guaranteed by social structures and systems that deny the possibility of the ritualised violation of children, and that refuse to attribute reparative meaning to the struggles of survivors to speak and be heard. In such a context, the malevolent expulsion of dread is multiply determined at the intra-psychic, interpersonal and collective level, of which the dissociation and reenactment of ritual abuse is the inevitable result. The framework of malignant trauma points towards the intersection of forces that are at work in the disappearance and invisibility of evils such as ritual abuse; forces that are grounded in human subjectivity and relationality, and thus present in us all. Indeed, Alford (2016) argues that trauma is irreducibly social and psychological, in which the risks, impacts and understandings of violence and loss are mediated by cultural and political processes.

 

The solution is to craft symbolic resources at the individual and collective level that attribute significance to tragedy, loss and vulnerability as inevitable features of human existence, rather than as embarrassing and avoidable contingencies. The experience of ritual abuse survivors suggests that conceptualisations of abuse and trauma capable of withstanding evacuative impulses may also prompt renewed ethical commitments to the disruption of evil. At the individual and social level, it would seem that the symbolization of dread is intimately involved with moral growth and the containment of malignant trauma.
https://www.academia.edu/38306864/Malignant_trauma_and_the_invisibility_of_ritual_abuse

Origins of Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist Terms and Symbols - A Glossary
The eruption of neo-Nazism and White Supremacy on display in Charlottesville in August 2017 and at other rallies across the country has exposed the public to symbols, terms, and ideology drawn directly from Nazi Germany and Holocaust-era fascist movements. Some of those who carried torches and swastika flags in Charlottesville weren’t afraid to openly call themselves Nazis.

 

The leaders of today’s Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist organizations are not Adolf Hitler, and America is not Germany, but, in order to understand their agenda, it is vital to understand the history of these code words, symbols, and ideologies. See more resources for confronting hate below....

 

Nazi Racial Ideology

Hitler was obsessed with race long before becoming Chancellor of Germany. His speeches and writings spread his belief that the world was engaged in an endless racial struggle. White Nordic people topped the racial hierarchy; Slavs, Blacks, and Arabs were lower, and Jews, who were believed to be an existential threat to the “Aryan Master race,” were at the very bottom. When the Nazis came to power, these beliefs became government ideology and were spread publicly in posters, radio, movies, classrooms and newspapers. They also served as a basis for a campaign to reorder German society, first through the exclusion of Jews from public life, then the murder of disabled Germans as well as Slavs and, ultimately, the effort to exterminate European Jewry....
https://www.ushmm.org/confront-antisemitism/origins-of-neo-nazi-and-white-supremacist-terms-and-symbols 

Neighbors of polygamist cult issue warning to Minnesota
A recent land purchase by FLDS church leader sparks fear that religious compound could be planned for northern Minnesota.

Author: AJ Lagoe, Steve Eckert February 7, 2019 GRAND MARAIS, Minn....

 

Child sex abuse

The FLDS split with Mormonism in 1890 when the mainstream church renounced polygamy. For more than a hundred years it was centralized around the remote community made up of the twin cities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona and had an estimated 10,000 members....

 

The group was made infamous in the mid-2000s when their self-proclaimed prophet Warren Jeffs landed on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted List when he fled after being indicted for child sex abuse.

 

Jeffs was sentenced in 2011 to life in prison plus 20 years after being convicted of sexual assault involving two girls, ages 12 and 15, he took as wives. He is said to still be leading the group from behind bars.

FBI records made public in criminal cases against Jeffs show he instructed his followers to set up what they call “houses of hiding” and “lands of refuge” across the country.

 

One of those “lands of refuge” is the South Dakota compound next door to the Von Rumps.

Karl says the population of the compound is hard to pin down. “At one time I was sure there was over 300,” he told KARE 11. But he believes recently the numbers have dwindled....

 

The Brother

Seth Steed Jeffs is also no stranger to legal troubles.

He was convicted in 2006 of harboring or concealing his brother Warren who was at the time on the run from the child sex abuse charges.

In 2016, Seth Jeffs also pleaded guilty to food-stamp fraud as part of a federal investigation into the practice of collecting benefits in the name of children but diverting them to the church. He was sentenced to probation.

After that, he dropped off the radar.

 

Utah attorney Alan Mortensen has been searching the country for Seth Jeffs since 2017, trying to serve him with a lawsuit alleging that he was involved in the ritualistic rape of a young girl.

“We’ve been looking for him for over a year now,” the lawyer told KARE 11. “We could never locate him.”

Mortensen has filed a civil lawsuit in Utah accusing Seth Jeffs and other FLDS leaders of participating in “religious sexual rituals with underage girls” involving Seth’s brother Warren.

 

Mortensen’s client is a young woman identified in court papers as “R. H.” She claims that as part of a FLDS ritual she was sexually abused “on a regular basis, between five and six times a week, from the age of 8 years-old” until she turned 12. When she turned 14, she says she was forced to become a “scribe” documenting the abuse of other young girls in the sect.

 

The lawsuit claims that in his role as a “Priesthood Leader” Seth Jeffs witnessed the abuse by his brother and  helped arrange the rituals.  “He allowed it to happen and he witnessed it happening over and over and over to a young girl,” Mortensen told KARE 11....
https://www.kare11.com/article/news/investigations/neighbors-of-polygamist-cult-issue-warning-to-minnesota/89-d5383c46-4e95-41e9-be42-6e6aa03e6631

 

 

Justice Department opens probe into Jeffrey Epstein plea deal, How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime

Justice Department opens probe into Jeffrey Epstein plea deal
By Julie K. Brown February 06, 2019

The Department of Justice has opened an investigation into Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta’s role in negotiating a controversial plea deal with a wealthy New York investor accused of molesting more than 100 underage girls in Palm Beach.

 

The probe is in response to a request by Sen. Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican and member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who was critical of the case following a series of stories in the Miami Herald. The Herald articles detailed how Acosta, then the U.S. attorney for Southern Florida, and other DOJ attorneys worked hand-in-hand with defense lawyers to cut a lenient plea deal with multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein in 2008.

 

The Herald’s three-part series, Perversion of Justice, was cited by Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd in his letter to Sasse. DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility will head the investigation, he said.

 

“OPR has now opened an investigation into allegations that department attorneys may have committed professional misconduct in the manner in which the Epstein criminal matter was resolved,’’ wrote Boyd in the letter dated Wednesday.

 

“Jeffrey Epstein is a child rapist and there’s not a single mom or dad in America who shouldn’t be horrified by the fact that he received a pathetically soft sentence,’’ Sasse said on Wednesday. “The victims of Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring deserve this investigation — and so do the American people and the members of law enforcement who work to put these kinds of monsters behind bars.’’

 

Former Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter — who pressured Acosta and former Palm Beach state prosecutor Barry Krischer to more aggressively prosecute Epstein — said he would like to see Epstein’s victims finally receive some form of justice.

 

“I hope that the Department of Justice investigation answers the questions of why this case was handled by the U.S. attorney’s office in the way that it was, and may it somehow result in justice and an apology by the government for the victims and their families,’’ Reiter said.

The case has raised fundamental questions about whether well-connected, wealthy people wield influence over prosecutors and others in the justice system. Epstein had a wide circle of powerful friends, including Bill Clinton, President Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, lawyer Alan Dershowitz and a former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak....

 

Epstein, 66, could have faced a possible life sentence for sex trafficking, but instead was secretly granted federal immunity, along with others who were part of the conspiracy, some of whom were named, others not.

 

Epstein was suspected by the FBI of running an international sex trafficking operation involving minors, and federal prosecutors had drafted a 53-page indictment that was shelved after Acosta signed off on a non-prosecution agreement in September 2007.

 

For months after the deal was executed, federal prosecutors kept Epstein’s victims in the dark, and the FBI led some of them to believe the investigation was ongoing. Most of the girls, ages 13 to 16 at the time, found out about the plea bargain only after learning about it on television when Epstein was sentenced in June 2008.

Acosta agreed to seal the agreement and keep it from Epstein’s victims so that the girls couldn’t try to derail it before he was sentenced, the Herald found.

Epstein’s agreement called for him to serve 18 months in the Palm Beach County jail and to register as a sex offender. But even in jail, Epstein received liberal work release privileges that required him to spend little time in a cell. Six days a week, he was picked up at the jail by his private driver and driven to an office in downtown West Palm Beach, where he spent up to 12 hours a day greeting friends, lawyers and several young women who were named by federal prosecutors as participants in his sex trafficking scheme....

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/article225624945.html

 

How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime
BY Julie K. Brown Nov. 28, 2018

....His client, Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, 54, was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls — with the help of young female recruiters — to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as three times a day, the Town of Palm Beach police found.

 

The eccentric hedge fund manager, whose friends included former President Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Prince Andrew, was also suspected of trafficking minor girls, often from overseas, for sex parties at his other homes in Manhattan, New Mexico and the Caribbean, FBI and court records show.

Facing a 53-page federal indictment, Epstein could have ended up in federal prison for the rest of his life.

 

But on the morning of the breakfast meeting, a deal was struck — an extraordinary plea agreement that would conceal the full extent of Epstein’s crimes and the number of people involved.

 

Not only would Epstein serve just 13 months in the county jail, but the deal — called a non-prosecution agreement — essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes, according to a Miami Herald examination of thousands of emails, court documents and FBI records.

 

The pact required Epstein to plead guilty to two prostitution charges in state court. Epstein and four of his accomplices named in the agreement received immunity from all federal criminal charges. But even more unusual, the deal included wording that granted immunity to “any potential co-conspirators’’ who were also involved in Epstein’s crimes. These accomplices or participants were not identified in the agreement, leaving it open to interpretation whether it possibly referred to other influential people who were having sex with underage girls at Epstein’s various homes or on his plane.

 

As part of the arrangement, Acosta agreed, despite a federal law to the contrary, that the deal would be kept from the victims. As a result, the non-prosecution agreement was sealed until after it was approved by the judge, thereby averting any chance that the girls — or anyone else — might show up in court and try to derail it....
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html

 

 

 

The Survivorship Ritual Abuse and Mind Control 2019 Conference

The Survivorship Ritual Abuse and Mind Control 2019 Conference

When:
Regular Conference - Saturday and Sunday May 4 - 5, 2019
Clinician’s Conference - Friday May 3, 2019

Where:
Courtyard Marriott Long Beach Airport
Long Beach, California

 
Survivorship, an organization for survivors of ritual abuse, mind control and torture, will be having a conference from May 3 - 5, 2019 at the Courtyard Marriott in Long Beach, California. The purpose of the conference is to help survivors of ritual abuse and their allies. The conference is for survivors, co-survivors, supporters and helping professionals. 

At their clinician’s conference on Friday May 3, 2019, Dr. Alison Miller will present on the topic of Deception by Organized Abuser Groups: Helping Yourself and Your Clients Think Through the Issues. She will discuss how abusers’ power over victims depends on their victims believing their lies, and that power can be diminished when victims see through the lies. She will discuss how it is important for therapists to use critical thinking to discern the deceptions, and to help their clients do the same.

Alison Miller, Ph.D. is a retired clinical psychologist who practised in Victoria, B.C., Canada and worked with survivors of organized abuse, including ritual abuse and mind control from 1990 to 2017. She is the author of Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control (for therapists), Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse (for survivors), and co-author with survivor Wendy Hoffman of From the Trenches: A Victim and Therapist Talk about Mind Control and Ritual Abuse.  

Dr. Randall Noblitt will also present at the clinician’s conference. His topic is The Use of Music and other Auditory Stimuli in Psychological Therapy with Extreme Abuse Survivors. Extreme abuse (EA) survivors often listen to music for enjoyment, relaxation, and emotion regulation. Some music and other auditory stimuli also have the capacity to trigger a variety of responses. Although clinicians who work with survivors often hear about, or observe these phenomena, there is little discussion of them in the clinical literature. This presentation will discuss some of the uses for music and other sounds in therapy with survivors.

Randy Noblitt, PhD, is a clinical psychologist (licensed in Texas) and professor of clinical psychology at the California School of Professional Psychology at Alliant International University, Los Angeles. In the course of his practice, Randy has treated more than 300 individuals who met the criteria for dissociative identity disorder. He is the principle author of Cult and Ritual Abuse: Its History, Anthropology and Recent Discovery in Contemporary America (Praeger, 1995. 2000), and its third edition, Cult and Ritual Abuse: Narratives, Evidence and Healing Approaches (Praeger, 2014). He is also co-editor and contributing author of the book, Ritual Abuse in the 21st Century: Psychological, Forensic, Social and Political Considerations (Robert Reed, 2008).

Survivorship will have several speakers at the regular weekend conference on Saturday and Sunday May 4 - 5, 2019. 

Dr. Alison Miller will present on Deception by Organized Abuser Groups: Helping Your Front People and Your Insiders Recognize the Lies and Tricks Which Keep You Enslaved. If you are a survivor of abuse by a mind-controlling abuser group, you have parts who have been trained to obey abusers because they believe lies your abusers told you. If you learn to recognize when your emotions and behavior are influenced by these deceptions, and to discover the ways in which you were deceived, you can increase your freedom from the abuser group.

Dr. Randall Noblitt will present on Talking About Triggers Without Being Triggering. This presentation is an interactive discussion about triggering phenomena, with the intent of avoiding causing triggered responses in one another. Being able to discuss triggers without being triggering (or triggered) is one way that survivors can develop their own sense of empowerment.

Joseph Lumbasi will present on Barriers encountered by RA Survivors when accessing Support in Offline Spaces (Services). As a support organisation for RA survivors in the UK, Izzy’s Promise has been continuously carrying out research with its service users to identify barriers encountered and how best to overcome such barriers. Since 2002 when Izzy’s Promise was set up, they have commissioned a variety of research projects with abuse support organisations and ritual abuse (RA) survivors to identify how best to improve support services. His intention is to analyse results from research endeavours to present to delegates at the conference and publish the findings into a journal article.

Joseph Lumbasi is a dual citizen of Kenya and Britain, educated up to postgraduate level. A graduate of Sociology, Geography, Health Research, Child and Adult Protection and currently a PhD student at the University of Dundee School of Education and Social Work. He has worked in different sectors of the economy, as a media researcher specialising on issues surrounding cultural abuse and violation of human rights e.g. female genital mutilation, trafficking of children and women locally and internationally by use of ritual oaths for purposes of prostitution and other inhuman issues. Joseph is presently the Manager of Izzy’s Promise and a PhD Student at the University of Dundee. He co-authored a journal article (Lumbasi, J., & Barron, I. (2016). Male Survivor Perceptions of Seeking Support: Hermeneutic Analysis of a Cluster Case Study. International Journal of Social Work, 3(1), 91.

Neil Brick will present on A Survivor’s View of Recovery from Ritual Abuse. Recovery from ritual abuse can take many years. Every individual has different experiences that lead them through the recovery path. Neil Brick will discuss his long journey healing from severe abuse. This will include ways he has learned more about himself, ways he has learned to develop healthier interactions with others and ways he has helped others along the recovery path.

Neil Brick is a survivor of ritual abuse and mind control. His work continues to educate the public about child abuse, trauma and ritual abuse crimes. His child abuse and ritual abuse newsletter S.M.A.R.T. https://ritualabuse.us has been published for over 23 years. http://neilbrick.com