Shards of glass and dark rituals (English transcript)
Argos investigates satanic ritual abuse
May be very triggering for survivors. Describes rituals and violence in detail.
Sanne Terlingen, Huub Jaspers, Sophie Blok
Over the last year, Argos collected the experiences and stories of over two hundred victims of organized sexual abuse. A hundred and forty victims told us about ritual abuse. In the radio documentary below, Argos highlights their stories and discovers unsettling similarities.
This documentary aired on Dutch national radio (NPO Radio 1) on June 27, 2020. Original title: Glasscherven en duistere rituelen.
....NARRATOR [ST]
Our questionnaire generated all kinds of stories. Twins Beatrix and Stefanie reached out, because they wanted to find the child pornography recordings that featured them. We received stories of sexual abuse at sports clubs and boarding schools, on grooming and cults. But reports of a very different nature quickly started to surface. Stories about unimaginable torture practices and rituals.
....NARRATOR [ST]
When these types of responses first started pouring in, we had no idea what to do with them. We found out there is an official definition: Ritual Abuse. In the nineties, health care workers sounded the alarm bells, and a lot of media attention ensued.
....NARRATOR [ST]
Marinke wrote down that she would be taken away in a car. From a very young age. She was often under the influence of drugs, so that she wouldn’t know where she was brought to. There were men and women who would at times wear black and purple robes. Family members, teachers, lawyers, and ‘even people working within the Dutch government, although no one will probably believe that’, she wrote. She also writes that obedience was enforced in many different ways.
....We analysed the 140 questionnaires in which ritual characteristics were mentioned. That’s how we discovered even more wrong assumptions. For example, there were no signs of hypnosis. And over forty people mention abuse that took place within the past ten years. That group includes people who shared stories of a network they’re still a part of to this day.
NARRATOR [HJ]
Those aren’t exactly ‘recovered memories’ from a long-forgotten past.
The assumption that all victims file police reports is also incorrect. Only a handful of respondents claims to have done so. And that would usually be against one or two persons, not an entire network.
NARRATOR [ST]
One assumption is correct: over three quarters of the respondents have been diagnosed with DID - dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder. This includes Marinke.
....NARRATOR [ST]
Christel Kraaij is a clinical psychologist working for GGZ Centraal (Dutch mental health care facilities). She is one of the experts that helped us out with drawing up our questionnaire. She has been treating clients with DID for over ten years. Around fifteen of them speak of Ritual Abuse.
Christel Kraaij:
I treat people that have gotten out of the network completely, I treat people that are still being pressured by the network but can stay safe. So people who receive emails and texts but no longer respond to them. And I do also treat people who are still actively approached by the network and who are abused and mistreated.
NARRATOR [ST]
The horrific acts they speak of show distinctive similarities:
Christel Kraaij:
The holidays are of course a similarity, whether it be Easter or Pentecost or Christmas or Ascension Day, but also all kinds of days that don’t stem from Christianity but are things like a Full Moon, the change of seasons. That those are the days on which the most horrific things take place.
....NARRATOR [ST]
And there’s something else victims of Ritual Abuse have in common:
Christel Kraaij:
It’s what I call ‘mind control’. People who have experienced Ritual Abuse show a lot more signs of…brainwashing you could say.
They would sometimes refer to them as ‘programs’, that can switch on and display very typical behaviour that isn’t really visible in people who have DID but did not suffer Ritual Abuse. What they say about that is that there is a type of training, more like conditioning, that when someone says A, they have to do B.
....NARRATOR [ST]
As has probably become clear by now, we decided to take up the gauntlet. We start by looking for the common denominator in these stories. Almost every single one of the 140 people who filled out our questionnaire state that they were introduced to the network by a family member, usually their father or mother. All of them were drugged. Almost every one of them was forced into prostitution. Child pornography was produced, as well as torture porn.
NARRATOR [HJ]
We’re talking dozens of overlapping testimonies. Over a hundred people mention abuse on specific holidays. Two thirds mention men and women in robes - black, purple, red or white.
....But we find a detail that we can investigate further: several women state that the perpetrators insert glass into their vaginas. The thought behind it is that they would have to return to the network in order to get it removed. But some women did end up getting their injuries treated in hospital.
NARRATOR [HJ]
We phone gynaecologists and care workers. These conversations are confidential. We have to promise that we won’t name any names. Four gynaecologists confirm that they have encountered such things, where they had to remove glass from a vagina. One gynaecologist states that she removed glass from the bodies of two women. These are severely traumatised victims of sexual abuse. With one of them the gynaecologist
questioned whether she might have inserted the glass herself. But with the other one, a young girl, she was convinced that someone else did it to her. But still, that does not prove there’s a network behind these crimes.
....Mother-in-law:
I remember very clearly, it was a quarter to nine and she was playing the piano and had her phone up on the piano and then, all of a sudden an image appeared on her phone, a picture of a V with flames going through it, and at that point she just changed at once. Marinke was gone and in her place a sort of robotic alter appeared, saying: I must leave, I must leave. And a while later a message followed, something like ‘it’s starting to take very long now’. And yes, it just went on for a while actually. Like, ‘you have to come now, or else: rest in peace’, these kinds of threats.
Sanne: Can you fake an alter?
Mother-in-law: I’d imagine that if you’re an amazing actor you could fake it, yes. But to continue to do that, year in, year out, and to fake awful recollections and horrible nightmares in the middle of the night, that seems a bit farfetched. And to continue doing that for five years.
NARRATOR [ST]
It’s far from the only incident they’ve been through with Marinke. Often, when Marinke received such a phone call, or when it was a special holiday, she’d disappear.
....NARRATOR [ST]
That changes when Marinke even receives a letter while staying at the closed ward in Emergis, a mental health facility.
Mother-in-law:
Every single possession she had at Emergis, I had personally brought her. She was there, in a little room, without access to computers, printers or anything. She just couldn’t have done this herself.
NARRATOR [ST]
That night, they receive a phone call from the facility: they can’t find Marinke.
Mother-in-law:
It’s just puzzling how she managed to get out of that closed ward. Because there’s actually a very high fence there.
Sanne:
There wasn’t like a little step or anything in front of that fence?
Mother-in-law:
No, because the fence was meant to keep people inside.
....NARRATOR [ST]
You’re listening to Argos, the investigative journalism show by VPRO and Human on NPO Radio 1. Over the past year we’ve received over a hundred and forty statements concerning Ritual Abuse. One of the girls who shared her story with us is Marinke. Her parents-in-law kept a large dossier in which they record everything that happened to her. It contains pictures of the window through which Marinke escaped from the closed mental health facility. It was smashed in, from the outside. It also includes photos of a sawed through brake line, belonging to a car. Pictures of injuries on Marinke’s body, and a letter from Marinke’s family.
....Bas Kremer, therapist and board member at the Knowledge Centre for Organized Transgenerational Abuse:
I think every single police report on ritual abuse has been dismissed. That they just automatically get sent to the LEBZ, and with that, discarded.
NARRATOR [ST]
Bas Kremer works as a therapist and is member of the board at the Knowledge Centre for Organized Transgenerational Abuse.
....NARRATOR [ST]
The Knowledge Centre is made up of a group of health care specialists who deal with clients that have come forward with stories on Ritual Abuse. They’ve been active for 25 years. They also conducted research, for which they interviewed just under thirty health care workers. They discovered very clear overlaps between their clients’ testimonies.
Bas Kremer:
There are a few very clear similarities. Certain very specific recurring locations, also certain names of perpetrators that would have also been mentioned by other victims. And we also saw a lot of overlap in the mind control that was imposed on them.
NARRATOR [ST]
The health care officials sounded the alarm bells. They themselves experienced things that severely frightened them.
Bas Kremer:
When our therapy session finished, they’d go out and there was literally a dying pigeon lying there in the house, in the hallway, right in front of the door of the practice.
....Bas Kremer:
We are also talking about abuse that starts at a young age, baby age, toddler age. And it’s almost inevitable that the parents would play a part there, or can safeguard it to the group.
Children, I’m almost afraid to say, but they’re trained, I think, to continue to function normally while being abused. That also entails that children can endure abuse from age zero, can continue smiling, even though they are being hurt severely. Remaining silent and never saying a word, in order to make it possible to let them get abused by strangers without anyone finding out.
NARRATOR [ST]
The reality is not nearly as mysterious as the term ‘ritual abuse’ might lead you to think. Victims don’t call it ritual abuse, but speak of ‘them’ or ‘the network’. ‘They’ are also engaged in drug and arms trafficking. Take a van to the port and pick up a bag of cocaine. Switch number plates. Make a quick stop at a holiday park or a rest stop in order to exchange the bag for two teenage girls. Switch number plates again and take the girls to a party, where they’re made to ‘wait’ in a cage or caravan until the party starts. On other days there are smaller, private parties at someone’s residence.
NARRATOR [HJ]
An errand boy describes how he would drive young women to a rest spot at the Veluwe, where they were forced to ‘work’ for the group. Other girls had to do the same in large hotels or sex clubs.
NARRATOR [ST]
Some victims speak of the ‘cult’. Mostly to make clear how brainwashed they are and how difficult it is to break loose.
Bas Kremer:
The number one characteristic of a cult is how they manage to isolate people. It can be very difficult to cut ties when you’re an adult, but we’re talking about networks that you’re born into here. So, this is what you’ve known your entire life
....The same goes for pregnancies. 78 percent states that they got pregnant through the abuse. The majority more than once. They’d get tortured to the point of losing their baby, they say. But they also speak of ‘nobodies’. Children that were born into and kept within the network, and never got officially registered. Some of them are dragged from place to place. Others live with families that are active within the network. Their mothers are only allowed to see them if their sexual performance is up to par. If they continue to come back. These nobodies undergo the most severe forms of abuse.
NARRATOR [HJ]
These are all stories that the people working for the Knowledge Centre are told too, board member Bas Kremer says. We ask him whether he’s also heard about the involvement of highly ranked officials in the abuse or its coverup:
Bas Kremer:
Yes, that is something that I often hear. I also think it’s something they’re told again and again, within these networks, the children too. Like they’re in charge of everyone and control the entire world.
....NARRATOR [ST]
Our map is covered in stickers at this stage: over eight stickers on a Belgian castle, which was also pointed out by Marinke. Several stickers on a residence, in a specific street in a mid-sized city. And on a building in the Veluwe. We end up locating over ten spots that were named by several of our participants.
And then we receive an anonymous email: ‘Beware, they know about your investigation. They’re going to get rid of evidence - just like they did with Dutroux’.
That same day the warehouse in the Bollenstreek burns down. We phone the fire department. The damage is so severe that a cause of fire cannot be determined.
