copied with permission from https://ritualabuse.us/2024/11/issue-179-november-2024/
The Survivorship Trafficking and Extreme Abuse Online Conference 2025 - Survivor Conference will be on Saturday and Sunday May 18 - 19, 2025. This year's topic is "Celebrating the Gains Fighting Ritual Abuse." The Clinician's Conference will be Friday May 17, 2025. This year's topic is "Progress Against Extreme Abuse." Please write info@survivorship.org for more information. The Conference Web Page is at https://survivorship.org/the-survivorship-trafficking-and-extreme-abuse-online-conference-2025 Updates will be posted when available.
Psychiatric Impact of Organized and Ritual Child Sexual Abuse: Cross-Sectional Findings from Individuals Who Report Being Victimized Johanna Schröder, Susanne Nick, Hertha Richter-Appelt and Peer Briken Institute for Sex Research and Forensic Psychiatry, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf,20246 Hamburg, Germany ....Published: 31 October 2018
Abstract: Organized and ritual child sexual abuse (ORA) is often rooted in the child’s own family. Empirical evidence on possible associations between ORA and trauma-related symptoms in those who report this kind of extreme and prolonged violence is rare. The aim of our study was to explore socio-demographic and clinical characteristics of the individuals reporting ORA experiences, and to investigate protective as well as promotive factors in the link between ORA and trauma-related symptom severity. Within the framework of a project of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in Germany, we recruited 165 adults who identified themselves as ORA victims via abuse and trauma-specific networks and mailing lists, and they completed an anonymous online survey. We used variance analyses to examine correlations between several variables in the ORA context and PTSD symptoms (PCL-5) as well as somatoform dissociation (SDQ-5). Results revealed a high psychic strain combined with an adverse health care situation in individuals who report experiences with ORA. Ideological strategies used by perpetrators as well as Dissociative Identity Disorders experienced by those affected are associated with more severe symptoms (2 p = 0.11; 2 p = 0.15), while an exit out of the ORA structures is associated with milder symptoms (2 p = 0.11). Efforts are needed to improve health care services for individuals who experience severe and complex psychiatric disorders due to ORA in their childhood.
Introduction
Child sexual abuse (CSA), once thought to be rare, is nowadays accepted as a frequent reality that occurs across a range of cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds worldwide and encompasses many types of sexually abusive acts towards children, including sexual assault, incest, the production and use of child pornography, as well as commercial sexual exploitation [1 ]. Sexual child abuse involving a network of perpetrators acting repeatedly and jointly on multiple victims is defined as ‘organized abuse’ [2 ]. Organized abuse that follows a (pseudo-) ideological strategy (e.g., symbols or group activities with religious, magical, or supernatural connotations) in order to frighten and intimidate the children or to force the victims to participate whilst simultaneously accomplishing the perpetrators’ exculpation is referred to as ‘ritual abuse’ [3,4]. Salter further describes ritual abuse as ideological framing in organized CSA contexts, functioning as strategical practices through which abusive groups indoctrinate the victims into a violently misogynistic worldview in order to control them [4]. In other words, ritual abuse occurs when a religious, political, or spiritual authority uses its position of power and the sovereignty to interpret the respective belief system to manipulate and dominate its followers. Since the 1980s, evidence of organized and ritual abuse (ORA) has been consolidated due to studies documenting psychological harm amongst children and adults disclosing such experiences.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328647987_Psychiatric_Impact_of_Organized_and_Ritual_Child_Sexual_Abuse_Cross-Sectional_Findings_from_Individuals_Who_Report_Being_Victimized https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30384461/
Ritualistic Abuse Survivors Difficulties Obtaining Services - Neil Brick
Ritualistic abuse survivors have struggled to obtain adequate mental health and social support services for over twenty years. This problem has been exacerbated by a lack of trained providers and adequate social services to deal with the complex problems ritualistic abuse survivors present. Most clinicians do not receive proper training due to severe trauma topics and their symptomatology not being adequately covered in their master level training programs or in post continuing education training. Very few organizations are available to educate clinicians and survivors about the research in the field. Insurance companies often do not adequately cover services for long term treatment. Social services employees are not adequately trained to work with severe trauma survivors.
There is a paucity of training regarding trauma informed services and ways to work with clients suffering from dissociative disorders. Application guidelines often make it very difficult for ritualistic abuse survivors to receive in the timelines given. Survivors may have difficulties getting to offices, getting on the Internet or filling out paperwork. This presentation will include the presenter’s own struggles receiving adequate services over the last thirty years. Issues to be discussed will include the symptomatology of dissociative disorders, attachment disorders, mood and anxiety disorders, economic problems, and social barriers. Solutions to decrease and eliminate these difficulties will be discussed. These will include public advocacy, public education, survivor training, and the building of a research base to help survivors and their helpers move forward to prevent these difficulties in the future. https://ritualabuse.us/ritualabuse/articles/ritualistic-abuse-survivors-difficulties-obtaining-services-neil-brick/
50 years after Philadelphia halted prison medical testing, families seek reparations By MARYCLAIRE DALE October 23, 2024
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Fifty years ago, Philadelphia prison officials ended a medical testing program that had allowed an Ivy League researcher to conduct human testing on incarcerated people, many of them Black, for decades. Now, survivors of the program and their descendants want reparations.
Thousands of people at Holmesburg Prison were exposed to painful skin tests, anesthesia-free surgery, harmful radiation and mind-altering drugs for research on everything from hair dye, detergent and other household goods to chemical warfare agents and dioxins. In exchange, they might receive $1-a-day in pocket change they used to buy commissary items or try to make bail.
“We were fertile ground for them people,” said Herbert Rice, a retired city worker from Philadelphia who said he has had lifelong psychiatric problems after taking an unknown drug at Holmesburg in the late 1960s that caused him to hallucinate. “It was just like dangling a carrot in front of a rabbit.”
The city and the University of Pennsylvania have issued formal apologies in recent years. Lawsuits have been mostly unsuccessful, except for a few small settlements. On Wednesday, families at a Penn law school event are set to seek reparations from the school and pharmaceutical companies that they say benefited from the Cold War-era research. A University of Pennsylvania spokesperson said the school had no comment on the push for reparations.
The testing was led by Albert M. Kligman, a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist with research ties to the Army, the CIA and the pharmaceutical industry, according to author Allen Hornblum, who ran an adult literacy program at Holmesburg in the 1970s and saw the effects firsthand. Medical testing in prisons was pervasive in the 1960s, with radiation studies conducted on people incarcerated in Washington and Oregon, cancer studies in Ohio and flash burn studies in Virginia, Hornblum said.
Human testing was also conducted on children in institutions, hospital patients and other vulnerable populations in much of the 20th century. The tide turned in the early 1970s, when outrage over the Tuskegee Syphilis Study — in which the U.S. government let Black men go untreated for syphilis to study the disease’s impact — sparked an evolution in medical ethics, Hornblum said. Kligman defended his work until his death in 2010.... In a 1966 interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer, Kligman described his first visit to Holmesburg with excitement, saying, “All I saw before me were acres of skin.”.... https://apnews.com/article/philadelphia-prison-experiments-black-reparations-ff8a08483fb13d1b949d938d7ae29656#
Archdiocese of Los Angeles agrees to pay $880 million to victims of clergy sexual abuse October 16, 2024
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has agreed to pay $880 million to victims of clergy sexual abuse dating back decades, in what an attorney said was the largest single child sex abuse settlement with a Catholic archdiocese, it was announced Wednesday. After the announcement of the agreement in principle, Archbishop José H. Gomez said in a statement, “I am sorry for every one of these incidents, from the bottom of my heart.” “My hope is that this settlement will provide some measure of healing for what these men and women have suffered,” the archbishop added. “I believe that we have come to a resolution of these claims that will provide just compensation to the survivor-victims of these past abuses.”
Attorneys for 1,353 people who allege that they suffered horrific abuse at the hands of local Catholic priests reached the settlement after months of negotiations with the archdiocese, the Los Angeles Times reported. The agreement caps a quarter-century of litigation against the most populous archdiocese in the United States. The archdiocese has previously paid $740 million to victims in various settlements and had pledged to better protect its church members, so this settlement would put the total payout at more than $1.5 billion, the Times said. Attorney Morgan Stewart, who led the negotiations, said in a statement that the settlement is the largest single child sex abuse settlement with a Catholic archdiocese.... https://apnews.com/article/los-angeles-archdiocese-clergy-sexual-abuse-bf23e8967410017c036f765bb83910f6
President Biden to apologize for 150-year Indian boarding school policy By GRAHAM LEE BREWER October 24, 2024
NORMAN, Okla. (AP) — President Joe Biden said he will formally apologize on Friday for the country’s role in forcing Indigenous children for over 150 years into boarding schools, where many were physically, emotionally and sexually abused,
and more than 950 died. “I’m doing something I should have done a long time ago: To make a formal apology to the Indian nations for the way we treated their children for so many years,” Biden said Thursday as he left the White House for Arizona....
The investigation she launched found that at least 18,000 children — some as young as 4 — were taken from their parents and forced to attend schools that sought to assimilate them into white society while federal and state authorities sought to dispossess tribal nations of their land. The investigation documented 973 deaths — while acknowledging the figure is likely higher — and 74 gravesites associated with the more than 500 schools.
No president has ever formally apologized for the forced removal of these children — an element of genocide as defined by the United Nations — or the U.S. government’s actions to decimate Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian peoples....
The forced assimilation policy launched by Congress in 1819 as an effort to “civilize” Native Americans ended in 1978 after the passage of a wide-ranging law, the Indian Child Welfare Act, which was primarily focused on giving tribes a say in who adopted their children. The U.S. government has offered apologies for other historic injustices, including to Japanese families it imprisoned during World War II. President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act in 1988 to compensate tens of thousands of people sent to internment camps during the war.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed a law apologizing to Native Hawaiians for the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy a century earlier. The House and Senate passed resolutions in 2008 and 2009 apologizing for slavery and Jim Crow segregation. But the gestures did not create pathways to reparations for Black Americans.
In Canada, a country with a similar history of subjugating First Nations and forcing their children into boarding schools for assimilation, former Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a formal apology in 2008. There was also a truth and reconciliation process, and later a plan to inject billions of dollars into communities devastated by the government’s policies.
Pope Francis issued a historic apology in 2022 for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with Canada’s policy of Indigenous residential schools, saying the forced assimilation of Native people into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations....
In 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologized to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for his government’s past policies of assimilation, including the forced removal of children. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made a similar concession in 2022....
https://apnews.com/article/indian-border-schools-apology-biden-haaland-701872132d7f191973d54cd05286ef75
Book: Demystifying Mind Control and Ritual Abuse: A Manual for Therapists - Alison Miller Karnac Books July 2024 Paperback ISBN 13 : 9781800132658 ISBN 10 : 1800132654 Dr. Miller spoke at the 2024 Online Annual Ritual Abuse and Mind Control Conference - August 10 - 11, 2024. Information is at https://ritualabuse.us/smart-conference/
Karnac books https://www.karnacbooks.com/product/demystifying-mind-control-and-ritual-abuse-a-manual-for-therapists/97609/?MATCH=1
Google Books limited preview: https://books.google.com/books/about/Demystifying_Mind_Control_and_Ritual_Abu.html?id=9MFx0AEACAAJ&source=kp_book_description
This book was written to meet the need of therapists: a succinct, thorough, practical, clear, down-to-earth handbook to which a therapist can refer as needed. Many, if not most, therapists have encountered a victim of complex mind control and ritual abuse, and most therapists feel deskilled in this work. Working with such clients is a challenge for therapists, given the extreme and prolonged nature of the clients’ trauma, the severity of their dissociative disorders, the complexity of the mind control they have experienced, and the reality of organised perpetrator groups who follow up on their victims. Every therapist needs to know the basics of this work.
Chapter 1 defines and explains dissociation, ritual abuse, and mind control. It lists indicators which suggest a client may be a victim, and recommends developing ‘reflective belief (or possibly) disbelief’ rather than maintaining ‘therapeutic neutrality’. Chapter 2, The therapeutic relationship, describes victims’ training to not form bonds, the parental nature of the therapeutic bond with such clients, and practical ways to relate to someone dealing with internal multiplicity. Chapter 3, The life of a mind control survivor, describes victims’ planned experiences from infancy all the way through adulthood. Chapter 4, Engineered personality systems, describes the most common forms of training or programming, and the ‘jobs’ of inner parts of the victim. Chapter 5, Stabilisation and internal safety, explains the way in which some parts punish the victim for disloyalty by creating destabilising symptoms. Chapter 6, Working with the personality system, describes internal hierarchies and how to work with them. Chapter 7, Present-day physical safety, looks at the ongoing torture and harassment of many victims by perpetrator groups, and describes the training of various parts to return to the perpetrators, report to them, and be available for further abuse. Chapter 8, Working through the traumatic memories, gives guidelines regarding how to help a client work through the numerous traumatic training memories. Chapter 9, Confronting the spiritual issues in ritual abuse, describes the perpetrators’ spiritual/moral abuse and simulation of spiritual entities. It discusses the question of demonic possession, and looks at the real spiritual issues which victims and therapists must deal with. Chapter 10, Healing for our clients and ourselves, discusses victims’ emotional healing, grieving, developing self-esteem and integration, and therapists’ intimidation and vicarious traumatisation.
‘Alison Miller’s latest book, Demystifying Mind Control and Ritual Abuse, is a tour de force in advanced psychotherapy for the most difficult of clients, those who have been subjected to torture since before birth and throughout their childhood in order to create compliant slaves without walls. She is a knowledgeable, tough, and compassionate guide who takes a clear-eyed look at what it really takes for therapists to do this work and gives us the tools to do so. She calmly addresses a topic that most find unbearable to acknowledge, that children can and are routinely used to serve the darkest desires of humanity. She lays out many practical tips; each chapter could almost be its own book. Any therapist who finds themselves confounded and feeling deskilled by a victim of organized abuse that is cult related, ritually abused and/or mind controlled will find helpful tips and resources in these pages. This book should be required reading for all therapists.’ Susan Pease Banitt, LCSW, psychotherapist and consultant specialising in trauma and extreme abuse, sought-after speaker, and award-winning author
‘Having worked in this difficult field for several decades, Alison Miller has found a further way of passing on her knowledge of mind control and ritual abuse. What’s more, she does so in the most honed, processed way. This is a handbook which is easy to read despite the fearfulness of its subject. It is filled with wise information culled from decades of experience. It will aid the newcomer and the experienced clinician alike.’ Valerie Sinason PhD, founder and patron, Clinic for Dissociative Studies, and author of The Orpheus Project
‘Demystifying Mind Control and Ritual Abuse: A Manual for Therapists delivers just what Dr. Miller promises – a book for therapists “who need a succinct, practical, down-to-earth guide for this challenging work.” She describes the strategies that mind control abusers apply to victims, beginning in infancy, to induce dissociated identities to form, to manipulate them, and to then set them up against each other for long-term, often lifetime control. These abusers hope to prevent victims from ever consciously accessing their memories, from being able to receive the help of a psychotherapist, and from ever defying and escaping their mental controls. Then Dr. Miller offers step-by-step therapeutic guidance in troubleshooting all of these obstacles so that survivors may discover their own minds and exercise agency over their own lives. This is a wonderful reference book to help psychotherapists navigate this toughest-of-all courses of psychotherapy.’ Ellen Lacter, PhD, psychologist, USA
‘Dr. Alison Miller's new book, Demystifying Mind Control and Ritual Abuse: A Training Manual for Therapists, is the most comprehensive book written to date on this topic. Dr. Miller discusses all of the techniques needed to help survivors of these crimes. Her book is easy to read and understand. It explains ways to work with trauma survivors in a compassionate, respectful, and comprehensive manner. Her many years of experience and research provide a unique guide into helping mind control and ritual abuse survivors. I have been proud to work with Dr. Miller in both Survivorship (survivorship.org) and SMART (ritualabuse.us). Every time I attend one of her workshops or webinars or read one of her books, I learn more about our field, myself, and ways to help other survivors.’ Neil Brick, editor and conference coordinator for SMARTNews at https://ritualabuse.us
