Ritual Abuse-Torture Within Families/Groups
Womens UN Report Network Sarson & MacDonald. (2008). Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment, and Trauma. (16)14, 419-438. http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a903766904&fulltext=713240928
Case studies provide insights into identifying 10 violent thematic issues as components of a pattern of family/group ritual abuse-torture (RAT) victimization. Narratives from victimized women suggest that victimization generally begins in infancy or soon thereafter. A visual model of RAT displays the organization of the co-culture. Examples of the family/group gatherings known as “rituals and ceremonies” provide insights into how these gatherings are used to normalize pedophilic violence. Global activism afforded the first effort ever to track RAT and human trafficking. Recognizing RAT as an emerging form of non-state actor torture, discontinuing the use of language that sexualizes
adult-child relationships, and promoting human rights education are suggested social solutions.
INTRODUCTION
Insights into the reality of ritual abuse-torture (RAT) victimization began for the cauthors in 1993 with a phone call from a woman who planned to commit suicide in 4 days. Sara (not her real name) said this was “the last time [I’m] ever going to reach out for help.” Unraveling the chaos of Sara’s world to find meaning in her contextualized expressions of life was essential to providing her with effective interventions. Sara reported being born and remaining actively captive in a RAT family/group for over 30 years. Efforts undertaken to develop
a framework that organized Sara’s victimization led to the identification of 10 violent thematic issues/behaviors constituting relational norms within RAT family/groups (Sarson & MacDonald, 2007): (a) neglect and abuse of many forms (e.g., verbal, emotional, physical, sexual, financial); (b) being terrorized by acts of violence, such as the killing of a pet and being threatened with death if she disclosed the violence and abuse; (c) human-animal violence, including bestiality and/or being “trained” to harm animals; (d) torture (e.g., physical, sexual, and mind-spirit); (e) rampageous pedophilia; (f) necrophilic and pseudonecrophilic acts, such as drugging or choking her into unconsciousness and raping her dead-like body; (g) forced self-harming behaviors; (h) enduring horrifying acts, such as being forced to watch another child tortured and gang raped; (i) human trafficking victimization and exploitation (e.g., pedophilic and adult pornography; being used as a drug carrier); and (j) forced participation in violent organized pedophilic family/group gatherings coded as “rituals and ceremonies.” Using such a framework to comprehend Sara’s family/group system was successful in guiding Sara’s gradual exit and ongoing
healing processes. It also prompted the following questions: (a) Would this framework define the RAT victimization of others? (b) If so, would it be representative of this specific population? (c) If so, could their experiential narratives then be considered a collective perspective of life within RAT families and like-minded groups?
OTHER CASE STUDIES
Responding to outreach into the Nova Scotian community, three women came forth with recollections of RAT victimization. Friends of a fourth woman, with permission from her husband, spoke of her ordeals, as she died before being able to reveal her complete story. No men came forth; thus, the knowledge gathered reflects the perspectives of a small sample of women’s childhood and adulthood realities.
Demographic Characteristics
Unlike Sara, who had a master’s degree and a professional career, the four other Caucasian Canadian women with RAT histories had graduated from high school, pursued college training, or proceeded directly into the work force. Sara was single and childless; the other four women were married or divorced with children. The women’s ages, including Sara’s, ranged from the early 30s to mid-50s. Financially, all five women had depended or were dependent on government or employee assistance programs because the compounded impact of their victimization overwhelmed their abilities to cope with the demands of everyday life. Sara lived in an apartment complex, whereas the other women occupied mortgaged single dwelling homes. All drove cars. All had pets (cats or dogs). Some used computers as a life-line for connection. All the women had personal or professional support systems.
Interview Methodology
Interview meetings took place mainly in the women’s homes and lasted between 2 and 5 hours per meeting. Two to four meetings provided sufficient interview time; however, 15 meetings (over the course of 1 years) were required for one woman to cope with telling her story. In total, 119 hours were spent in meetings, 96 hours on e-mail communications, 27 hours on phone conversations, and approximately 10 hours on speaking with spouses, friends, and other concerned persons. Few notes and no audio or visual recordings were taken during the meetings. Listening to comprehend the meaning in their voiced realities was the main interview technique. Immediately after leaving the women’s homes, time was dedicated to writing condensed notes to ensure recall accuracy. These notes were typed and given to the women at the next meeting. Any miscomprehensions were
discussed and corrected. All women were presented with a typed final edition of their narrative using a pseudonym of their choice to protect their privacy.
Finding meaning in the women’s narratives meant de- and reconstructing context in a manner that was “understandable and experientially credible” (Maxwell,
1996, p. 21). This process involved asking challenging, clarifying, and reality-based questions that deconstructed the family/group concepts that normalized and justified RAT within adult-child or captive adult relationships. Reconstructing reality meant exposing victims to the perspective that RAT constitutes relational violence.
CASE STUDY RESULTS
Defining Ritual Abuse-Torture
One consensus that emerged from the interviews was that the commonly used term “ritual abuse” did not adequately describe the violent acts endured. The women said they had endured more than abuse; they had been tortured and had witnessed other children or adults being tortured. It was essential for their empowerment to have their ordeals named appropriately. “Ritual abuse-torture” was coined, a term the women thought adequately described their victimization; thus, it is the term used in this paper. Briefly described, RAT involves pedophilic parents and transgenerational family members, guardians, and like-minded adults who abuse, torture, and traffic their or other children. They also organize violent group gatherings using “rituals and ceremonies.” If unable to exit, a girl child can become a captive and exploited adult.
Congruencies
Closure of the interview process included showing the women, for the first time, the graphic organizational Model of Ritual Abuse-Torture (see Figure 1). All were surprised that their ordeals could be organized in such a nonchaotic manner and stated that the Model not only organized the violent thematic issues but provided a holistic perspective of their lives inside RAT families/groups. They added that it captured their experiences within society generally.
[Enlarge Image] FIGURE 1. Model of Ritual Abuse-Torture.
Perpetrators in all cases included parents (mother, father, or both) and/or extended intergenerational kin as well as known and unknown adults who were frequently referred to as being part of “the family.” The women spoke of the superiority of the RAT family/group and the concept that perpetrators harm with intentionality. Inflicting violence maintained the perpetrator’s goals of totalitarianistic power and control, ensuring silence and secrecy and facilitating ongoing violent pedophilic entertainment and pleasure.
The term co-culture was used because in all cases the perpetrators functioned “invisibly” within mainstream society. Within their communities, they were professionals, business people, volunteers, local politicians, and/or active members in church organizations. In other words, the perpetrators manipulated their fit within mainstream society while functioning within the co-culture of the like-minded RAT family/group locally, nationally, and/or transnationally. Living “within three realities at once” was how one woman
described the layering of the family/group’s community face, the family face of everyday life, and the insider face that victimized children were compelled to navigate (Sarson
& MacDonald, 2005). Besides manipulating a community fit, all the case studies were rife with everyday family life experiences of child neglect and abuse. When describing the secretive insider face, the acts of violence crossed into the realm of organized family/group torture, consisting of the thematic issues also identified in the Model.
During the process of “getting out” and attempting to heal, the women’s narratives included various forms of revictimization. During hospitalization, one woman reported being raped by a psychiatric intern, another spoke of “consensual” sex with the therapist, and Sara spoke of severe forms of violence that included torture and entrapment by professional female counselors, one of whom she considered connected to the family. Such revictimization involves abuses of power and trust as identified in one of the outer rings of the Model.
All indicated that healthy caring, and safe and effective support was difficult to obtain, a position that was mirrored in the findings of the Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women (1993).
Variations
Within the context of congruency, there was also variation. For instance, Sara and one woman spoke of infant victimization, whereas others believed they were toddlers or preschoolers when their victimization began. Additionally, the age and reasons for exclusion from the violent pedophilic family/group gatherings varied and were multilayered, and included the following: (a) the death of a grandfather, considered to be the leader of the group, was one woman’s perception of why her victimization ceased when she was a young adolescent; (b) growth and developmental reasons, such as menstruation and the risk of impregnation; and (c) being replaced by a younger sibling.
Alternative norms, which Hoebel (1960, p. 172) described as existing patterns of behavior that provide for a leeway of choices within the same situation, were also present. Common to all the women’s narratives was the norm of being taken to violent pedophilic family/group gatherings. However, there was much variation as to how the patterns of violence were enacted during these gatherings. For example, it could begin with voyeurism by watching and laughing as one child was forced to degrade another. One woman described her pedophilic rape as being “presented to the bishop” as a preschooler of 3 or 4 years of age. She did not know whether “the bishop” was an actual cleric or a code word for the pedophile’s erect penis. Another stated the terrorization of the “formal rituals” began with human-animal cruelty. Seeing a chicken’s head cut off and witnessing the headless chicken flapping about was translated to mean that she would have her head cut off if she did not comply with the perpetrators’ demands.
Ongoing Victimization
Not all women interviewed were of the opinion they had exited. Besides Sara, who was a captive adult, another woman considered herself not to be fully out of the family. Her ongoing state of adult captivity involved the vulnerability she described as “doing what I’m supposed to,” which was secretly giving one half of her salary to the family. Sara also experienced financial abuse control tactics. She disclosed she gave her professional paychecks to her father and that her parents, in turn, supplied her with groceries, which she rationed. At times, she went hungry because groceries were withheld. Keeping Sara financially poor was one tactic her perpetrators used to force her to keep coming back to them, thus maintaining control over her.
Tactics that promote ongoing contact can also give RAT perpetrators access to the next generation of children, if a woman has children. It was difficult to ascertain whether the children of some of the women interviewed had been harmed when young, as the women stated they only began to understand their victimization later in life, when their children were older or young adults. Several women openly discussed their concerns, realizing they had left their children with family members when they were infants or toddlers.
Predation was a common tactic used to control the victimized. Sara and another woman reported being stalked, enduring worksite harassment, and experiencing periodic physical and sexual assaults. Stalking, for example, included being followed, receiving harassing telephone messages, and experiencing threats delivered in various ways, such as having intimidating “traitor” notes left on the windshield of her car. These reports are not unusual considering that on average, in Canada, more than 1 in 10 females over the age of 15 reported being stalked in such a manner that they feared for their or another person’s life (Statistics Canada, 2005).
On completion of these case study interviews, answers to the three previously identified questions were gained. The 10 violent themes/behaviors identified with Sara were generally representative of the victimization of the other four women. All the women’s narratives presented a collective pattern of RAT victimization, but on a minute scale. To gain a broader scope, connection with more people who self-identified as having endured RAT was required.
LOCAL TO GLOBAL ACTIVISM
Global activism efforts concentrated on exposing RAT as a human rights violation and a form of non-state actor torture. Perpetrators of non-state torture include family members and non-kin, such as a neighbor, a trusted person, a stranger, or even an organization acting outside the state (Amnesty International UK, 2000). How could a population be reached who self-reported being victimized, oppressed, marginalized, discriminated against, silenced, terrified, threatened, disbelieved, and whose boundary of community
was not local but global? Various opportunities arose, including participating in “The Many Faces of Torture” panel at the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) United Nation Headquarters in New York City in 2004. Word spread via the Internet of an opportunity for participation and 61 people from six countries (Canada, Costa Rica, England, Germany, Scotland, and the United States) sent over 400 pieces of information, including art and written stories, describing their ordeals of RAT victimization. These were displayed in 10 portfolio books for people attending the panel to view.
RAT and Human Trafficking
To promote further participatory involvement, the first global tracking of transnational occurrence of RAT began in 2003. A website was established that included a RAT Prevalence Guestmap (Bravenet.com), which provided people with an opportunity to place an icon on the map to indicate the site where they first endured RAT victimization. The Guestmap in Figure 2 represents 123 persons who placed their icons between April 23, 2003 and May 1, 2004. Today, women, men, and youth continue to participate. Using the Guestmap, they communicate via e-mail or telephone, send written information, contribute written feedback on educational resources and presentations, and provide further information, such as naming the destination countries they remember being trafficked to. [Enlarge Image]
FIGURE 2. Guestmap Representing 123 Persons Who Placed Icons to Indicate the Site Where They First Endured RAT Victimization (Icons Placed Between April 23, 2003 and May 1, 2004).
Case Studies and Human Trafficking Patterns
As a captive adult, Sara spoke of local, national, and transnational organizational patterns that reached into Ireland and other parts of Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the United States, and Mexico. Two women also described their experiences as being transnational but limited to Nova Scotia, the United States, and Greece or to RAT-involved family members who lived in the United States and visited Canada. The remaining two women defined their trafficking as being confined to local family/groups. One thought her father’s
behaviors were influenced by contacts made during his sea voyages. All the women identified being harmed by both male and female perpetrators.
Forms of Human Trafficking Within RAT Families/Groups
Because of the transnational connections of some RAT families/groups, they may be participants in the human trafficking organized crime network. Human trafficking is considered one of the three most profitable illegal businesses worldwide (U.S. Department of State, 2004). Global contacts derived, for example, from over 300 icons presently on the RAT Guestmap have expanded insights into the many forms of human trafficking of children that can occur within RAT families/groups. Transportation, trafficking, and exploitation occurs (a) within the home (e.g., carrying or forcing a child into the basement for planned abuse or torture); (b) when transported to other local settings (e.g., warehouses, private offices, barns, studios); (c) when transported to other RAT family/groups locally, regionally, nationally, or transnationally; (d) when “rented out” to a pedophilic outsider; (e) when forced to work the street because their body has developed, making them unmarketable to pedophiles; (f) when used in child pornography; (g) when forced to sell drugs or be a carrier for money laundering or gun smuggling; and (h) when forced to clean the homes of members of the family/group as part of labor enslavement practices. Enslaved
women also report being trafficked and exploited in similar ways.
RITUAL ABUSE-TORTURE: MISOPAIS AND RITUALISM
Misopais
Thinking about how attitudes are encultured pushed consideration that there must be one that supports the childhood violence spoken of by persons who have endured RAT victimization. Misopais was the attitudinal word coined. This word comes from the Greek mis (hatred) and pais (children). Just as understanding the attitude of misogyny helps explain the underpinnings of global oppression and violence against women, naming misopais as the destructive attitudinal root that supports violence against children helped
comprehension of RAT violence. Proof of the RAT perpetrators’ intentionality is in their proverbial utterance “Don’t tell, but if you do no one will ever believe you anyway,” a declaration that they know what they do is a crime.
Ritualism
Exposing the existence of RAT families/groups requires understanding how they function, including comprehending how they manipulate ritualisms for a complex array of purposes: They follow the ritualisms of their profession; as mothers, fathers, and kin, they present to the community in normative family ways; as volunteers, members of community groups, or mainstream church-goers, they skillfully manipulate community ritualisms to their advantage, hiding behind good people and good causes. Socialized sexual victimization and aggression was frequently spoken of as being central to the enforcement of gender-based roles. The most powerful environment and method of indoctrination
and training in which to maximize such enculturation is with the use of group ritualisms. Socializing the girl child into the role of perfect victim, perpetrators tell a little girl she needs to be taught “how to be a woman,” justifying her rape. A boy child is socialized to be an aggressor; forced into sexualized acts with another child, he is taught “how to be a man.”
Group ritualisms present ordeals that are very destructive to the child’s connectedness to herself or himself. Group rituals and ceremonies are where horrification commonly happens. The behaviors of the group present a group momentum, a force so brutally violent that the child victim’s terror and horror is overwhelming, shocking her or him into survival and coping responses of disconnection, out-of-body experiences, dissociation, and/or fragmentation. As one woman said, “I was held down. Hands and objects did things to hurt me … . I left my body in that room.”
Regardless of the sociocultural nationality of the families/groups that have been reported, ritualisms within the co-culture organize their invisible violent community and contain variations of the same thematic issues/behaviors identified by the women. Commonly, these gatherings involve participants in the positions of leader(s), audience of like-minded participants, and chosen victim(s). A case study narrative briefly demonstrates this latter point:
My father “the devil” had his [specific] place in the ritual circle … at some of the ceremonial ritual gatherings the adults wore masks … sometimes robes … but their voices were always identifiable … forced to drink wine until drunk … tied to a plank … smeared with feces and what I thought was blood … surrounded … the men and women did grotesque sexualized acts … and torturing … Their laughter still haunts me, the feelings of being humiliated returns …
Within these gatherings, pedophilic perpetrators assert their adult positional power and domination over the child victim, shaping the adult-perpetrator/child-victim relationship. Using and abusing the “specialness” concepts associated with rituals and ceremonies, perpetrators set the stage for indoctrinating the child, normalizing violent relational
pedophilia. Narratives from victimized persons demonstrate how perpetrators distort reality by using and dramatizing omnipotent themes, playing roles such as being “the devil.” Ritualized constructed gatherings can be legitimatized using outsider language in a coded manner, for instance, telling the girl child she is in a marriage ceremony—“marriage to Satan” ritual. In some narratives and drawings submitted, it is very clear that “Satan” refers to the perpetrator’s erect penis and “the marriage” representative of oral rape and
the forced ingestion of semen. For example, as a captive adult Sara still believed that the swallowed semen meant she was forever consumed by and connected to “Satan” as an entity. Awareness of this use of coded language is essential to unravel the perpetrator’s tactics of mind-spirit tortures that inflict distortions and hold victimized persons in a captive state.
Human-animal cruelty in the form of bestiality compounds the reproductive harms of sexualized torture ritualisms. Perpetrators can manipulate and distort beliefs by “teaching” female children to be fearful of their reproductive capacities because they fear producing animal babies. Disclosure of this self-directed hatred and belief was frequently encountered, as were expressions of horrification when forced into group ritualisms of bestiality with large animals, such as horses or donkeys. Being pornographically photographed deepened the wounds.
There was a time when such narratives would be dismissed as unbelievable or labeled lies. However, police have seized DVDs of children forced into bestiality (Canadian
Press, 2004) with parents the alleged perpetrators and pornographers (Blais, 2007). People in industrialized countries such as Canada, the UK, and the United States manufacture 90% of pedophilic pornography, much of it intrafamilial (Lamberti, 2002) and homemade (Gooderham & Laghi, 1996; Sher, 2006). Furthermore, infants in diapers (Canadian
Press, 1996; Smith, 2003) with umbilical cords still attached (Dimanno, 2003) can be victims. And 20% of pedophilic pornography viewed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Child Exploitation Unit involves torture and bondage (Caswell, Keller, & Murphy, 2006).
Perpetrators further distort the reality of the victimized child by drugging them to cause disorientation and stupor. Weapons (guns, knives, ropes, whips) inflict terror as well as harm. Victimized persons explain how perpetrators whipped, burned, cut, and hung them by their limbs. Narratives include prolonged group beatings, telephono (beatings to their ears), falanga (beatings to the soles of their feet), and water torture as depicted in Sara’s drawing in Figure 3. Sara told of being held under water until “the darkness comes” (i.e.,
unconsciousness). Being electric shocked, tied down, caged, denied nourishment or access to a bathroom, smeared with or forced to eat their or perpetrator’s body fluids, choked, and hooded gives insight into some of the physical tortures perpetrators inflict to satisfy their need for sadistic pleasure and entertainment.
[Enlarge Image] FIGURE 3. Sara’s Drawing of Water Torture.
Reported sexualized tortures include forced nakedness; continuous prolonged family/group rapes; rapes with knives, hot pokers, and lit candles (cut and burned); rapes with guns, sticks, or other objects; pseudonecrophilic rapes; bestiality; and the taking of pornographic pictures. Case study narratives disclose that as victimized children, the women might be forced to harm other children or animals, to witness them being harmed, or forced to consume tissue such as blood. Emotionally objectified, laughed at, humiliated, degraded, and
dehumanized, these mind-spirit tortures were combined with physical and sexualized tortures that forced out-of-body, disconnective, and dissociative survival responses that altered or fragmented the victimized child’s relationship to and with herself.
Intensification rites are rituals that bring a whole group together to sharpen their sense of community solidarity (Goldschmidt, 1971). The frequently held ritualized gatherings of RAT families/groups suggest this purpose. A ritualized gathering re-energizes like-mindedness; reinforces group cohesiveness, bonding, and sense of belonging; and justifies
the beliefs, values, perceptions, thoughts, and misopaisic attitudes that normalize torturous pedophilia. Tightening networking processes, ritualized gatherings can strengthen ties with other RAT families or like-minded groups regionally, nationally, or transnationally. This gives rise to human trafficking networks as perpetrators transport victim(s) from group to group or from place to place.
Figure 4 depicts a violent ritualized pedophilic family/group gathering, drawn by a woman who survived RAT. She shows herself and another girl at ages 8 and 6 surrounded by RAT perpetrators and being serially group molested and “raped and raped and raped” (orally, vaginally, and anally) by male and female members. The scribbled lines in the drawing, she says, are representative of her and the other girl’s blood. The circle, candle, and stars are symbolic props used by the family/group. This drawing is generally representative of the narratives attesting to the violent ritualized group enculturation that occurs in childhood within the co-culture of RAT families/groups. These families/groups use and abuse the power of destructive enculturation embedded in ritualized group processes because such enculturation maintains group membership, provides ongoing child victims, and gathers financial or other benefits when the perpetrators are involved in criminal activities such as human trafficking and pornography.
[Enlarge Image] FIGURE 4. A Drawing Depicting a Violent Ritualized Pedophilic Family/Group Gathering.
Destructive enculturation can lead to the belief that there is no way out, so the victimized child may become a captive adult victim, or to the belief that she is both victim and perpetrator, which can further silence her. The belief of being both victim and perpetrator is instilled from an early age when one child is forced to harm another child, animal, or adult victim. Based on what we have been told, some children, because of the ongoing nature of the family/group, will remain and be involved in family/group activities as adult
perpetrators or in some other supplier capacity. For instance, one woman stated her father dropped her off at the group gatherings, then left. He “supplied” her to her grandfather. Intergenerational family involvement in organized crime is a reality repeatedly seen in other family-centered organized crime groups. Whether child or adult, family members face a painful struggle if they try to exit. For example, if they run away from home, they are commonly returned totheir parents. As one woman shared:
I remember being four and packing my little blue suitcase with clothes and walking down the street to a neighbor’s house and saying I was going to move in with them because they were a nice family. They took me back home.
Children often do not have the language or understanding to explain their victimization clearly, a reality especially common for those who have specifically endured sexualized violence (Alaggia,2004). They are rarely believed. Even victimized adults still struggle to be heard and believed for risk of being labeled mentally ill or crazy, adding more injury to their struggles.
CONCLUSION
Just who are ritual abuse-torturers? Babiak and Hare (2006) wrote that psychopathy is found in 1% of the general population and “that about 20 to 25% of men who persistently abuse and batter their partners are psychopaths” (p. 286); maybe the answer lies in this reality. Psychopaths can be parents. Of the four case studies presented, three spoke of their father’s violence against their mothers, often compounded by alcoholic rage. Two of these three mothers were considered not to be involved in RAT. Sara stated that alcohol was not present in her household. Although her mother actively participated in inflicting RAT victimization, she was still subjected to misogynistic and physical violence. Could it be that ritual abuse-torturers have remained so invisible that they have yet to be considered a specific psychopathic group within society? When exposed, might they fall into the category of being sadistic human predators?
Recognizing RAT as an Emerging Form of Non-state Actor Torture
Those victimized by RAT have endured brutal crimes against their humanity. One socially transformative and empowering solution is to recognize RAT as an
emerging form of non-state actor torture. Canada does not have a law that addresses torture by non-state actors or a law that criminalizes RAT. Thus, the
civil and legal right of victimized persons to name the crime committed against them remains unattainable, even though the Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women (1993) published a national report stating that “ritual abuse-torture” was occurring in every region of Canada. Presently, the Canadian legal system takes the existing provisions perspective that torture committed by non-state actors, including ritual abuse-torturers, can be addressed under existing sections of the Criminal Code. That is, acts of torture
are tried as sexual assault, assault with a weapon, or kidnapping. For a crime involving torture to remain unnamed, misnamed, and prosecuted as sexual assault or kidnapping is an under-acknowledgement of the severity of the crime. The necessity of differentiating acts of torture from abuse was highlighted when Governor Granholm signed legislation that, for the first time, made torture a criminal act in Michigan. This legislation was enacted because prosecutors were unable to hold a husband accused of torturing his blind, diabetic wife accountable because no law against torture existed in Michigan (Watson, 2006). How many children have suffered acts of non-state actor torture, including RAT, without triggering legal and social intervention?
Accurately naming the crime of RAT is about naming reality. Naming explains the severity of the child or adult’s victimization and traumatization responses. Naming reveals the understandable need for specialized care, just as it is recognized that specialized care is required for persons who have survived state actor torture. Also, if the attitude of misopais is to be brought out into the open, it is time to fully name the extensive violence a child can be subjected to within adult-child relationships, including parental and guardianship ones.
Stopping the Use of Language that Sexualizes Adult-Child Relationships
A second solution is to stop using language that sexualizes adult-child relationships. Language communicates cultural components and worldview; it carries meaning and delivers concepts, beliefs, values, attitudes, and perceptions. Constructively used, language can help a child to understand her or his relationship with herself or himself, to nurture awareness of her or his emotional feelings, to develop emotional intelligence (Barnet & Barnet, 1998), and to safely situate herself or himself in relationships with others. Language constructs a truthful reality when it names reality correctly. Language used destructively, as within the co-culture of RAT families/groups, is distorting and enculturating by encoding and normalizing violence within adult-child relationships. Distorting language is used by perpetrators to keep a child captive, to keep them from learning that what is being done to them is wrong and criminal. Using distorting language is a protection-from-detection tactic of perpetrators to ensure that if the child tries to speak to outsiders, their conversation will likely be misunderstood. For instance, as a child Sara was taught to “suck a lollipop”—lollipop meaning penis. Her father and others coded their pedophilic oral raping of her by teaching her distorted language that outsiders would most likely misunderstand. As a result of the distorted and destructive use of language, the child’s comprehension of reality is
severely manipulated, misshaped, and sexualized.
When mainstream society also uses language that delivers misleading, distorting, and sexualized messages, then the victimized child’s distortions are easily reinforced. Consider statements such as the following: Mr. X, a nurse, was arrested for having oral sex with a minor; Ms. V, a teacher of 10 years, was charged for having sex with a 12-year-old student; Mr.
C was jailed for sex crimes against his daughters. In each scenario, the language used is deceiving, distorting, and sexualized as it names the pedophilic assaults or rapes as sex. A clearer message would be delivered to victimized children and adults if these messages were stated as the following: Mr. X was arrested for the oral rape; Ms. V was charged for raping a student; or Mr. C was jailed for rape crimes. Dismantling the centuries old misopaisic attitude that reinforces pedophilic violence as sex or sexual will make it more difficult for perpetrators such as ritual abuse-torturers to function with impunity. Thus, the transformative support that society can offer is to use language that names pedophilic violence for the crime that it is; pedophilic violence should never be called sex. Clearly and truthfully naming the behaviors of ritual abuse-torturers is essential as it offers persons who had been victimized the language to name the atrocities they endured. As one women stated, “Abuse is a more benign word than torture, but torture is the correct term for what I experienced.”
Promoting Human Rights Education
“I’m a person? Nobody ever told me this before!” These were Sara’s comments when informed she was a human being with rights and responsibilities. These
concepts were extremely difficult for her to internalize. For over 30 years, all she ever heard was “You’re good for nothing; slut, whore; you’re nothing
but garbage.” Sara and other victimized women spoke of being treated “like animals” by their parents, some of whom were ritual abuse-torturers and some
who were not. One woman described how her pedophilic father tortured her, although it was her mother whom she identified as the parent connected to the
RAT group. She said:
My degradation was so profound there were times I didn’t even feel human; I felt like an animal, I felt like a pile of shit … . I was down in the basement
with my hands tied together, a rope around my neck, in a cage hanging from the ceiling. My father used to put me there … with the rope placed around my neck
in such a way that if I caused the cage to swing too much the noose would tighten around my neck… . Sometimes before putting me into the cage, my father
threw food onto the basement dirt floor forcing me to eat like an animal, or sometimes he’d put canned dog food in a white china saucer and force me to eat it like a dog. I broke it [the saucer] and I remember my mother got angry at me. There was a bucket of pee that he’d force me to drink… .
Torturers intentionally attempt to destroy the personality of the person they victimize. This constitutes some of their pleasure. To counter such dehumanization, a third solution is generalized interventions that promote human rights education at all levels of schooling, beginning in the earliest grades. Such interventions would offer insights to the victimized school-aged child, providing them an opportunity to recognize that RAT victimization is a human rights violation, a form of torture, and is not their fault. Human rights
education could help expose all forms of violence, expose misopais, educate mainstream society, and contribute toward building a more empathic, responsive, and humane