Ritual abuse

Satanic ritual abuse (SRA), abusive cults and government/political ritual abuse (e.g. MKULTRA) are just a few examples of ritual abuse. Ritual abuse or organized abuse typically consists of a combination of extreme abuses, usually carried out by groups.

Ritual Abuse and Organised Abuse explained
Organised Abuse has been defined in a number of different ways, but particularly as sexually abuse perpetrated by multiple adults on multiple victims, occasionally this is referred to as MVMO (multiple victims, multiple offenders). Other terms which may be used include sex ring, paedophile/pedophile ring, and sexual exploitation but these phrases suggest the abuse is carried out by strangers, rather than considering family may be involved. In the 1980s and 1990s clinical and therapeutic literature often uses the term "organised abuse" to refer to sadistic or ritual abuse. It is recognized that organised abuse may consist of a combination of different forms of abuse, and that this may include victims (typically children) being forced to abuse others.

Ritual abuse (also known as Ritualistic Abuse or Ritual Abuse-Torture) typically consists of a combination of extreme abuses, including sexual, physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual abuse and is usually carried out by groups rather than lone individuals. The physical abuse may include murder and torture, often to near death. Within ritual abuse, torture may be used along side mind control and brainwashing techniques; combined these can be used to further control a person who has developed dissociative parts or identities in order to cope with the abuse. Survivors of ritual abuse report that most groups force them to commit horrific acts including harming other victims, including other children, vulnerable adults or pets, and being drugged (e.g, to cause pain, immobility, unconsciousness or confusion and hallucinations.

Ritual Abuse is combined with other forms of Abuse
"“Qualitative and quantitative research with adults and children reporting ritual abuse has found that it occurs alongside other forms of organised abuse, particularly the manufacture of child abuse images (Scott 2001, Snow and Sorenson 1990, Waterman et al. 1993), and hence subsuming such non-ritualistic experiences under the moniker ‘ritual abuse’ is misleading at best and incendiary at worst. Moreover, it is unclear why an abusive group that invokes a religious or metaphysical mandate to abuse children should be considered as largely distinct from an abusive group that invokes a non-religious rationale to do so. '"

Miller (2012) reports that sexual abuse occurs in both children and adults includes rape, bestiality and snuff films (filmed murders), and that many groups are also involved in organized crime, including child and adult trafficking, producing child pornography and child and adult prostitution. Many signs of torture e.g., sensory deprivation, isolation, confinement, sleep deprivation and being forced to perform or witness abuse, do not leave physical evidence.

Perpetrators of Ritual Abuse
Oksana (1994) describes four types of ritual abuse perpetrators: multigenerational family groups, self-style abusive groups, lone operators such as serial killers and the least extreme dabblers in ritual abuse, who may be adults or teens.

Organized, abusive groups and cults
Ritual abuse exists all over the world. The best known example of ritual abuse is satanic ritual abuse (SRA), the details of which may vary by group. Ritual abuse usually has a religion or belief system associated with it, and these beliefs can be used to justify many of the group's abusive activities. There is a mistaken belief that all ritual abuse involves some form of Satanic worship, but other examples include Christianity, vodun/voodoo, Santeria and some types of witchcraft.

Government, political and military abuse / State Torture
A historic example of ritual abuse by a political/military group is Carl A. Raschke's Painted Black, from Germany in 1776. Survivors of ritual abuse have reported being abused by politically motivated groups including Neo-nazis and the Klu-Klux Klan. Torture carried out by representatives of a state or government (for instance, federal police, prison, military and embassy personnel) is also known as "state torture" and is a specific crime in countries such as Canada, although "non-state torture" (the same acts by those not representing the state or government) is not a named crime.

MKULTRA
MKULTRA is the best known and most extensively documented example of ritual abuse perpetrated on behalf of a government, despite the intentional destruction of most of the documentation  Project MKULTRA was a "mind control" project designed and perpetrated by US intelligence agencies and those of other countries. Related "projects" include PAPERCLIP, BLUEBIRD, and ARTICHOKE. MKULTRA involved Nazi doctors and scientists who were given asylum in the US as part of a related project known as PAPERCLIP. The intention was to use the amnesia within dissociative identity disorder to create spies or assassins who lacked conscious awareness of their involvement.

These activities are described in documents released under the Freedom of Information Act and have been subject to senate hearing in the US, and are documented in many books, including Dr Colin A. Ross's book Bluebird : Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists  and A National Betrayed by survivor Carol Rutz. Canada's Dr Donald Ewan Cameron was a leading psychiatrist in the 1950s-60s who is documented as taking part in such unethical experiments on people as part of MKULTRA. Some of the documentation for these projects provides clear evidence of experiments on children using sexual abuse, behavioral modification, hypnosis, drugs and torture. In 1977 a senate hearing called "Project MKULTRA, the CIA's program of research into behavioral modification" was held which exposed these abuses, and stated that many records were destroyed in 1973 on the instructions of CIA director. MKULTRA is now a declassified project.

Impact on mental health
Ritual abuse is known to create Dissociative Identity Disorder if it occurs at a young enough age. Many groups deliberately create additional dissociative parts (alters) to act as the abusive group wishes, these sometimes result in other specified dissociative disorders (OSDD) (formerly DDNOS) rather than Dissociative Identity Disorder. Psychotherapist Alison Miller believes that abusive groups intend to create OSDD but that DID often results instead. (One of the typical presentations of OSDD is very similar to DID but does falls short of meeting the criteria; the DID treatment guidelines also apply to this form of OSDD.

Media exposure to SRA allegations and hospitals treatment
Satanic ritual abuse (SRA) has been sensationally reported in the media. Leavitt (1998) assessed a group of survivors reporting sexual abuse (SA groups) and a group reporting satanic ritual abuse (SRA group) to assess the influence of both media and hospital treatment in reports of satanic ritual abuse by using word association tests (WAT). He reported no influence on the SA group and that "media exposure makes no difference on the number of satanic word associations of patients in the SA group. However, individuals in the SRA group with low media exposure produced a greater number of satanic associations than did individuals reporting high media exposure to satanic ritual abuse content." Levitt concluded "If satanic responses do not flow from actual experience, then from where do they arise? Exposure to media materials does not appear to be a plausible explanation, nor does exposure to a hospital setting. In a similar vein, it is difficult to understand the reverse media effect in the SRA group. Why do only SRA patients with minimal or no media information respond to the WAT (i.e., show the base rate satanic associations) in a manner consistent with their report of clinical information? '"

Moral panic, 'witch-hunt' and claims of 'hysteria' about satanic ritual abuse
In the media satanic ritual abuse is often referred to as a 'moral panic', while all other forms of ritual abuse are ignored. Claims are also dismissed or discredited using emotionally laden terms such as 'witch hunt' or 'hysteria'.

Moral Panics and Witch Hunts
The term 'moral panic' is now commonly used in an attempt to discredit the victims of any form of sexual abuse, and their accounts of the abuse. For example, when Jerry Sandusky was charged with 40 counts of child sexual abuse, his lawyer compared the allegations about him to the 'moral panic' about 'satanic ritual abuse' (Sax 2011). In one of the biggest sexual assault cases in Australian history, involving over 200 charges of child abuse at a Catholic boarding school, lawyer Greg Walsh (defending most of the accused) spoke of a witch-hunt against the teachers, saying "Religious people are so easily tainted these days", “These men are innocent. The allegations are bizarre and have arisen under very suspicious circumstances” and that “We are seeing here examples of mass hysteria. Moral panic.”

The key characteristics of a moral panic, as originally defined by Stanley Cohen, are stereotyping, exaggeration, distortion, sensitization, including a group of people who were singled out as the cause, and "demonized." Salter (2013) states "Indeed, Scott (2001) notes with irony that the writings of those who claimed that ‘satanic ritual abuse’ is a ‘moral panic’ had many of the features of a moral panic: scapegoating therapists, social workers and sexual abuse victims whilst warning of an impending social catastrophe brought on by an epidemic of false allegations of sexual abuse." Psychotherapist Dr Ellen P. Lacter gives examples of misinformation and disinformation (false information) which can be spread about therapists, particularly online, including false claims of malpractice and claims that a therapist is a "fundamentalist Christian zealot" when the therapist may not even be a Christian. Ridicule and emotionally-laden language is often used by those claiming ritual abuse is a "moral panic", in comparison to the scientific and objective terms used by professionals.

Inaccurate claims that satanic ritual abuse is a "myth"
Dr Jean La Fontaine, an anthropologist, was commissioned to write report on organized and ritual abuse in Great Britain, and studied hundreds of cases that alleged organized abuse and 86 cases of alleged ritual abuse, all occurring between 1988 and 1991. In cases where 'satanic' paraphernalia had been found in connection to the abuse, La Fontaine maintained that these were simply used by paedophiles to intimidate the children: "the aim is sexual and the ritual is incidental to it. Self-proclaimed mystical/magical powers were used to entrap children and impress them with a reason for the sexual abuse, keeping the victims compliant and ensuring their silence.'" La Fontaine's heavily publicized conclusion stated that evidence of "satanic abuse" was not found in those cases, but less publicized was the report's statement that three of the cases of ritual abuse were substantiated, this was leaked to the press before publication. La Fontaine was heavily criticized for not interviewing the children or adult survivors, whilst simultaneously blaming social workers and police for previously conducting "poor quality" interviews with the children. Her report was largely based on analysis of survey questionnaires completed by police, social services and a national children's charity; along with existing interviews with six adult survivors (no children). She referred to the children as "difficult, damaged, disturbed and sexually active" within the report, and during a lecture at Birbeck college she described them as 'bizarre little creatures'.

Misquoting professionals, and substituting 'satanic ritual abuse' for 'ritual abuse'
Child abuse expert Dr Liz Kelly (1994) criticized the report starting that "a more stringent methodology was used" than for other areas of child sexual abuse; showing an "inclination of a readiness to disbelieve". La Fontaine's report stated there was "an absence of 'forensic and material evidence' to prove that ritual elements occurred", despite referring to the "clothing, altars, candles" found. The diaries kept by foster mothers which recorded conversations with the children were judged "unreliable" because they "could not be a verbatim record of conversations, which would have required shorthand skills...that there were no indications the foster mothers possessed." La Fontaine (1994) Pscyhotherapist and author Dr Valerie Sinason criticized the impact of the report, starting that "I find it disturbing that one anthropologist's readings of transcripts are being listened to more seriously than 40 senior health service clinicians", while La Fontaine's views on ritual abuse where compared with "well-known promoters of paedophilia" including Benjamin Rossen, whose writing she recommended to leading journal Child Abuse Review. Rossen had previously been arrested for the sexual abuse of a 12-year-old and had been instrumental in claiming that satanic ritual abuse did not exist in Holland. The British Health Secretary Virginia Bottomley later claimed the report "exposed the myth of Satanic abuse", which La Fontaine denied, stating her conclusion referred to only the cases she investigated.

The FBI Lanning Report does not say that Satanic Ritual Abuse is a hoax
In 1992 Kenneth V. Lanning published a report for the FBI about organized cult and ritual abuse in the US in which he stated there was "little or no evidence" of some of the crimes described by ritual abuse survivors but he acknowledges that crimes with ritualistic elements occur; this report investigated discussed many forms of ritual abuse including satanic and occult ritual abuse and did not refer to any of these forms as a "hoax" or "myth". The title of the report is "Investigator's guide to allegations of "ritual" child abuse". Noblitt (1995) describes how this has been misquoted: One example was the assertion that a seven-year FBI study revealed no evidence of organized cult or ritual activity in the United Sates. In reality there is no such study. The day following the ABC program, my office contacted the FBI and requested a copy of the alleged study. The bureau responded in writing indicating that no such study existed." Noblitt goes on to explain "This monograph by Special Agent Ken Lanning (1992) is merely a guide for those who may investigate this phenomenon, as the title indicates, and not a study. The author is a well known skeptic regarding cult and ritual abuse allegations and has consulted on a number of cases but to our knowledge has not personally investigated the majority of these cases, some of which have produced convictions."

Gould (1995) questions why in the previous year, Lanning (1991) ignored both convictions for crimes involving ritual abuse and considerable published evidence of research, instead claiming that no substantive evidence of ritual abuse existed. For example, Finkelhor, William and Burns (1998) conducted a national study of substantiated cases of child sexual abuse which occurred at US day care centers. Despite this study not been focused only on ritual abuse, it found 13% of the 1,639 children abused had been subject to ritual abuse, 58% of the ritual abuse cases which went to trial resulted in convictions.

Convictions and Evidence of Ritual Abuse
There are many media who continue to report that there are no convictions for ritual abuse, or re-word this to "satanic ritual abuse", "satanic ritual abuse of children", "satanic ritual abuse of children involving large groups", "wide-scale satanic ritual abuse of children", etc, and ignore satanic killings where other types of abuse by the group are reported but only the killings have resulted in convictions. Many convictions exist, in the United States, Europe and world-wide. Salter (2013) quotes from one such conviction:

“Batley insisted that no cult existed but the jury found him guilty of 35 offences including 11 rapes. three indecent assaults, causing prostitution for personal gain, causing a child to have sex and inciting a child to have sex. The three women, who got Egyptian Eye of Horus tattoos apparently to show their allegiance to their organisation, were found guilty of sex-related charges. Young boys and girls were procured by cult members to take part in sex sessions, the trial heard. The group preyed on vulnerable youngsters, impelling them to join with veiled death threats. Batley was accused of forcing a number of his victims into prostitution." (The Guardian newspaper, 2011, referring to convictions in Kidwelly, Wales, 2011)