RITUAL ABUSE-TORTURERS: THE
‘INVISIBLE’ ABUSERS, ‘NON-STATE ACTOR’ TORTURERS, AND HUMAN
TRAFFICKERS
Jeanne Sarson, MEd, BScN,
RN and
Linda MacDonald, MEd, BN,
RNã
White
Paper Prepared for the Following Panel
Presentation:
Human Trafficking in the
21st Century
Moderator: Ms. Salwa Kader,
President and founder US Federation for Middle East
Peace
Commission on the Status of Women, February 27-March 10,
2006
United
Nations Headquarters, NYC. NY. 10017
RITUAL ABUSE-TORTURERS: THE
‘INVISIBLE’ ABUSERS, ‘NON-STATE ACTOR’ TORTURERS, AND HUMAN
TRAFFICKERS
Jeanne Sarson, MEd, BScN, RN & Linda MacDonald, MEd,
BN, RNã
The
purposes of this paper are:
- To promote, as briefly and caringly as possible, an understanding of the lived reality of the specific group of oppressed, marginalized, and ignored girl or boy infant, toddler, child, and youth who, as adults, identify they were born into a ritual abuse-torture family/group, or became victims when the guardians, entrusted with their care, were ritual abuse-torturers.
- To promote the understanding that the girl child who has grown and developed within a ritual abuse-torture family/group environment can remain a captive, enslaved, and exploited woman. (We have no reported information that the victimized boy child can become a captive, enslaved, and exploited adult male.)
- Then, to ask for your support as a NGO, other organization, or an individual to endorse our efforts to have:
Ritual
abuse-torture recognized as an emerging human rights violation and
identified as a newly acknowledged
form of torture that is inflicted by “non-state actors” onto the girl and boy
infant, toddler, child, youth and the captive enslaved woman.
From NGO’s, Members of Parliament, or other organizations we are asking for an official letter of support, with your letterhead, that we can present to the Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery in June, 2006. We ask for your supportive presence as we proceed forwards towards the Human Rights Commission. For your convenience we have included a suggested framework for such a letter as Appendix A. We have enclosed a copy of a letter of endorsement from our Member of Parliament, the Honorable Bill Casey, as Appendix B.
For individuals, we are asking that you sign and invite others to sign the petition included as Appendix C. Please mail it back to us. Our address is at the bottom of the petition.
In-a-Nut-Shell Definition
This paper specifically refers to ritual abuse-torturers who are parents, families, guardians, and like-minded adults who abuse, torture, and traffic children using organizing ritualisms. Captive girl children can and do remain captive enslaved, abused, tortured, and exploited women. Their state of captivity is created and enforced by the organized family/group violence that is inflicted upon them.
Ritualisms: Organizational Framework
of Ritual Abuse-Torture Families/Groups
It is common knowledge that perpetrators of ‘western style’ cultural misogynistic relational family violence select the privacy of their home to initiate this cycle of partner and family violence. Western style, meaning a secretive private pattern of family violence in comparison to other forms of misogynistic relational cultural family violence such as ‘honor’ killings, which are generally openly public. Attacking a partner or child in the home, away from the neighbors witnessing eyes, western style perpetrators manage to keep victimized family members silenced, manipulating and controlling their lives with intimidations or escalating forms of physical violence. At the same time, these perpetrators constantly state, “Don’t tell because nobody will believe you”. This statement ought to be viewed as an acknowledgement that perpetrators are aware that the violent acts they inflict are unacceptable, illegal and criminal, placing them at risk for incarcerating consequences if they are exposed. This pattern holds true for perpetrators of ritual abuse-torture.
However, because ritual abuse-torture families/groups engage in group violence they must organize and plan their violent family/group actions more intentionally. So they use the organizing principles of ritualisms to their advantage.
Organizing ritualisms—rituals—generally, within civil society,
function to:
- Organize many
aspects of people’s lives and the cultures and societies they live
in.
- Influence
people’s beliefs, values, thoughts, perceptions, attitudes, and motivations
which shape their behaviors.
- Impact on a
person’s way of fitting into families or groups—work, play, church, and
friendship networks, for example.
- Shape
positional power in relationships, for instance groups usually have a leader
and followers. Leaders exert positional power and are responsible for deciding
how they use or conversely abuse this power. The same holds true for family,
kinship, or guardian groupings. A child is dependant on their parent or
guardian who is entrusted with positional power within the adult/parent-child
relationship. Some adults, parents, or guardians misuse this relational
positional power to neglect, abuse, torture, or ritually abuse and torture
their child, or children.
As stated, ritual abuse-torturers use the principles of group rituals to their advantage when organizing their group violence. By organizing their family/group gatherings this ensures security, reducing the risks of being caught, facilitating the opportunity to quench their desires to perpetrate acts of brutalization against the captive, enslaved girl or boy child or woman victim.
And, how do
they do this?
- Firstly, by using group rituals they influence and reinforce their groupthink,
create group cohesiveness and solidarity which instills a sense of like-minded
kinship and belongingness, which diffuses responsibility giving perpetrators
permission to act out their sadistic family/group behaviors of torture,
fulfilling their wanton expressions for violent power, pleasure, and
entertainment.
- Secondly,
organized group rituals provide a strong milieu in which to teach, train,
school, indoctrinate, condition, program, and role-model—normalize—to their
child victim that acts of pedophilic brutality are normal ‘loving’
adult/parent-child relationships within the family/group.
- Thirdly,
organized group rituals provide the opportunity to construct ‘special
occasions’ and to develop coded language to give ‘legitimacy’ to the violent
group gatherings which are frequently coded as ‘rituals and ceremonies’ or
‘party times’.
- Fourthly,
within the context of organized group rituals positional power in
relationships is established. Perpetrator-victim relationships are enforced
when an adult member, acting as leader, gathers with ‘an audience’ of
like-minded participants to inflict all forms of abuse and torture onto their
victim(s)—the captive infant, toddler, child, youth, or captive woman. The
victim is put in their place, so to speak. Asserting violent domination over
the ‘chosen’ victim within the context of such organized group gatherings is
made easier, overwhelming them not only with group numbers but with their
victimizing tools. Keeping a victimized person passive with forced drugging,
mixed with the tools of ritual drama—costumes, masks, chants, prolonged
silence or noise, bright lights or darkness creates disorientation and terror.
Domination and terror are further inflicted via the abuse of the power of the
parental/guardian position or adult role and size. By attaching themes of
omnipotent power to their roles—identifying them-Selves as a devil, satan, or
bishop, and legitimizing the violent gatherings as ‘rituals and ceremonies’,
and naming these gatherings as ‘a marriage to satan’ for example, forces the
victimized child to accept these ordeals as normal. No one tells the
victimized child that ‘satan’ means a man’s penis and marriage to satan is
about pedophilic oral rape and that the semen they swallow does not mean satan
is inside them forever. No one tells them that they are being victimized.
Combining the tools of ritual drama which are similar to mind-altering
sorority hazing rituals, the perpetrators further disorientate and overwhelm
the victimized captive child or woman victim by inflicting torture and
horrification pain.
- Fifthly,
initiating infants to young children into the group process using organized
family/group rituals provides the next generation of like-minded perpetrators
or victims—pedophilic or adult. By distorting the worldview of the victimized
child and adult this holds them in a state of on-going captivity. As well,
having a legacy of on-going perpetrators continues to build on the organized
crimes they commit by strengthening loose networks with like-minded others
locally, nationally, and transnationally.
Abuses and
Tortures: ‘Creative’ Brutalities of Ritual Abuse-Torture
Families/Groups
Abuses of many forms are intentionally inflicted onto
victims by ritual abuse-torturers. For the child born into or who is under the
guardianship of such perpetrators, or for the captive woman victim, abuses are a
day-to-day reality.
They can and do
endure all or most of the following forms of relational abuses. For example:
- Verbal abuses endured means being repeatedly called
names, put-down, and bombarded with negative messages such as being told they
are ‘stupid, bad, and good for nothing’. Feeling non-existent happens when
they are given the ‘silent treatment’—not talked to and not acknowledged—which
delivers the message ‘you do not exist’. Directed at them with demeaning voice
tones all forms of verbally abusive messages can lead to emotional harm.
- Emotional abuses of habitual humiliations, shame,
rejection, and constant emotional messages of feeling unlovable, unwanted,
undeserving, disregarded, and useless—‘a pile of shit’. Surviving harmful
child ‘parenting’ practices meant having unreasonable demands made of them,
such as being forced as a preschooler, for extended periods of time, to clean
a bathtub with a tooth brush, being told they ‘didn’t do it good enough’, and
being hit or kicked for ‘failing’.
- Psychological abuses aimed at intentionally distorting their
beliefs, values, attitudes, actions, and worldview. For example, teaching
children that ‘outsiders—non-family/group members—will contaminate them’. This
keeps victimized persons under the perpetrators control, isolated, often
without friends, captive, and the ‘perfect victim’.
- Physical abuses involved being hit, punched, shoved,
kicked, or having their limbs twisted whenever the perpetrators feels like
striking out.
- Sexualized abuses endured means coping, often daily, with
sexualized touching, oral, vaginal, penal, or anal rape, forced viewing and/or
being involved in pornography, and exposed to sexualized acts of others. It
can also mean being attacked at any time night or day, and especially on
week-ends, holidays, and vacation times, which provide opportunities to keep
an injured child or woman isolated from outsiders until they recover.
- Financial abuses feed the perpetrators greed so a
victimized working youth’s money or a woman victim’s salary and credit or bank
cards are taken.
- Spiritual abuses are suffered as the victimized child or
woman is constantly told they are very bad persons which enforces and
conditions them to develop this core belief about them-Self.
- Exposure to family violence is a constant state which causes intense
overwhelming duress and increases the risk for further victimization.
Torture, are acts of violence that go beyond
acts of abuse. Emotional abuse, for
example, becomes emotional torture when a girl’s father forces her to drown her
pet kitten to terrorize her that she too will be drowned if she ever tells on
him and the others in the group.[1] And verbal abuse
becomes verbal torture when a girl child or woman is tied down, raped with a gun
inserted into her vagina, then verbally degraded by being told she is ‘good for
nothing.’
The goal of ritual abuse-torturers is to attempt to alter or destroy their victim’s relationship with them-Self; this destructive and torturous process begins with children, starting often in infancy. Consuming them—making them one with the group—victimized women often speak of them-Self as feeling like ‘a robot’, an ‘it’, ‘a nothing’, or just ‘a head’ and belonging to ‘the family’.
Below is a brief list of the acts of torture that youth,
women (and men) have reported to us that they endured during their childhood.
For women who remained captive and enslaved they report these acts of torture
continued. They describe their torture ordeals as:
- Physical tortures which included electric shocking,
whippings, being hung by a limb, prolonged beatings with fists, boots, whips,
belts, boards, and broom handles, for example. External skin burns and burns
to oral, vagina, and anal mucosa, cuts, caging, being forced and confined into
small enclosed dark spaces, denied nourishment or access to a bathroom, being
tied down for prolonged periods, kept awake all night and bombarded with
glaring lights, and forced to eat their vomitus are other
examples.
- Sexualized tortures involving forced nakedness, being forced to watch them-Selves being raped and tortured in a mirror, enduring family/group rape and bestiality, being vaginally raped with objects such as a gun, having their skin and vagina cut with objects such as knives, forced to smear others with body fluids or being smeared them-Selves, or forced to drink and eat their perpetrator’s urine or excrement, being submerged under water (waterboarding) or being choked unconscious and rendered lifeless then being raped to satisfy perpetrator’s sado-necrophilism, and being trafficked or exploited into pedophilic or adult pornography including ‘snuff’ films, and into the ‘sex’ trade.
- Mind-spirit tortures including forced indoctrination, conditioning, and programming that distorted their worldview by forcing them to believe they belonged—were owned—were the property of the family/group. Normalization of rampageous pedophilic and torture ‘touch’. Using family/group rituals with omnipotent themes perpetrators programmed the victim to believe they have evil within thus could never escape—there was no way out. Forced to witness or harm other children or animals, forced to engage in sexualized acts with other children while being laughed at and humiliated, exposed to acts of necrophilic horrification with ‘snuff’ pornography, for example, combined with the mind-altering tactics of drugging, hypnosis, torture pain, electric shocking, or human experimentation, distorting reality and overwhelming their capacities, forcing the victimized child or woman into out-of-body, disconnection and dissociation responses which fragmented their relationship to/with Self.
Comprehending
the torturous processes that are inflicted onto children during their childhood,
within the context of abuse-torture families/groups environment, explains how a
captive girl child becomes a captive enslaved woman. It is important to
understand that, depending on the family/group dynamics, being finger or object
raped can be the first ‘bonding experience’ of an infant, an ordeal that
instantly propels the girl child into a state of overwhelming duress, of being
objectified—a sexualized object—an ‘it’. Within some families/groups this
sexualized objectification has been reported to start later, at age two, three,
or four. In order to survive, the girl or boy child will be forced and will
attempt to adapt, to internalize the abuse, torture, and horror as normal, will
try to ‘forget’, and even try to make their parent(s)/guardian happy by trying
to co-operate with them thinking this will help.
If they are not
identified as a child at risk and rescued, if, as youths, they are unable to
escape, they can and do become the next generation of captive adult victims,
perpetrators, or both. A best practice intervention demands civil society opens
a place at the table of humanity, where persons who have survived ritual
abuse-torture are free to speak, to be heard, listened to, believed, and cared
about so they can contribute to the safety of the specific population of
children who are presently suffering or who will in the future suffer harm.
Presently, we are being contacted by young women who report on-going harm as
they struggle to exit ritual abuse-torture families/groups. They state they are
either not believed when they try to tell and they cannot find appropriate
support, care, and protection.
The
Torturers: ‘State’ and ‘Non-State Actors’
Who are ‘state actor’ torturers and who are ‘non-state actor’ torturers?[2]
1.
‘State actor’ torturers refers to persons who are in the military,
who are police, state employees, or detention services personnel for example,
and whose behaviors, actions, or policies are supported by the state.
2.
‘Non-state actor’ torturers are persons, groups, institutions, or
organizations acting outside of the state, whose behaviors, actions, or policies
impair and violate the human rights of others. For instance, spousal torturers, human traffickers, ritual
abuse-torturers—fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, guardians, or other
like-minded adults who are most often identified by their roles, such as clergy,
teachers, social workers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, politicians, for example.
Do acts of torture differ from one torturer to another? From the torture literature and from knowledge gained when we listen to persons who survived the Nazi death camps, or who survived being held a prisoner of war, or to a woman who reported being held prisoner in a windowless room by her husband for over four years while being tortured and exploited, and by the many who survived ritual abuse-torture, torture is torture—being tortured is being tortured!
They all speak of starvation pain that gnawed at their insides; for the prisoner of war it was ongoing for the number of years he was prisoner; for the victimized child within ritual abuse-torture families/groups the with-holding of food was episodic or on-going, depending on the desires of the perpetrator. We read in Buchenwald that holocaust prisoners were handcuffed to heating pipes then beaten and hung by their limbs.[3] We heard the same horror from the captive tortured, and exploited woman whose husband handcuffed her to an iron radiator daily; from those who survived ritual abuse-torture they too speak of being hung by their limbs. Whether some torturers use unique repetitive techniques or relish in the free-flowing acts of creative brutality, there is little that separates the absolute expression of power and brutality in acts of one torturer from another except who they are—state or non-state actors. Acts of torture result in consequences that were/are intentionally meant to be destructive to the humanness of the chosen victim[4] irrespective of who the torturers are. For a reality insight we provide the following two comparatively similar ordeals—torture by ‘state actors’; torture by ‘non-state’ actors.
Sister Ortiz:
Tortured
by State Actors: The Army’s
Counterinsurgency Force
Burned nearly 100 times with cigarettes; terrified;
gang-raped; dogs used; horror; blood; suspended over a pit of the bodies of
persons who had been murdered and persons who were still dying; a knife forced
into her hands and held there by her torturers as they plunged it into another
woman and this horror videotaped for blackmailing purposes; hearing the
torturer’s “if you tell no one will believe you,” statement; their laughter;
humiliation—these are some of the over-whelming ordeals Sister Diana Ortiz
reports were inflicted unto her during her 24-hour state of captivity by the
Guatemalan army’s counterinsurgency force, on November 2, 1989.Escaping Sister
Diana Ortiz fled back to the United States.[5]
Sara:
Tortured by Non-State Actors’: Ritual
Abuse-Torturers
Burned with cigarettes, candles, hot light bulbs for more
times than can be recorded; terrified; family/group and individually raped;
suspended by her limbs; bestiality; horror; blood; forced involvement in real
and/or sham murder rituals; a knife forced into her hands and held there by her
torturers as they plunged it into another human being; horrified; horrors
videotaped as trophies for future pleasures, for commercial trade on the
pornography market, and for emotional blackmailing purposes; hearing the
torturer’s statement “if you live to tell no one will believe you,”; their
laughter; humiliation—these are just a few of the over-whelming ordeals Sara
describes enduring during her 35-years of enslaved captivity and ritual
abuse-torture by ‘the family’. A co-culture of trans-generational kin and/or
non-kin whose like-minded needs and desires for ritual abuse-torture (RAT) can
be inter-connected regionally, nationally, internationally, and transnationally
with other like-minded families/groups. She has no where to
flee.[6]
Amnesty
International, making reference to the draft Articles on State Responsibility and its
commentary set out by the International Law Commission, Report of the ILC (1996)
stated that ‘under international law the state has clear responsibilities for
human rights abuses committed by non-state actors.’ [7] The Committee Against Torture, which deals with
‘state actor’ torture, considers trafficking in women to be a specific form of
torture as part of a gender-sensitive interpretation of the Convention, Article 1, which states:
‘any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is
intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as …’[8] We suggest, the
captive girl or boy child or woman who suffers tortures committed by
perpetrators of ritual abuse-torture—‘non-state actors’—ought to have the same
consideration and protection of their human rights under international law and
by the Committee Against Torture. As well, perpetrators need to be held fully
accountable for the severity of the crime of torture they commit whether
perpetrated by ‘state’ or ‘non-state actor’ torturers—whether committed by a
soldier or by a father, mother, family, nurse, teacher, or group, for
example.
Human
Trafficking: Activities of Ritual Abuse-Torture
Families/Groups
There is a need
to look at human trafficking differently when considering it occurs within the
context of ritual abuse-torture families/groups. The common perspective is that
the victimized child or woman is trafficked to perpetrators outside of their
home and often transported to another town or country. Maintaining such a
perspective is blinding to civil society. It fails to see, to identify, the
human trafficking that originates within ritual abuse-torture family/group. For
example, when the perpetrators are mothers, fathers, other family members,
friends, neighbors, and other like-minded persons who organize and gather
together as a group in their homes and take—transport—their girl or boy child or
woman victim into the basement to be the victim of their torture pleasures this
must be considered a form of human trafficking.
Five different modes of
trafficking: From our
perspective, human trafficking connected to ritual abuse-torture families/groups
involves at least five different modes of trafficking which we have identified
as:
- Transporting
and trafficking that occurs within the homes of the family/group members, for
example, carrying or physically forcing the girl or boy child or adult woman
victim into the basement torture room.
- Transportation
and trafficking to other family/group sites such as warehouses, private
offices, barns, studios, institutions, cabins, cottages, RV’s, and to the
out-of-doors.
- Transportation
and trafficking to other ritual abuse-torture family/groups locally,
regionally, nationally, or transnationally.
- Transportation
and trafficking to the “outsiders” as shown and described in the following
drawing entitled, ‘Being Rented
Out’, and
- Transportation
and trafficking or forcing, for example, a young victimized youth to work on
the street because her or his body has developed to the stage where they are
no longer marketable to pedophiles.
Being Rented Out: This drawing by Sara (not her real name)
gives insight into how ritual abuse-torturers conducted their sexualized
exploitation business—their marketing of Sara—their transporting and trafficking
of Sara, as a child victim, to outsiders. She explains,
My father owned
a store and he and my mother would dress me up and sit me on the counter of
their store and rent me out to the ladies and the men who came to rent me. I can still hear my father saying to
them, ‘Bring her back when you’re done’.
Sara’s ordeal
tells how she was marketed—dressed up—and transported—taken to the family store
which was attached to their house—and trafficked by being forced to sit on the
store counter—rented—to the pedophilic women and men by her father and
mother—the traffickers. She was a ‘reusable resource’ for the pedophilic
practicing ritual abuse-torture family into which she speaks of being born.
Tracking the ritual abuse-torturers
trafficking patterns: We do
not know of other sources of information that have tried to track the ritual
abuse-torturer’s patterns of trafficking so, since April 2003, we have been
attempting to do this by creating a global map of the prevalence of ritual
abuse-torture trafficking on our website (www.ritualabusetorture.org).
Persons who visit our website and who are of the opinion they have endured
ritual abuse-torture (RAT) have the opportunity to mark an icon on this map
indicating the original site where their victimization first began. They can
also submit their comments. To date, approximately 332 persons have marked their
icons on the map and most have also submitted additional personal information.
Seven lists, present on our website, each holding names or icons, have been
developed from the information obtained from the on-going prevalence map. Since
the prevalence map can only hold 100 icons, the oldest icons are removed and
placed on a list, thus the seven lists.
Below is a copy
of the trafficking pattern that emerged when tabulating the information provided
by the 123 persons, who placed them-Selves on our map between April 23, 2003 and
May 1, 2004. A consistent pattern of ritual abuse-torture victimization provided
by these 123 persons is visible on the following map. (SEE FULL REPORT
ATTACHED).
Source:
Sarson, J. & MacDonald, L. (2004). Global map of the prevalence of ritual
abuse-torture trafficking from 23 April 2003 – May 1, 2004. Guestmap.[9]
The following bar graph image (SEE FULL PAPER ATTACHED), representative of the 123 persons who placed them-Selves on our map, shows 108 (87.8%) indicated the destination countries they were trafficked to. Fifteen (12.2 %) respondents did not supply this information. Destination countries listed included: Antarctica, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Holland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Paradise Islands, Bahamas, United Kingdom, United States, and Wales.
Based on our review of the names given by the 123 persons, 97 are female and eight are male. We do not know the gender of 16 persons and two icons were from supportive carers.
Additional information about trafficking and destination countries has come from information written on the evaluations of a presentation we gave in 2004 that included discussion of human trafficking as it occurs within the context of ritual abuse-torture families/groups. Some participants voluntarily wrote the names of destination countries on their evaluations. Destination countries included Austria, Belgium, Germany, England, Switzerland, and the west coast of the United States. This information and the information that is being continuously entrusted to us indicates: (1) that ritual abuse-torture families/groups exist in many countries, (2) that there are transnational links, (3) that ritual abuse-torture families/groups have to be exposed if the global reality of all forms of human trafficking is to be squelched—eventually, and (4) if countries are not educated about the realities of ritual abuse-torture they will not be aware of the full extent of the horrors the perpetrators commit when they move ‘off-shore’.
Ritual
Abuse-Torturers: Traffickers of Pornography
Ritual
abuse-torturers use cameras, lights, drugs, weapons, and objectify animals,
babies, toddlers, girls, boys, youth, and captive enslaved women are the ‘tools’
to make pedophilic and adult pornography. Forced into the making and the viewing
of pedophilic and adult pornography is a violent theme of victimization we hear
spoken of repetitively by persons so victimized. Homemade pornography is one
source of the pornography seized by police[10] with ninety percent of child pornography recovered by
the Sex Crimes Unit of the Toronto Police made in the United Kingdom, the United
States, Canada, first-world countries, and is inter-familial.[11] These facts lend support to the information about the
horrendous exploitation and trafficking ordeals victimized persons are sharing
with us.
Women tell us
that, as children, they witnessed babies being victimized and that they
themselves were also such young victims, another reality supported by the
pornographic material police are recovering. Newspapers report police have
seized material of ‘a baby so young that it still [had] its umbilical crust
attached … [of] infants covered with ejaculate’ and toddlers being orally
raped.[12] Pictures seized have also included infants wearing
diapers[13] and a six-month-old baby being raped.[14] Again, more support for what we are constantly being
told about babies being victimized for the making of pedophilic pornography
within ritual abuse-torture families/groups.
An American
youth tells us she was taken to Prague, Czechoslovakia when she was seven or
eight years old and witnessed a killing committed in the making of a ‘snuff’
movie. The year was approximately 1996. To tell, she places the horror of her
trafficking victimization into a poem entitled, Do
You Remember . . . I Don’t.
Here is an
excerpt:
Do You Remember . . . I Don’t [15]
Do
you remember taking me on a plane?
Do you remember sending the plane into a
nose dive,
because I wouldn’t do what you asked?
I
don’t.
Do you remember taking me to that house?
Do you
remember what he said to you,
“If she’s as good as you say, she’ll be a nice
addition to my collection.”
I don’t.
Do
you remember the cameras surrounding the bed?
Do you remember him saying to
you, “these whips are standard,
marks are gone after a few hours?”
Do you remember him
telling me that movies like the one I was going to be in,
make
a lot of money?
I don’t.
Do you remember seeing another girl on the
bed,
being held by her ponytail, knife at her throat?
Do
you remember how she fought so hard to live?
I don’t.
Do you remember all the blood?
Do you remember him
wiping the blood on me?
I don’t.
It is common
that family or friends are the trusted linkages that take a victim into the
network of human trafficking. Such was the case for this youth. At the same
time, in 1996, when she was being transported into Prague, a transnational
trafficking operation that originated in Prague and touched down in New York
City was discovered.[16] With rampart systematic disinterest, corruption, and
abuses of power widespread, Prague and the Czech Republic provided safe, secure,
and fertile soil for her family traffickers, as well as for the pedophilic
torturer and ‘snuff’ movie killer. We do not know who the young girl with the
ponytail was, but ‘disposable’ she was. She may well have been a girl from one
of the orphanages in Czechoslovakia, Russia, Ukraine, or Romania on whom human
traffickers prey.[17]
Pornographic
‘collections’ are part of the modus operandi of the insider and the outsider
users, abusers, torturers, and killers. This young woman’s story suggests
transnational trafficking with connections to an outsider pedophilic perpetrator
as there was no mention of ritual abuse-torture perpetration. This outsider
perpetrator created the demand; the ritual abuse-torturers supplied his demand.
Inside the ritual abuse-torture family/group the demand is ever present, used as
a tool to feed their sexualized perversions, useful as a tool for mind-spirit
torture, and shown to children to normalize and distort the
parent/guardian-child relationship.
And bestiality
is ever present. In the home pet dogs are trained and violated, forced to
participate in bestiality. On farms, in barns, larger animals such as horses,
for example, are also violated, as is the victimized child or woman ‘trained’
and forced to perform. Violent acts of bestiality, watched and recorded for the
pleasure of the ritual abuse-torturers, also supply and meet some of the demand
for degrading animalistic pornography. At one time, when persons disclosed these
horrific degrading victimizing and terrifying narratives they were not believed.
Today headlines of, Authorities seize
child porn, bestiality DVDs tell civil society we have to believe because
these DVDs show bestiality involving dogs and horses.[18]
Those caught in
possession of pedophilic pornography include teachers, professors, clergy,
doctors, nurses, police officers, magistrates, care workers, social workers,
fathers, mothers, foster parents, scientists, grandparents, storekeepers, and
the list goes on. And when we ask who the ritual abuse-torturers were/are and
what their jobs were/are we hear the same response. Mothers, fathers, family,
friends, neighbors; a nurse, doctor, dentist, social worker, psychologist,
lawyer, police, clergy, farmer, mechanic, fisher, storekeeper, politician, CEO,
hospital worker, biker, and the list goes on.
Ritual Abuse-Torture: ‘Exported’
Off-Shore
Based on the prevalence pattern identified on our ritual abuse-torture map (page 11), as well as testimonials given by persons who continue to contact us we are compelled to wonder if ritual abuse-torture victimization is a form of ‘western style’ relational violence. Thus, it is our concern if global communities do not know about the reality of ritual abuse-torture they will not understand the nature of the pedophilic crimes that are being inflicted onto the girl child and ‘infecting’ their communities. They will miss the details and meaning of the evidence and will fail to spot the networks that exist locally to transnationally.
As global travel becomes easier and easier there are a variety of reasons why perpetrators might move ‘off-shore’. From our experiences some of these reasons are:
- The dangers of exposure have increased as they may be at risk of being connected to a crime investigation that might threaten to implicate then in some manner,
- Stress and pressures have weakened the family/groups cohesiveness, such as the death of a main member or leader, so they begin to disintegrate and disperse,
- The victimized person who is working at exiting is not succumbing to the family/group threats, harassment, stalking, or assaults increasing the risk they or others might report,
- The carer who is providing support to the exiting person is not intimidated thus the perpetrators are unable to remove the relational support the carer is providing and the risks for exposure increases,
- Systematic corruption, lax laws, or lax enforcement of some countries provides security and safety and are ideal hunting ground to reconnect with other like-minded perpetrators.
In the personal testimony shared below, which we have entitled, Exported to South Africa, the woman shares the crimes inflicted against her humanity. She tells of being trafficked in South Africa, as well as surviving a ritual drama inflicted by ritual abuse-torturers who used the omnipotent theme of being reborn to satan. Here is herstory:
Exported to South Africa
My mother, a
physician, took me to South Africa where she assisted with medical procedures in
what seemed to me to be a prison. I was seven-eight years old. My father, an
American dentist, had previously taken me to South Africa when I was five. These
trips happened during 1963-1965.
In South Africa
I would be taken to a jail like atmosphere and my mother would sell me to the
men in the jail. The authorities were in on this as well, I remember their
clothes like cop suits, but they got to have sex with me, before the men in the
jail. They had this back room that they let them come one by one. But sometimes
there were more. The authorities would pay my mother, then in return, she would
give them money as well. Then the higher up men, who were mostly white, some
black, would take me to a building, they done vaginal cutting on me. They
sodomized, raped, and tortured me. They did all this chanting, and there was a
plastic model of satan. They put me inside this model with rope tied around my
neck. This is when they told me I would be born to satan, they would do all
these cult things and cut the model … I would fall out, and they would cut the
rope around my neck. And that is when I was reborn to satan. Then I was to marry
this man I had never seen.
My father told
me I was his little girl … blah, blah, blah, and he never wanted anyone to have
me, but yet when everyone came to the house for the ‘meetings’… the main service
was the use of me … I was free to everyone, and he would sell me to anyone. He
had all the money he needed, why did he do me this
way?
I believe there
were a lot of high up men involved in this, for my father to get by with all of
the things that he did. He never seemed to have a problem getting into Africa,
neither did my mother. Upon arrival my mother and I would be met by men, and she
would turn me over to them. They would take me to this building, give me enemas,
and clean my vagina out with a water hose. Then gave me stuff to drink that made
me deathly sick. I will call these men the higher up men. I had to be clean for
them. Then my mother would join them after this procedure. They would rape and
torture me. I would stay there sometimes for days, without food or water. My
fluid would be urine from the men, and they told me this is all the food I would
get is what came out of their penises. After these men were done with me, oh,
and they would take pictures of me having sex with some of them and some of me
alone naked, making me feel my body. But after this it was a dreadful time ….
Just writing
this letter I get flashes and a feeling where I get all cold all over just
before passing out. Or …a better example, like all the blood is draining from my
body. OK, this is all I can do for now.
That crimes of sexualized violence and torture happen in prison is not new. In Canada, a prison guard was sentenced to four-years in jail for sexualized violence against eight young men.[19] In many countries around the world sexualized crimes against women in prison is routine, and in Turkey, Amnesty International has monitored trials of suspected torturers of children who had been in detention.[20] Torture images from Abu Ghraib have been flashed into our and the world’s reality. And, hidden in the writings of women, are details of women officers of the South African state who practiced institutionalized torture by pumping water into women prisoner’s fallopian tubes and administered electric shocks to their nipples.[21] That abuses of power and acts of violence, that even some women engage in, are inflicted by officers of the state or ‘state actor’ torturers can occur within the walls of institutions is not new, what might be new is that pedophilic trafficking and group sexualized violence against a little girl was condoned, was paid for, and happened in the back room of some prison. What might be new is that the total realities of crimes, including ‘non-state actor’ torture, that are committed against children are just starting to be revealed. It is only when a person has the courage to speak, as this woman has, that global communities will come to understand the deep horrifications of human rights abuses and torture embedded within ritual abuse-torture family and like-minded group networks.
The Legacy
of Ritual Abuse-Torture Victimization
For the captive enslaved woman the legacy means on-going victimization that began in childhood. It can mean that if she has children, her children provide the next generation of ritually abused and tortured pedophilic victims. It can mean she will be forced into perpetrating pedophilic violence against her child; it can mean that she will be forced to exploit and traffic her child; it can mean horrors so extreme that she will attempt to ‘forget’ what she is forced to do. If she fails to comply and attempts to exit, she will experience, as women all over the world experience when they attempt to leave violent relationships, on-going threats. She will be stalked, harassed, and can be/is physically, emotionally, and sexually attacked, and feel and be at life-threatening risk.
For the girl or
boy child or youth, who is born into a ritual abuse-torture family or whose
guardian is a perpetrator, it means a day-to-day struggle to survive the violent
organized acts of ritual abuse-torture
victimization and the threats of death if they try to
tell.
And for both,
the captive child or woman victim it means asking ‘Why?’ Why me? Why didn’t
somebody help me when I was little? Why doesn’t somebody help me now? Why can’t
I get the care I need? Why can’t I get justice? Why do the perpetrators get away
with what they do? Why?
A National
and Global First
With the publication of Changing the Landscape: Ending Violence ~ Achieving Equality in 1993, Patricia Freeman Marshall, Co-Chair, along with the other members of the Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women, submitted their findings to the Minister Responsible for the Status of Women. Findings that were based on the voices of women (and some men) who spoke of violent relational horrors endured. The Co-Chairs message stated,
It is
abundantly and indisputably clear that women will not be free from violence
until there is equality, and equality cannot be achieved until the violence and
the threat of violence is eliminated from women’s lives … therefore, … a policy
of zero tolerance must be adopted by all levels of government – as well as
within every organization in society. … that supports the basic human rights of
each individual … [and] a society
that recognizes the importance of the United Nations Universal Declaration of
Human Rights ….
To eliminate the threat of violence and violence from women’s lives we must first be willing to see all the violence that women endure—beginning even in their infancy. On pages 45 to 47 of the report, the Panel addressed for the first time, on a national scale, the reality that ritual abuse and torture was reported to exist in every region of Canada. Not only was recognizing ritual abuse and torture a first for Canada, it was also a first globally. There had not been another governmental report any where in the global community that faced up to the truth and reality about the horrific ‘everyday’ violence that was and is practiced by ritual abuse-torture families/groups.
Marshall, in an interview with reporter Wendy
Cox,[22] made the parallel that the Panel was hearing about
relational terrorism and degrees of violence in women’s lives that compared to
the ‘… torture in a prison of war camp’. We have included a letter from Patricia
Freeman Marshall as Appendix D.
Ritual
Abuse-Torture as a Transnational Reality
No statistics are collected in Canada nor are we aware of another country that statistically acknowledges the reality of ritual abuse-torture victimization and traumatization. To date, Canada has failed to initiate actions of due diligence that would provide equal benefits and protection, under Canadian law, to women who report surviving or enduring ritual abuse-torture. Women tell of asking lawyers to address ritual abuse-torture in the courts however, Canada does not have laws that support their human and legal rights to seek such justice; the ritual abuse-torturers continue to function with impunity. Thus, this specific group of Canadian women, 13 years after the Panel’s report, continues to be oppressed, marginalized, and discriminated against.
Canadian women are not alone in enduring such oppression, marginalization, and discrimination. Presently, we have collected approximately 50 signed statements from persons who report surviving ritual abuse-torture—Canadian and international—from New Zealand, Australia, Israel, The Netherlands, Germany, and the United States. And people continue to contact us seeking information on submitting one-page signed statements. All their stories disclose the similar and repetitive acts of violence endured in childhood, violent acts that, for some, continue in adulthood. Their accounts form the indisputable fact that their ordeals represent a collective of horror that has yet to be acknowledged in Canada or transnationally.
We are being contacted almost daily by women (and a few men) seeking to talk. They reach out to us via e-mail, search our website for information, and identify them-Selves on our map. They telephone us and write to us. They are grandmothers, mothers, and fathers. The oldest is in her 80’s, the youngest a pre-teen. We hear from youth and college students. As we write this paper we are listening to youth and young women who tell us they have tried to tell but are not believed. We have mourned the death of others.
Their testimonial artifacts come as words, stories, drawings, poems, photographs, paintings, letters, newspaper clippings, and copies of pages from their journals. We have heard from women (and a few men) from New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Africa, Germany, The Netherlands, Scotland, England, and from most states or provinces in the United States and Canada. Carers also contact us as they struggle to provide support to women who are over-whelmed by the horrors they have endured and over-whelmed by the pain of exiting and healing. We reach back. We have created educational pamphlets, written papers, given presentations, and had articles published, the latest, attached as Appendix E, was in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police journal, Gazette.[23]
Healing from torture means some days are fairly good and others consist of “double torture”. Because healing includes days filled with flashbacks and body memories that bring reality pain—pain caused by realizing what being tortured feels like. Days filled with humiliating episodes of urinary and fecal incontinence, vaginal and anal bleeding, gagging and vomiting, gross smells and taste from the past, debilitating headaches, and seizure-like responses being re-expressed when their body remembers how it reacted to the violations of the past. Pain filled days invaded by emotional memories of ongoing degradation in response to physical and sexualized tortures, responses that other persons who have survived ‘state actor’ torture also speak of.[24] Reality pains compounded by the fact ritual abuse-torturers continue to function with impunity while they, as victims, struggle to live. While they struggle to be heard, to be believed, and before they can even seek social justice they must also struggle to dismantle the transnational oppression, marginalization, and discrimination that silences the telling of the crime of ritual abuse-torture committed against their humanity.
Global Best
Practice Interventions
Civil society at all levels—from the United Nations and international law, to the community and state laws, to the individual and their ideologies of caring—must open a place at the table of humanity where persons who have survived ritual abuse-torture are free to speak, to be heard, listened to, believed, and cared about so they can heal and contribute to gaining safety for the specific population of children who are presently captive, enslaved, tortured, and suffering ritual abuse-torture.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that ‘recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace … [and reaffirms] the dignity and worth of the human person ….’ For persons who have survived torture—whether inflicted by ‘state’ or ‘non-state actors’—these words have to be translated into practice. For persons who have survived ritual abuse-torture this means that
Ritual
abuse-torture must be recognized as an emerging human rights violation and
identified as a newly acknowledged
form of torture that is inflicted by “non-state actors” onto the girl and boy
infant, toddler, child, youth and the captive enslaved woman.
Best practice
interventions must start at the United Nations global level. This is the reason
we asked, at the beginning of this paper for NGO, organizational, and individual
support. Global level changes we envision include:
1. The Commission on Human Rights acting to recognize that ritual abuse-torture is a human rights violation. International human rights laws that have not addressed the crime of ritual abuse-torture need to place this crime and its perpetrators on the global list of human rights crimes.
- That under the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography and A World Fit for Children ritual abuse-torture needs to be recognized as a most destructive breach of trust and abuse of power on the growth, development, and safety of the girl and boy child because the ritual abuse-torturers are the very persons, families, guardians, or adults on whom the child is dependent within guardian/parent/adult-child relationships.
- The Committee on Torture opening its vision and wisdom to recognize both ‘state’ and ‘non-state actor’ torture as crimes against humanity. Neither can be ignored, both must be eliminated. That ritual abuse-torture be recognized as an emerging form of torture and that the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, or other appropriate conventions, provide a humanitarian forum open to persons who have survived ritual abuse-torture.
- Recognition that under the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and the supplemental Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, ritual abuse-torture is named and explained to exist in some circumstances as a transnational organized crime committed by some families and like-minded individuals/families/groups against the humanity of persons from infants to captive enslaved women.
- That the Committee on Violence Against Women will include ritual abuse-torture as a violent crime that disproportionately impacts on the lives of women and their health.
- That the Special Rapporteurs, whose mandates would
intersect when addressing ritual abuse-torture, will provide education,
guidance, and support in achieving recognition for the human rights violations
and ‘non-state actor’ torture endured by persons so victimized.
Persons Against
Ritual Abuse-Torture
Jeanne Sarson, MEd.
BScN, RN
Linda MacDonald, MEd, BN, RN
International Educators &
Speakers, Consultants,
Researchers, Writers, Activists
Email: flight@ns.sympatico.ca
Phone/Fax: 902-895-2255
361 Prince St, Truro NS, CAN B2N 1E4