Here’s a weird fact: Apparently, on Sunday, “17 cartoonists will join up their child characters to highlight April as Sexual Violence Awareness and National Child Abuse Prevention Month. On this day, Teresa Dowlatshahi’s Frog Applause… Abuse and comics, together again

Thirteen ways to help children who are being abused Explore any and all abuse you have experienced, how it has affected you, and how to deal with it, so that you can share what has… Thursday Thirteen: 13 ways to help children who are being abused

This is a little gem I remember from my childhood of watching Sesame Street: All this time I thought the goat was saying “Everybody get maa-a-a-a-ad!” but it turns out it’s “It ain’t bad to… Abuse really gets my goat!

(I wrote this for a Psych 101 class I took while working at Mills College in 2005. The point of the assignment was to see if we could cite our sources correctly; I used it to explore my own questions about research on recovered/repressed memories, and to respond to the offensive inaccuracies in the textbook and the professor’s refusal to discuss them for more than a minute in class. Imagine how pissed off I was when all he did was check the form of the ending citations and return it! I’ve bolded stuff here that wasn’t emphasized in the original to make it easier on the eyes.)

Over the past two decades, no psychological issue has been embroiled in such controversy, nor so often misunderstood, as that of recovered memories. The definition is constantly shifting; the requirements for validation differ from study to study; and the research is often limited by what could almost be called a lack of imagination.

One barrier to effective research has been the divorcing of sexual abuse from all other forms of what researcher Nanette Auerhahn calls ‘massive psychic trauma.’ (Auerhahn & Laub, 1998) Most information about repressed memory, both in the clinical field and in lay writing, treats it specifically as a possible rare effect of extreme childhood sexual abuse. As a result, it has been tainted with the high-profile controversy around sexual abuse cases, and needlessly politicized. Yet in the areas of war psychology, of Holocaust survivors, and related areas, repressed memories are treated as a common effect of trauma. Even in papers not directly addressing the issue, one frequently finds mention of them, as in this study of the children of Holocaust survivors: ‘In our work collecting oral histories of Holocaust survivors at Yale University, we have heard of other children whose very existence had been ‘forgotten’ by their survivor parents. One Auschwitz survivor recalled being asked by a fellow inmate, upon arrival at a new camp, how her daughter was, to which she responded, ‘What daughter?’ She had forgotten the baby she had given birth to and managed to hide in a bag until an SS officer heard the baby cry and demanded that she hand the bag over to him.’ (Auerhahn & Laub, 1998) Recovered Memory Research

Faked or real animal sacrifice… electric shock… abusive religious and political systems… medical experimentation… forced prostitution… attempted brainwashing… forcing victims to consume urine and feces… programming… burying victims alive… drugging… destroying or perverting family bonds… forcing children to abuse others…. These are some of the hallmarks of ritual abuse.

Ritual Abuse

“Ritual abuse” is defined and used in many different ways. It first rose into the public awareness as satanic ritual abuse in the 1980s. Even now people often associate all ritual abuse with Satanism, even though any system of belief can be (and has been) perverted to justify and create abuse.

“I used to refer to this as “Systematic Repetitive Abuse” in SRA contexts, just to hammer home the point that it wasn’t all due to some bizarre conspiracy…. It’s a human thing to make rituals, we do it all the time. Abusive people make abusive rituals.” – Bob King

Ritual abuse should be distinguished from ritualized abuse. Ritualized abuse does not require a “systematic” component and is merely abuse that takes place in a repeated, formalized manner. It is the difference between the religious rituals associated with Easter, and the mundane ritual of brushing one’s teeth and going to bed. As well as including a political or religious justification, ritual abuse is generally characterized by extreme physical and sexual abuse, and often by taking place within a group of adults, whether it’s a family or a social organization of some kind.

Ritual abuse can be tricky; it often contains the seeds of its own invisibility. That is, a lot of ritual abuse seems designed to make sure the survivors will not be believed. An abuser may don a Mickey Mouse or alien mask because if their young victim ever tries to tell someone that Mickey abused them, they will sound delusional. There has been speculation that at least some of the alien abduction stories out there, especially with the bright lights and the probing, are connected to experiences of ritual abuse. As the Dominion Conquest puts it,

The purpose of ritual elements of the abuse seems threefold: 1.) rituals in some groups are part of a shared belief or worship system. 2.) rituals are used to intimidate victims into silence. 3.) ritual elements (devil worship, animal or human sacrifice) seem so unbelievable to those unfamiliar with these crimes that these elements detract from the credibility of the victims and make prosecution of the crimes very difficult.”⁶

Definitions of Ritual Abuse

It might be more apropos to call this section “Descriptions of Ritual Abuse,” because this kind of abuse consists of a group of characteristics which might not all be present in any given ritually abusive situation. For example:

• “Absolute control over the child
• Mind games
• Abuse of power
• Twisted words that say one thing yet mean another
• Insistence that there are certain right ways to do things
• Absolute thinking about worship
• Cruel savagery against children performed in the name of love.”⁵

According to Safeline, “One definition of ritual abuse is when one or more children are abused in a highly organized way, by a group of people who have come together and subscribe to a belief system which, for them, justifies their actions towards that child. This usually extends into family involvement and may have been practiced as a religion or a way of life for years.” ¹

The Ritual Abuse Task Force of the L.A. County Commission For Women (1989 report) takes a more extreme view, saying that “Ritual abuse usually involves repeated abuse over an extended period of time. The physical abuse is severe, sometimes including torture and killing. The sexual abuse is usually painful, humiliating, intended as a means of gaining dominance over the victim. The psychological abuse is devastating and involves the use of ritual indoctrination. It includes mind control techniques which convey to the victim a profound terror of the cult members…most victims are in a state of terror, mind control and dissociation.”²

By contrast, a similar project taken on in 1995 by The Canberra Women’s Health Centre focused on the purpose of the abuse as well as some political aspects: “Ritual abuse is organized abuse carried out by a group for the purpose of achieving power or making money. The abuse aims to break a person’s spirit and to gain the ultimate in power – absolute control over another human being. Religious or pseudo-religious beliefs are used as part of controlling others. It encompasses deliberate human and biological experimentation, technological mind control conditioning and criminal activity (eg prostitution, drug trafficking, arms dealing).”³

Healing Roads looks at the elements involved in cases of ritual abuse and compares them to similar situations on a larger scale: “In a broad sense, many of our overtly or covertly socially sanctioned actions can be seen as ritual abuse, such as army boot military basic training, hazing, racism, spanking children, and partner-battering…. The term ritual abuse is generally used to mean prolonged, extreme, sadistic abuse, especially of children, within a group setting. The group’s ideology is used to justify the abuse, and abuse is used to teach the group’s ideology. The activities are kept secret from society at large, as they violate norms and laws.”⁴

And Sanctuary Unlimited helpfully isolates some of the basic emotional elements of ritual abuse affecting children:

ControversyRitual Abuse: it’s not what you think

I like to fiddle around with the site’s statistics and see how long people spend here and how they get here. Particularly, which kinds of searches move people to spend more time reading around here,… Government ritual abuse resources

http://shereadsbooks.wordpress.com/2008/04/13/sunday-salon-happily-cataloguing

I don’t know if this counts for Sunday Salon, because it’s “just a newspaper.” But it’s reading! I’ve actually been spending a lot of time reading lately; currently I’m on one of the Georgia Nicolson… Sunday Salon: Rallies and rats

Repressed Memories
A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse
by Renee Fredrickson, Ph.D.
Fireside/Parkside, 1992

As with anything psychological, or medical, or indeed anything in the world, “the more you know about what to look for… the more you find.” Fredrickson’s first client came to her to deal with fourteen years of rape by her father. Her 1970s education as a psychotherapist had not made a single reference to sexual abuse, and she set out to learn more. Eventually, she says, “the appalling lack of available resources for treating sexual abuse influenced me to specialize in this area.”

She found that what she learned working with “very young children applied to adult survivors as well.” As the years wore on, she established clinics in St. Paul, Minnesota and Dallas, Texas, and became a consultant on child abuse to the U.S. Army. This book is one result of her eighteen years of experience in working with sexual abuse survivors around the United States.

Repressed Memories is a tremendous gift. Renee Fredrickson takes on an issue which often seems incredibly obscure, unclear, and mired in political claims, and explains it clearly and directly. This book is an oasis in a desert of wild claims and accusations.

A Sampling

She begins by explaining the phenomenon of repressed memories in a non-sensationalistic way, answering many of the assumptions and questions that people have about repressed memories. I’ll present a few of her ideas here, in question and answer format.

• Recall Memory: These are “normal memories.” Your memory of what you did yesterday – assuming that you remember what you did yesterday – is a recall memory. They are memories that you feel like you experienced directly, vividly, which come with images and feelings and thoughts about the experience. This is the only kind of memory “that requires maturation to be of use” – that is, it’s the kind that people are talking about when they say we can’t remember things that happened before we turn two or three. The other kinds are, actually, accessible to infants.
• Imagistic Memory: These are memories that come in the form of images. They can come as visual flashbacks, slide shows, or flickers of images. The U.S. Army has actually done studies of Army personnel with PTSD who experienced intrusive flashes related to traumatic events, which found that the things they were seeing were always directly related to what they had been doing in the disaster that caused their post-traumatic stress disorder.
• Feeling Memory: These might better be called emotional memories, because that’s the kind of “feeling” involved – as opposed to a physical sensation. Depression and anxiety disorders are often “feeling memories;” it is rare for people to have emotions that are truly coming out of nowhere. Feeling memories also often take the form of a wave of seemingly unrelated emotion, like feeling rage way out of proportion to what is going on around you, or fear at the sight of something seemingly mundane.
• Body Memory: Everyone’s favorite! Body memory comes in the form of physical sensations. They are often confusing, because we may have no way of knowing whether something is a physical illness or injury or whether it is a memory. I have a friend, in fact, who had what appeared to be seizures and was diagnosed epileptic despite not having medical indicators besides seizures. He was put on anti-seizure medication and banned from driving for many years before his seizures slowly disappeared. Later he discovered that what he had been experiencing were body memories from violent electric shocks in his childhood. Fredrickson also notes that “Even when there is little physical pain or intrusion, body memories can occur. Nausea is a frequent physical reaction to sexual abuse. Infants will sometimes spontaneously vomit on their perpetrator, even though they are not being physically hurt by the abuse.”
• Acting-Out Memory: As the author explains it, “Acting-out memory is a form of unconscious memory in which the forgotten incident is spontaneously acted out through some physical action.” She gives the example of a two-year-old who had been physically abused and then adopted into another family, who would hit herself on the left ear whenever she got angry. One of the few things they knew for sure about her abuse was that that ear had been burned with a cigarette when she was only two months old. Acting-out memory can also take the form of survivors blurting out or suddenly writing things about which they had no conscious memory so far – just like any other flashback, except with an eerie “automatic writing” aspect to it.

Why would people repress memories of abuse? It seems like that’s too big a deal to not remember it. 

Perhaps the most important fact she offers in this area is that “the traumatic and the trivial are the two kinds of information your mind represses.”

Tools of Recovery: Repressed Memories

These are some of the major articles sprinkled throughout this blog. Explore and enjoy! Books about supporting the young survivor When Society Becomes An Addict When Society Becomes An Addict: The real story