Cult abuse is about control, domination of another for the gain (financial, social, political) of the cult leaders, and members. But the main purpose of cult abuse is to maintain repression (amnesia/forgetting/unawareness) of adult participants’ severe early trauma. For example, “to control, dominate to . . . gain (financial, . . . and political . . .” advantage--all are means to repress. That is, helplessness, humiliation, and other trauma-created pains are kept unconscious through sadistic rituals. The cult offers regular “fixes” to maintain repression by providing a steady supply of victims to act out on and use for emotional catharsis. For instance, one norm is role reversal, the adult cult members doing to their child victims what was done to the adults when they were small. Supported by cult members through their providing a steady supply of victims to act out on, using role-reversal and emotional catharsis primarily as a means to keep cult members.
By using mental indoctrination, deception, humiliation, intimidation by implanting fear, terror, extensive threats to ensure obedience by members and their families, providing false idols, false hope, knowingly and unknowingly harmful interpretations of the bible or other programming tools.

By using drugs, technology, beating, torture, sex, killing animals and children, confusion, isolation, sensory deprivation, pain, extreme physical discomfort, staging scenes, captivity, and bondage.
For example, a child was tortured, then comforted by a man with kind eyes, who looked like the pictures of Jesus, until the child opened up and trusted “Jesus.” Then the man changed, and with cruelty in his eyes, raped the child.

It can also include spiritual abuse: Examples include teaching that God hates disobedient children, (the one who do not like to participate in ritual activates), that they are born evil, bad or fallen-from-grace, that a God doesn’t care, or is too weak to protect them, or will punish them with torture/Hell, that they are helpless in the face of evil, that their bodies are dirty. Severe abuse includes rituals where children must “marry Satan.”

The main purpose of cult abuse is to maintain repression such as (amnesia/forgetting/unawareness).
Adult participants’ suffer severe early trauma. For example, abuse appears to be about control, domination of victims but these actions are all are means to repress. That is, to repress helplessness, humiliation, and other trauma-created pains that they are kept unconscious through the sadistic rituals. The cult offers regular “fixes” to maintain repression by providing a steady supply of victims to act out on and use for emotional catharsis. For instance, one norm is role reversal, the adult cult members doing to their child victims what was done to the adults when they were small.

Results: PTSD, anxiety, depression, manic depression, severe dissociative disorders, multiple personality disorder, nightmares, panic attacks, suicidal thoughts and acts, violence towards other feeling beings, addictions to wealth, status-seeking, deception, and the compulsion to dominate others; food disorders, cutting and other forms of self-mutilation, abusive relationships, immaturity, insecurity, lack of empathy.

Explanations: Sadistic Cult Abuse
Preliminary Report, Ritual Abuse Task Force Los Angeles County Commission for Women May 15, 1989

CONCISE DEFINITION
Ritual abuse is a brutal form of abuse on children, adolescents, and adults, consisting of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, involving the use of rituals. Ritual does not necessarily mean satanic. However, most survivors state that they were ritually abused as part of satanic worship for the purpose of indoctrinating them into satanic beliefs and practices. Ritual abuse rarely consists of a single episode. It usually involves repeated abuse over an extended period of time.

The physical abuse is severe, sometimes including torture and killing. The sexual abuse is unusually painful, sadistic, and humiliating—intended as a means of gaining dominance over the victim. The psychological abuse is devastating and involves the use of ritual indoctrination, which includes mind-control techniques, mind-altering drugs, and ritual intimidation conveying to victims a profound terror of cult members themselves and the evil spirits they believe cult members can command. Both during and after the abuse, most victims are in a state of terror, mind control, and dissociation, conditions which make disclosure exceedingly difficult.

DESCRIPTIVE DEFINITION
Ritual abuse is usually carried out by members of a group or cult. The purpose of ritual elements of the abuse seems threefold:

1. Ritual elements (e.g. 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.

2. Rituals are used to intimidate victims into silence.

3. Rituals in some groups are part of a shared belief or worship system into which the victim is being indoctrinated.

Many victims are children under the age of six who suffer the most severe and longstanding emotional damage from the abuse. These young victims are particularly susceptible to being terrorized and indoctrinated into the abusers’ belief system. During, and even long after the abuse, victims live in a state of terror and dissociation, and suffer from the lasting impact of mind control techniques. All this makes the initial disclosures of abuse exceedingly difficult, and can make each subsequent disclosure a terrifying and painful experience.

Ritual abuse is known to occur as an integral part of some families in which one or both parents participate in conjunction with an extended family or other group.

Ritual abuse also occurs without the knowledge of parents at preschools, day-care centers, churches, summer camps, and at the hands of babysitters and neighbors. Children are subjected to sexual abuse, ritual intimidation (to terrorize them into silence) .

Many adults who are victims and/or perpetrators of ritual abuse came under the influence of such beliefs and practices in their own childhood or adolescence and function with severe dissociative disorders, including multiple personality disorder. Such adults are often working members of society whose identity as members of satanic or other cults is not known outside the cult. Some perpetrate abuse, infiltrate and/or recruit for the cult in the context of their jobs. Some adults join the cult later in life, enticed by the sexual promiscuity and perversion, the availability of illicit drugs, the promise of money, and a satanic spirituality oriented toward power control and moral license.

DISSOCIATION DSM-III-R 1987
A disturbance or alteration in the normally integrative functions of identity, memory, or consciousness. The disturbance or alteration may be sudden or gradual, transient or chronic. If it occurs primarily in identity, the person’s customary identity is temporarily forgotten, and a new identity may be assumed or imposed (as in Multiple Personality Disorder). If the disturbance occurs primarily in memory, important personal events cannot be recalled (as in Psychogenic Amnesia or Psychogenic Fugue).

The horror and fear experienced by a child who is ritually abused is processed by the child with varying degrees of dissociation as a defense mechanism against the overwhelming pain. Most children who were ritually abused during their pre-school years will have completely dissociated the events within two years of the cessation of the abuse, and will be unable to consciously recall and report what occurred. . . . the severe trauma which, if left untreated, is likely to cause severe emotional problems for the child throughout his life. . . .

POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER
A dissociative disorder triggered by the experience of profoundly traumatic events. The dissociation may be characterized by intrusion (intrusive thoughts, nightmares, hypervigilance) and by denial (inattention, amnesia, and constriction of thought process). (Horowitz M. J., Stress Response Syndromes, 1976.)

Post traumatic stress disorder in adults was first studied in returning war veterans who experienced amnesia and flashbacks of overwhelming traumatic events from their wartime experience. Studies have since been done of children who are exposed to the violence of extreme fear and manifest post traumatic stress disorder as a result. Sexual abuse has been shown to cause post traumatic stress disorder among its victims. If left untreated, this condition often persists long after the abuse occurred.

SRA [Satanic Ritual Abuse] victims suffer usually from post traumatic stress disorder and often experience nightmares or intrusive thoughts. These have elements of ritual violence; yet, due to amnesia regarding the actual abuse, have no idea why they are troubled by such dreams and thoughts.

TRANCE STATE
A dissociative state one enters when hypnotized, in which memory and perception are altered. The dissociative effects of the trance state can also be induced by other conditions such as physical or mental exhaustion, terror, repetitive chanting or rituals, or drugs. Not all individuals are equally susceptible to trance or to dissociation. Research shows that those people who show a high degree of susceptibility to hypnosis are likely to possess some apparent, biological predisposition to it. They are also more likely to have been victims of abuse as children. (Hilgard, 1970; Kluft, 1984; Nash, 1984.) . . . .

Trances also can be induced by another person who functions as a hypnotist. The hypnotist can give post-hypnotic suggestions to an individual in trance to carry out certain carefully defined actions or experience certain emotions or physical sensations after the trance state is over. These actions or emotions are usually triggered by certain discrete cues that have been suggested to the subject while he/she was in trance. Mind control from which many ritual abuse victims suffer is in part a result of having been put into trance states repeatedly and given a complicated series of post-hypnotic suggestions .

Part 2
Ritual Abuse and the Use of Mind Control
Physical, Emotional, and Cognitive Conditions

Mind control is the cornerstone of ritual abuse, the key element in subjugating and silencing its victims. Ritually-abused victims are subjected to a rigorously applied system of mind control. It’s designed to rob them of their sense of free will and to impose upon them the cult-leaders’ will. . . . Mind control is achieved through an elaborate system of brainwashing, programming, indoctrination, hypnosis, and the use of various mind-altering drugs. The purpose of mind control is to compel ritual abuse victims to keep the secret of their abuse, to conform to the beliefs and behaviors of the cult, and to become functioning members. They are to serve the cult by carrying out its leaders’ directives without being detected within society at large. . . .

Satanic cults focus their initial efforts to achieve mind control most frequently and strenuously with children under the age of six. Like developmental psychologists, Satanists understand that people are most susceptible to having their character, beliefs, and behavior molded during this early period of development.

COGNITIVE CONDITIONS
1. LACK OF INFORMATION:
Ritually-abused young children lack information they need to know that much of what their abusers tell them is untrue. They lack the cognitive development to perceive contradictions in some of the lies they are told. They are likely to accept the misinformation offered by cult members as part of their mind-control process.

2. CONFUSION:
Ritually-abused children are confused by the infliction of pain, extreme sexual arousal caused by sexual abuse, incessant directives to do things they know are wrong, extensive lying and deception by cult members, perceived loss of control over their own behavior and the behavior of those around them. Children in such situations long for explanations from adults to reduce their confusion about what is happening to them. The result again is an increased vulnerability to indoctrination as they open themselves to any explanations offered from adults in the cult.

TRANCE STATES
There are many means by which trance states can be achieved with children during the course of ritual abuse. The rituals themselves contain many trance-inducing elements. Chanting and the use of other repetitive sounds or phrases, staring into bright lights, terror, confusion, isolation, sensory deprivation, pain, and other forms of extreme physical discomfort. Trance states are also induced in ritual abuse victims by using hypnosis and hypnotic drugs.
Until memories are surfaced and worked through in a safe environment, survivors of such abuse are still controlled to some extent by these past experiences.

LA County Commission for Women Ritual Abuse Task Force Public Hearing
January 8th Notes.

37 person task force has been meeting for 2 years; pastors, police officers (5), district attorney, ritual survivors, therapists, etc.
Ritual abuse is one of the most serious problems in our country.
After 1-1/2 years of work, the task force published a 30 page report that is now being used across the country.
Very few therapists know about ritual abuse.
Adult survivors are just now coming out. The reason survivors have kept quiet all these years:
It is the healthy way to stay sane?
We received repeated lessons in forgetting torture.
There is a large group of people in this area walking around with no memories.

Study done on Vietnam Vets found:
Those that could dissociate were more intelligent and very easily hypnotized.

Kids do try to tell.
Always a tie-in with a mortuary. Mortuary chapels are good places for rituals and
ceremonies. Bodies are available for abuse and other bodies are easily disposed of. Children used in sacrifices are from the street, breeders, or orphanages. Children are kept in cages to be used in rituals.
Most devastating for the child – child is given an animal or another child to care for. Later the child is made to kill that animal or other child.
The children are put into a circle around one child. She is made to decide which child is sacrificed.
Tools (homemade and exotic torture tools) are used.
How do people actually survive mentally? Child has
some early religious training that child holds onto.
one supportive, loving person in her/his life.
high intelligence.
ability to dissociate.
inner strength.

Excerpted from Ritual Abuse:
what it is, why it happens, how to help, by Margaret Smith, 1993, HarperSanFrancisco, page 2 –

The State of Illinois Public Act #87-1167 Effective January 1, 1993
Be It Enacted by the Legislature of the State of Illinois:

RITUALIZED ABUSE OF A CHILD . . .DEFINITION.
(a) A person is guilty of a felony when he commits any of the following acts with, upon,or in the presence of a child as part of a ceremony, rite, or similar observance.

(1) actually or in simulation, tortures, mutilates or sacrifices any warm-blooded animal or human being;

(2) forces ingestion, injection or other application of any narcotic drug, hallucinogen, or anaesthetic for the purpose of dulling sensitivity, cognition, recollection of, or resistance to any criminal activity;

(3) forces ingestion or external application of human or animal urine, feces, flesh, blood, bones, body secretions, non-prescribed drugs or chemical compounds;

(4) involves the child in a mock, unauthorized or unlawful marriage ceremony with another person or representation of any force or deity, followed by sexual contact with the child;

(5) places a living child into a coffin or open grave containing a human corpse or remains;

(6) threatens death or serious harm to a child, his or her parents, family, pets, or friends which instills a well-founded fear in the child that the threat will be carried out; or

(7) unlawfully dissects, mutilates or incinerates a human corpse.

Information and definition gathered by Ushanda io Elima for AAaCWorldwide.

Let the Truth Be Known!
Advocacy for Victims of Ritual Abuse
http://truthbeknown2000.tripod.com/Truthbeknown2000/index.html

Ritual Abuse Network
http://www.ritualabuse.net/