Growing up in a home of abuse, you struggle with the notion that you can love a person you hate, or hate a person you love. It’s a strange feeling.

Ritualised child sexual abuse is about abuse of power, control and secrecy. Ten years ago many people found it difficult to believe that fathers actually raped their children, yet survivors of such abuses spoke out...

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...

To the men and women who changed Cheryl Hersha’s life, she was a continuation of the research that had first been conducted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Dr. Morton Prince. He...

The interruption did nothing but earn her a similar slap, as I’m sure she knew it would. Sometimes I wondered if my mother spoke up at the wrong time on purpose. As often as we...

interview from Ross E. Cheit about The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children (Oxford University Press, February 2014).In the foreword to your book you mention a book titled Satan’s Silence was...

Like Jocelyn, Survivors often think: * That’s just the way I am * I’m not lovable, that’s why I keep having disastrous relationships * I’m not very clever, that’s why I didn’t do well at...

It is the selfish parents who are to blame. Pay attention, be involved in your children’s lives. They are your legacy, your only hope.

That woman” expected everyone to buy into the lies that she did. Her self-worth depended on it. So would mine.

A person raised in a healthy family is equipped to live a confident and independent life; someone from an unhealthy family is filled with fear and self-doubt. He has difficulty with the prospect of life...

Without realizing it, I fought to keep my two worlds separated. Without ever knowing why, I made sure, whenever possible that nothing passed between the compartmentalization I had created between the day child and the...

The mental health system is filled with survivors of prolonged, repeated childhood trauma. This is true even though most people who have been abused in childhood never come to psychiatric attention. To the extent that...

He loves me so he hurts meTo try and make me good.It doesn’t work. I’m just too badAnd don’t do what I should.My memory has so many different sections and, like all survivors, there are...

The war is against children, and all the other wars are just a shadow of the war on children.

BELIEVE” it! Then I was talking to my friend Kieran and he explained to me in a way that I could PERCEIVE that I was not at fault. No one else could ever do that...

I want to see her naked, ” Mengele said pointing to Marlene. She cried and shock. My mother flung her body in front of Marlene’s and said, “You can’t have her. I love her, my...

Some alters are what Dr Ross describes in Multiple Personality Disorder as ‘fragments’. which are ‘relatively limited psychic states that express only one feeling, hold one memory, or carry out a limited task in the...

As a child abuse and neglect therapist I do battle daily with Christians enamored of the Old Testament phrase “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” No matter how far I stretch my imagination, it...

A substantial minority of DID patients report sadistic, exploitive, and coercive abuse at the hands of organized groups. Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision

So often parents of abused children feel helpless. When a child falls, and scrapes her knees parents can erase the hurt by kissing it and putting a Band-Aid on it, but not so with the...

moral panic”.Salter, M. (2011), Organized abuse and the politics of disbelief.

In 1953, Allen Dulles, then director of the USA Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), named Dr Sidney Gottlieb to direct the CIA’s MKULTRA programme, which included experiments conducted by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new dissociated identities,...

The major abscess in the mind is a lack of acknowledgement of evil.

When fear rules, obedience is the only survival choice.

The discovery that detonated Cleveland is one of Britain’s great contributions to awareness of child abuse. In 1986 and 1987 the Leeds paediatricians Dr Jane Wynne and Dr Christopher Hobbs reported in the Lancet that...

The child who attends school does not remember the abuse that happens at home or via the family; those memories are held in another part of the child’s mind. The child does not even remember abuse...

When we began researching the film on behalf of Channel 4, which had commissioned and paid for it, the response from individual child protection workers inside and outside Cleveland was universally positive. Everyone we met...

illegitimate” sources of satisfaction: experiencing a loss of self-respect for indulging in activities contrary to personal moral standards of conduct; risking the displeasure and misunderstanding of others important to her; and opening oneself to the...

We are God’s chosen people.We are God’s treasured possession.Let us rise in mighty strength to possess our rightful places as God’s children.

In her book claiming that allegations of ritualistic abuse are mostly confabulations, La Fontaine’s (1998) comparison of social workers to ‘nazis’ shows the depth of feeling evident amongst many sceptics. However, this raises an important...

I believe the best service to the child is the service closest to the child, and children who are victims of neglect, abuse, or abandonment must not also be victims of bureaucracy. They deserve our...

Answer me, you good-for-nuthin’ wench!” The pain bit instantly as his hand connected with my cheek. I shook my head in answer to his crazy questions, feeling a rise of warm tears.

For all this talk about us being a nation at war with child abuse, and for all the media hype about witch-hunts and false allegations — and don’t ever let anyone use the word witch-hunts...

Survivors are damaged to different degrees by their experiences. This does not depend on what happened physically. A Survivor who has been raped will not necessarily be more damaged than a Survivor who has been...

Always find the funny.

The Persian rug served as their country with people living injade green jungles and others living in an opal cream sky.They were so light. No one would ever be able to tell thatthey had lived...

The introduction to horrors so young impressed on me just how helpless and vulnerable I was. Parents are supposed to empower their children to live without them but in my family, I wasn’t given permission...

While many experts insisted that children seldom lie about sexual abuse, others claimed that young children often failed to distinguish between fact and fiction and might be susceptible to suggestion and pressure on the part...

Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is...

Political prisoners describe:- extreme physical and emotional torture- distortion of language, truth, meaning and reality- sham killings- begin repeatedly taken to the point of death or threatened with death- being forced to witness abusive acts...

All we think about in the cycle of violence is men. If we miss the oestrogen factor we cannot solve the cycle of violence. We cannot bring peace to the world unless we hold women...

It is worth — given the passage of time — recalling the basic architecture of the Crisis: 121 children from many different and largely unrelated families had been taken into the care of Cleveland County...

When I was 14-15 There was nothing to my lifebut dancing and sexI’d go to night clubs and danceThen I’d meet someone and have sexit was Fine and easynothing to doBUT Think with my bodylike...

The return of the voices would end in a migraine that made my whole body throb. I could do nothing except lie in a blacked-out room waiting for the voices to get infected by the...

To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation—is that good for the world?

When the gates of mockery and abuse is opened, the heart becomes a shock absorber

My goal in going public was not to put my extended family to shame, or to get back at Brian for abusing my sister and me; rather, my mission was to give a face and...

Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory...

Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most...

If you can get to be you, why can’t I get to be me?