Josh joined her at the window. She let him look. He should know that the world was not all lessons and iguanas and Nintendo. It was also this muddy simple boy tethered like an animal.

One hundred twenty-nine women with previously documented histories of sexual victimization in childhood were interviewed and asked detailed questions about their abuse histories to answer the question “Do people actually forget traumatic events such as...

I opened my louvres and looked at Comfort, walking in the heavy rain, crying bitterly. I heard mom saying, Anywhere you want to go, you can, but don’t come back again to this house. Comfort...

Social anxiety results from being around people who are resolutely opposed to who you are.

From Colin A. Ross, 1995: The writer is the brother of the man who co-founded the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. He is writing to WGBH about a program called ‘Divided Memories’, which you may have...

the abuser’s desire to abuse is not created by the child – it is there before the child appears

You’re a survivor because everyday you make a choice not to be governed by their harsh words or actions. No one has the right to take away your happiness.

I would like to turn in my skin and change it for a new epidermis. It feels as if I will never be able to rinse the sadness from my soul. All the while I...

How much our society values its children can be measured by how well they are treated and protected.

The healing process is best described as a spiral. Survivors go through the stages once, sometimes many times; sometimes in one order, sometimes in another. Each time they hit a stage again, they move up...

Allegations of multi-perpetrator and multi-victim sexual abuse emerged to public awareness in the early 1980s contemporaneously with the denials of the accused and their supporters. Multi-perpetrator sexual offences are typically more sadistic than solo offences...

In general, the more dysfunctional the family the more inappropriate their response to disclosure. Never expect a sane response from an insane system.

Aurora, you’re a child, live like one, don’t act like one. Enjoy the innocence, dump the immaturity.

witch hunts” in the 1980s. There were big mistakes made in how some cases were handled, particularly in the earliest years. But even in those years there were cases such as those of Frank Fuster...

The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden; what is forbidden is to write about it.

far more cases (of ritual abuse) end in acquittal” than in conviction.In fact, 58% of the ritual abuse cases in the Finkeihor (1988) study that went to trial resulted in convictions. In the Kelly (1992b)...

Cheryl’s growing awareness of her emotional difficulties was leading her to research multiple personality. As she had learned more about dissociation, she realised just how severe the abuse had been and how much she had...

The very first part in healing is shattering the silence,

By developing a contaminated, stigmatized identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship,...

Mum was pregnant, then there was Sharron. […]I wanted to keep him away from her – but for the wrong reasons. In my head he was mine, he was my special person but, of course,...

Improving the world can be a nasty and ugly and difficult and dangerous business…because when you improve the world, you threaten the entrenched interests of evil people.

Although the terminology implies scientific endorsement, false memory syndrome is not currently an accepted diagnostic label by the APA and is not included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American...

Dissociation is the ultimate form of human response to chronic developmental stress, because patients with dissociative disorders report the highest frequency of childhood abuse and/or neglect among all psychiatric disorders. The cardinal feature of dissociation...

The survivor movements were also challenging the notion of a dysfunctional family as the cause and culture of abuse, rather than being one of the many places where abuse nested. This notion, which in the...

Denial is commonly found among persons with dissociative disorders. My favorite quotation from such a client is, “We are not multiple, we made it all up.” I have heard this from several different clients. When...

Dr. Lois Jolyon West was cleared at Top Secret for his work on MKULTRA. West’s numerous connections to the mind control network illustrate how the network is maintained, not through any central conspiracy, but by...

Last night I dreamt Moses and I were rowing underwater.We could breathe and talk to one another.We rowed past schools of fish and sea anemones and Moses named them for me.”—Jules Finn

Both incest and the Holocaust have been subject to furious denial by perpetrators and other individuals and by highly organised groups such as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and the Committee for Historical Review. Incest...

Think twice before you pull your trouser and rape a woman; she may be your mother, sister or friend, and you know the consequences that follows.

False Memory” for Errors in Memory for Details, Journal: Ethics & Behavior 14(3) pages 201-233, 2004

We raise predators by treating children as prey.

I remember the pain I felt, and wonder why a man who was such an accomplished liar had to tell the truth that day.

Silly you.”Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Learned Author: Anna C. Salter. Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998

You’re a survivor because every day you make a choice not to be governed by their harsh words or actions. No one has the right to take away your happiness

Too afraid to touch anything, I found sitting in the custom made indow cubby the safest place for me to be as I played games with raindrops. Rainy days made the time pass more quickly...

The initial trauma of a young child may go underground but it will return to haunt us.

The most important thing in defining child sexual abuse is the experience of the child. It takes very little for a child’s world to be devastated. A single experience can have a profound impact on...

Today, acknowledgement of the prevalence and harms of child sexual abuse is counterbalanced with cautionary tales about children and women who, under pressure from social workers and therapists, produce false allegations of ‘paedophile rings’, ‘cult...

Other personalities are created to handle new traumas, their existence usually occurring one at a time. Each has a singular purpose and is totally focused on that task. The important aspect of the mind’s extreme...

She had to save herself from every last one of them. All of them, the people at the orphanage, the foster care system, the middle school, they were all outsiders and strangers and a possible...

The witch-hunt narrative is a really popular story that goes like this: Lots of people were falsely convicted of child sexual abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s. And they were all victims of a...

Child abuse damages a person for life and that damage is in no way diminished by the ignorance of the perpetrator. It is only with the uncovering of the complete truth as it affects all...

Youngsters deserve no opinions.

She still remembered sitting for hours as a little girl and pretending to be a hassock. A foot stool. Because if she could just stay very small, and very quiet, her mother would forget she...

Because it is so hard, some people wait until they are in their thirties, forties, fifties, or even older before breaking their silence.

The vast majority of incest begins years before the earliest conceivable age of consent. p4

It felt like I was living in two worlds. There was one world which was a daylight world and another dark world (though I’m not saying that everything bad happened in darkness because it didn’t)....

SCREW CHILDREN! That’s the mantra of the world. Instead of burying them with a national debt, shoving them in shitty schools, drugging them if they don’t comply, hitting them, yelling at them, indoctrinating them with...

You know what happens to me!

What better weapon than the human brain? The human brain was Mrs Twartski’s and Wiezenslowski’s domain. The children who were used were the castaways of the United States government, like dogs abandoned and a vet’s...