Eating disorders are prevalent among women who were sexually abused as children. They seem to have components of other symptoms such as obsessions, compulsions, avoidance of food, and anxiety, and they primarily include a distorted...

One is that if women’s sexuality in Africa wasn’t under assault, if women were able to say no, if women weren’t subject to predatory attacks by men, or predatory behavior generally, then you would have...

In all the interviews I have done, I cannot remember one offender who did not admit privately to more victims than those for whom he had been caught. On the contrary, most offenders had been...

The church may update its techniques and methods, but it is always in service of the institutional organism. This is one of the reasons why the pedophile priest issue is and will remain an endemic...

As in so many cases of sexual abuse within the family, it is much more complicated than had it been done by a stranger.

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...

Don’t put your child at risk. Limit unsupervised one-on-one time between your child & another adult or another child.

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...

…in my wildest, most indulgent dreams, we only hear about sexual assault & abuse in history books.

Young girls frequently report that their early sexual experiences were coerced. In a study in South Africa, 30 percent of girls report that their first sexual intercourse was forced. In rural Malawi, 55 percent of...

The asylum, and later the national health service, warehoused thousands of patients made mad by the intrusions of a sexual predator. But these institutions had been dominated by the discredited Freudian fantasy that sexual abuse...

The odd sensation I had while cooking would often last through the meal, then dissolve as I climbed the stairs. I would enter my room and discover the homework books I had left on the...

The thought had occurred to me as I was flying to Salt Lake City earlier that day that Ted Bundy might offer to let me stay in his apartment” (p. 74).(Loftus testified as a defense...

Culture alone cannot explain the phenomena of such high rates of eating disorders. Eating disorders are complex, but what they all seem to have in common is the ability to distract women from the memories,...

I was about thirteen when I started letting boys feel me up.

Are Child Molesters Really Just Victims Themselves? “All victims are offenders,” one professional challenged me at a conference, “and all offenders are victims. How does your work address that?”My work doesn’t address that because I...

Violators cannot live with the truth: survivors cannot live without it. There are those who still, once again, are poised to invalidate and deny us. If we don’t assert our truth, it may again be...

She was so upset about a blog that maybe a total of six people read yet had no compassion for her granddaughters who had suffered the physical and emotional pains of sexual abuse and whose...

The underlying attitude comes bursting out of his words: He believes his wife is keeping something of his away from him when she doesn’t want intimate contact. He sees sexual rights to a woman as...

You’re not worthy” is one of them.

By the time Cheryl Hersha came to the facility, knowledge of multiple personality was so complete that doctors understood how the mind separated into distinct ego states,each unaware of the other. First, the person traumatized...

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...

Studies conducted in a city in Zimbabwe found that half of reported rape cases involve girls less than 15 years of age and that girls are most vulnerable to sexual abuse by male relatives, neighbors...

The themes that exercised the minds of survivor movements and their allies within the health and welfare professions generated a political project: how to revolutionise medical and judicial approaches to injured adults and children, how...

I became skilled at covering my tracks, filling in the blanks. Sometimes the blanks were never filled. At other times, I would recall places where I had been or things I had done as if...

He says, “I would walk around the township and I could point them out, which girls had been abused. You could see it in them. There’s a luminosity to incest. The taboo is so strong...

The data on organised abuse has been simplified or distorted in an attempt force it to conform to mechanical psychological models of dissociative obedience or else to the psychiatric framework of ‘paedophilia’. Psychopathology alone is...

At one point in my life I was a disappointment. I have popped pills, drugs, cheated, lied, and killed. But, at this moment in my life, I am very successful because not one of those...

But in any case, validity, offender self-reports have dubious validity, especially when the offender’s self-interest is at stake. The only rule for deception in sex offenders I have ever found is this: If it is...

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...

The very first part in healing is shattering the silence,

The central attitudes driving the Drill Sergeant are:I need to control your every move or you will do it wrong.I know the exact way that everything should be done.You shouldn’t have anyone else — or...

Games where someone wants to touch your body where your swimsuit covers or they ask you to touch their body where their swimsuit covers. Those body parts are private. No one is allowed to touch...

The question that remains unanswered and keeps coming to the fore is ‘Are the punishment schemes for child sex and sexual abuse deterrent in nature? Amidst ongoing debates in most countries about capital punishment as...

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...

But no matter how much evil I see, I think it’s important for everyone to understand that there is much more light than darkness.

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...

During this hour in the waking streets I felt at ease, at peace; my body, which I despised, operated like a machine. I was spaced out, the catchphrase my friends at school used to describe...

The silence was killing me.And that’s all there ever was. Silence. It was all I knew. Keep quiet. Pretend nothing had happened, that nothing was wrong. And look how well that was turning out.

Like the psychological model outlined above, the psychiatric understanding of ’organised paedophilia’ is a framework that is focused primarily on individual psychological factors and overlooks the role of violence in criminal groups and the contexts...

witch hunters,” as those on this list soon came to describe themselves, were increasingly activists who used the internet to exchange information and ideas. Jonathan Harris may have done more than anyone else to disseminate...

Imagine, pretend, and play so you can become anyone you want to be. You don’t need to be afraid.

Theirs was the eternal youth of an alternating self, a youth with the constant although unfulfilled promise of growing up

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...

Abuse? Ah. Such problems, even with time, do not go away on their own. They must be addressed. André Chevalier

My body was a Pandora’s box of aches and pains. When Grandpa died all the ailments came jumping out. I was forever twitching and shaking. I had a persistent sore throat and had difficulty swallowing...

killing off these hormones and liberate the person from their vicious influence” (…) I say it is a prejudice because part of what it means to be a mentally healthy and well adapted individual involves...

Thank goodness it wasn’t real sex.

I think I just said it, but I think it’s worth repeating. They gave me hope that there is good in the world out there. There really is. It really does exist. Regardless of how...

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...