Comprehensive Notes on Ritual Abuse-Torture Within Families/Groups
Ritual Abuse-Torture Within Families/Groups
Abstract
Case studies reveal 10 violent thematic issues as components of family/group ritual abuse-torture (RAT) victimization.
Victimization often starts in infancy.
A visual model displays the organization of the co-culture.
"Rituals and ceremonies" normalize pedophilic violence.
Global activism tracks RAT and human trafficking.
RAT is an emerging form of non-state actor torture.
Social solutions include:
Discontinuing language that sexualizes adult-child relationships.
Promoting human rights education.
Keywords
Torture, ritual, abuse, pedophilia, trafficking
Introduction
Authors began studying RAT victimization in 1993 after a call from Sara, a woman planning suicide, who reported being captive in a RAT family/group for over 30 years.
Framework development identified 10 violent themes/behaviors within RAT family/groups:
(a) Neglect and abuse (verbal, emotional, physical, sexual, financial).
(b) Terrorization (violence, death threats for disclosure).
(c) Human-animal violence (bestiality, training to harm animals).
(d) Torture (physical, sexual, mind-spirit).
(e) Rampageous pedophilia.
(f) Necrophilic and pseudonecrophilic acts (drugging, raping).
(g) Forced self-harming behaviors.
(h) Horrifying acts (witnessing child torture and gang rape).
(i) Human trafficking (pornography, drug carrier).
(j) Forced participation in violent organized pedophilic family/group gatherings coded as "rituals and ceremonies."
The framework helped Sara's exit and healing and led to questions about its applicability and representativeness for other RAT victims.
Other Case Studies
Three women from Nova Scotia and friends of a fourth deceased woman shared RAT victimization experiences.
No men came forward.
Demographic Characteristics
Unlike Sara (master’s degree, professional career), others had high school diplomas, college training, or entered the workforce directly.
Sara was single and childless; others were married/divorced with children.
Ages ranged from early 30s to mid-50s.
All relied on government/employee assistance due to victimization's impact.
Sara lived in an apartment; others in mortgaged homes.
All drove cars and had pets (cats/dogs).
Some used computers for connection.
All had personal/professional support systems.
Interview Methodology
Meetings mainly in homes, lasting 2.5-5 hours.
2-4 meetings were sufficient; one woman required 15 meetings over 1.5 years.
119 hours in meetings, 96 hours on e-mail, 27 hours on phone, ~10 hours with spouses/friends.
Few notes, no audio/visual recordings.
Listening to comprehend meaning was key.
Condensed notes were written immediately after and shared for accuracy.
Final typed narratives used pseudonyms.
Finding meaning involved deconstruction and reconstruction of context to be understandable and experientially credible.
Challenging, clarifying, and reality-based questions deconstructed family/group concepts normalizing RAT.
Reconstructing reality meant exposing victims to the perspective that RAT is relational violence.
Case Study Results
Defining Ritual Abuse-Torture
"Ritual abuse" was inadequate; women endured torture and witnessed it.
"Ritual abuse-torture" (RAT) was coined to describe their victimization.
RAT involves pedophilic parents, transgenerational family, guardians, and like-minded adults who abuse, torture, and traffic children.
They organize violent group gatherings using "rituals and ceremonies."
Girl children may become captive and exploited adults.
Congruencies
The Model of Ritual Abuse-Torture organized violent thematic issues and provided a holistic perspective of their lives inside RAT families/groups.
Perpetrators included parents and extended kin, as well as known and unknown adults.
The women spoke of the superiority of the RAT family/group and the concept that perpetrators harm with intentionality.
Inflicting violence maintained the perpetrator’s goals of totalitarianistic power and control, ensuring silence and secrecy and facilitating ongoing violent pedophilic entertainment and pleasure.
The term co-culture was used because in all cases the perpetrators functioned “invisibly” within mainstream society.
Within their communities, they were professionals, business people, volunteers, local politicians, and/or active members in church organizations.
In other words, the perpetrators manipulated their fit within mainstream society while functioning within the co-culture of the like-minded RAT family/group locally, nationally, and/or transnationally.
Living “within three realities at once” was how one woman described the layering of the family/group’s community face, the family face of everyday life, and the insider face that victimized children were compelled to navigate (Sarson & MacDonald, 2005).
Besides manipulating a community fit, all the case studies were rife with everyday family life experiences of child neglect and abuse.
When describing the secretive insider face, the acts of violence crossed into the realm of organized family/group torture, consisting of the the- matic issues also identified in the Model.
During the process of “getting out” and attempting to heal, the women’s narratives included various forms of revictimization.
During hospitalization, one woman reported being raped by a psychiatric intern, another spoke of “consensual” sex with the therapist, and Sara spoke of severe forms of violence that included torture and entrapment by professional female counselors, one of whom she considered connected to the family.
Such revictim-ization involves abuses of power and trust as identified in one of the outer rings of the Model.
All indicated that healthy caring, and safe and effective support was difficult to obtain, a position that was mirrored in the findings of the Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women (1993).
Variations
Sara and one woman spoke of infant victimization; others believed it began in toddler/preschool years.
Exclusion age/reasons varied:
Grandfather's death (group leader).
Growth/development (menstruation, impregnation risk).
Replacement by sibling.
Alternative norms existed (Hoebel, 1960, p. 172), providing choices within the same situation.
Common norm: violent pedophilic family/group gatherings.
Variation in violence patterns.
Voyeurism as one child degraded another.
One woman described her pedophilic rape as being “presented to the bishop” as a preschooler of 3 or 4 years of age. She did not know whether “the bishop” was an actual cleric or a code word for the pedophile’s erect penis.
Another stated the terrorization of the “formal ritu-als” began with human-animal cruelty. Seeing a chicken’s head cut off and witnessing the headless chicken flapping about was translated to mean that she would have her head cut off if she did not comply with the perpetrators’ demands.
Ongoing Victimization
Not all women felt they had exited.
Sara was a captive adult; another felt partially captive.
Captivity involved giving half her salary to the family.
Sara experienced financial abuse (giving paychecks to father, rationed groceries).
Perpetrators used tactics to maintain contact and access to the next generation.
It was difficult to ascertain whether the children of some of the women inter-viewed had been harmed when young, as the women stated they only began to understand their victimization later in life, when their children were older or young adults.
Several women openly discussed their concerns, realizing they had left their children with family members when they were infants or toddlers.
Predation was a common tactic used to control the victimized.
Sara and another woman reported being stalked, enduring worksite harass-ment, and experiencing periodic physical and sexual assaults.
Stalking included being followed, receiving harassing telephone messages, and experiencing threats delivered in various ways, such as having intimidating “traitor” notes left on the windshield of her car.
These reports are not unusual considering that on average, in Canada, more than 1 in 10 females over the age of 15 reported being stalked in such a manner that they feared for their or another person’s life (Statistics Canada, 2005).
Answers were gained to the three previously identified questions.
The 10 violent themes/ behaviors identified with Sara were generally representative of the vic- timization of the other four women.
All the women’s narratives presented a collective pattern of RAT victimization, but on a minute scale.
To gain a broader scope, connection with more people who self-identified as having endured RAT was required.
Local to Global Activism
Efforts focused on exposing RAT as a human rights violation and non-state actor torture.
Non-state torture includes family, non-kin, or organizations outside the state (Amnesty International UK, 2000).
Reaching a global population of victims required various opportunities, including a panel at the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in 2004.
61 people from six countries sent over 400 pieces of information describing RAT ordeals, displayed in portfolio books.
RAT and Human Trafficking
Global tracking of transnational RAT occurrence began in 2003 via a website with a RAT Prevalence Guestmap.
The Guestmap represents 123 persons who placed their icons between April 23, 2003 and May 1, 2004.
Using the Guestmap, they communicate via e-mail or telephone, send written information, contribute written feedback on educational resources and presentations, and provide further information, such as naming the destination countries they remember being trafficked to.
Case Studies and Human Trafficking Patterns
Sara described local, national, and transnational patterns reaching into Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the United States, and Mexico.
Two women described transnational experiences limited to Nova Scotia, the United States, and Greece.
Two women defined trafficking as local family/groups only.
One suspected her father’s behaviors were influenced by contacts made during his sea voyages.
All women identified harm by both male and female perpetrators.
Forms of Human Trafficking Within RAT Families/Groups
RAT families/groups may participate in human trafficking, one of the most profitable illegal businesses (U.S. Department of State, 2004).
Transportation, trafficking, and exploitation occurs:
(a) Within the home.
(b) To local settings (warehouses, offices, barns, studios).
(c) To other RAT groups (locally, regionally, nationally, transnationally).
(d) When “rented out” to a pedophilic outsider.
(e) When forced to work the street because their body has developed, making them unmarketable to pedophiles.
(f) When used in child pornography.
(g) When forced to sell drugs or be a carrier for money laundering or gun smuggling.
(h) When forced to clean the homes of members of the family/group as part of labor enslavement practices.
Ritual Abuse-Torture: Misopais and Ritualism
Misopais
Misopais (Greek mis = hatred, pais = children) is the attitudinal root supporting violence against children, similar to misogyny's role in violence against women.
Perpetrators know what they do is a crime.
Ritualism
Understanding RAT families/groups requires understanding how they function, including comprehending how they manipulate ritual- isms for a complex array of purposes: They follow the ritualisms of their profession; as mothers, fathers, and kin, they present to the community in normative family ways; as volunteers, members of community groups, or mainstream church-goers, they skillfully manipulate community ritual- isms to their advantage, hiding behind good people and good causes.
Socialized sexual victimization and aggression enforce gender roles.
Group ritualisms maximize indoctrination, socializing girls into victim roles and boys into aggressor roles.
Group rituals present destructive ordeals, leading to disconnection, out-of-body experiences, dissociation, and/or fragmentation.
Regardless of the sociocultural nationality of the families/groups that have been reported, ritualisms within the co-culture organize their invisible violent community and contain variations of the same thematic issues/ behaviors identified by the women.
Commonly, these gatherings involve participants in the positions of leader(s), audience of like-minded partici-pants, and chosen victim(s).
One woman's narrative:
Father was "the devil" in the ritual circle.
Adults wore masks or robes.
Forced to drink wine, tied to a plank, smeared with feces/blood.
Grotesque sexualized acts and torturing occurred.
The perpetrators' laughter still haunts me, the feelings of being humiliated returns . . .
*
Pedophilic perpetrators assert power over the child, normalizing violent relational pedophilia.
Perpetrators distort reality using omnipotent themes and coded language.
"Marriage to Satan" can represent oral rape and forced semen ingestion.
Awareness of coded language is essential to unravel mind-spirit tortures.
Human-animal cruelty compounds reproductive harms of sexualized torture ritualisms.
Perpetrators manipulate beliefs, causing fear of producing animal babies.
Narratives of bestiality with large animals were encountered.
Pornographic photos deepen wounds.
Police have seized DVDs of children forced into bestiality (Canadian Press, 2004) with parents the alleged perpetrators and pornographers (Blais, 2007).
People in industrialized countries such as Canada, the UK, and the United States manufacture 90% of pedophilic pornography, much of it intrafamilial (Lamberti, 2002) and homemade (Gooderham & Laghi, 1996; Sher, 2006).
Furthermore, infants in diapers (Canadian Press, 1996; Smith, 2003) with umbilical cords still attached (Dimanno, 2003) can be victims.
And 20% of pedophilic pornography viewed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Child Exploitation Unit involves torture and bondage (Caswell, Keller, & Murphy, 2006).
Perpetrators further distort reality with drugs, weapons (guns, knives, ropes, whips), and physical tortures.
Victims report whipping, burning, cutting, hanging, beatings, telephono, falanga, and water torture.
Electric shock, being tied down, caged, denied nourishment or access to a bathroom, smeared with or forced to eat their or perpetra-tor’s body fluids, choked, and hooded gives insight into some of the physical tortures perpetrators inflict to satisfy their need for sadistic pleasure and entertainment.
Reported sexualized tortures include forced nakedness; continuous prolonged family/group rapes; rapes with knives, hot pokers, and lit candles (cut and burned); rapes with guns, sticks, or other objects; pseudonecrophilic rapes; bestiality; and the taking of pornographic pictures.
Victimized children may be forced to harm others or witness harm.
Emotionally objectified, laughed at, humiliated, degraded, and dehumanized, these mind-spirit tortures were combined with physical and sexualized tortures that forced out-of-body, disconnective, and dissociative survival responses that altered or fragmented the victimized child’s relationship to and with herself.
Intensification rites sharpen community solidarity (Goldschmidt, 1971).
RAT gatherings re-energize like-mindedness, reinforce cohesiveness and belonging, and justify misopaisic attitudes normalizing torturous pedophilia.
Ritualized gatherings strengthen ties with other RAT groups, giving rise to human trafficking networks.
A drawing depicts a violent ritualized pedophilic family/group gathering.
Two girls (ages 8 and 6) are serially group molested and “raped and raped and raped” (orally, vag-inally, and anally) by male and female members.
Scribbled lines represent their blood.
Circles, candles, and stars are symbolic props.
The drawing is generally representative of the narra-tives attesting to the violent ritualized group enculturation that occurs in childhood within the co-culture of RAT families/groups.
These families/groups use and abuse the power of destructive enculturation embedded in ritualized group processes because such enculturation maintains group membership, provides ongoing child victims, and gathers financial or other benefits when the perpetrators are involved in criminal activities such as human trafficking and pornography.
Destructive enculturation promotes the belief there is no way out or that the victim is both victim and perpetrator, causing silence.
This belief is instilled when a child is forced to harm another.
Some children remain involved as adult perpetrators or suppliers.
Intergenerational family involvement in organized crime is a reality repeatedly seen in other family-centered organized crime groups.
Child or adult family members face a painful struggle if they try to exit.
Even victimized adults still struggle to be heard and believed for risk of being labeled mentally ill or crazy, adding more injury to their struggles.
Conclusion
Psychopathy is found in 1% of the general population and “that about 20 to 25% of men who persistently abuse and batter their partners are psychopaths” (Babiak & Hare, 2006, p. 286); maybe the answer lies in this reality.
Psychopaths can be parents.
Three spoke of their father’s violence against their mothers, often compounded by alcoholic rage.
The two mothers were considered not to be involved in RAT.
Sara stated that alcohol was not present in her house- hold. Although her mother actively participated in inflicting RAT vic- timization, she was still subjected to misogynistic and physical violence.
Could it be that ritual abuse-torturers have remained so invis-ible that they have yet to be considered a specific psychopathic group within society?
When exposed, might they fall into the category of being sadistic human predators?
Recognizing RAT as an Emerging Form of Non-state Actor Torture
RAT victims have endured brutal crimes against their humanity.
One transformative solution is to recognize RAT as an emerging form of non-state actor torture.
Canada lacks laws addressing torture by non-state actors or criminalizing RAT.
Civil and legal right to name the crime remains unattainable.
The Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women (1993) reported RAT occurrence in every region of Canada.
The Canadian legal system takes the existing provisions perspective that torture committed by non- state actors, including ritual abuse-torturers, can be addressed under existing sections of the Criminal Code. That is, acts of torture are tried as sexual assault, assault with a weapon, or kidnapping.
For a crime involving torture to remain unnamed, misnamed, and prosecuted as sexual assault or kidnapping is an under-acknowledgement of the severity of the crime.
The necessity of differentiating acts of torture from abuse was highlighted when Governor Granholm signed legislation that, for the first time, made torture a criminal act in Michigan. This legislation was enacted because prosecutors were unable to hold a husband accused of torturing his blind, diabetic wife accountable because no law against tor-ture existed in Michigan (Watson, 2006).
How many children have suf-fered acts of non-state actor torture, including RAT, without triggering legal and social intervention?
Accurately naming the crime of RAT is about naming reality.
Naming explains the severity of victimization and traumatization responses.
Naming reveals the understandable need for specialized care, just as it is recognized that specialized care is required for persons who have survived state actor torture.
Also, if the attitude of misopais is to be brought out into the open, it is time to fully name the extensive violence a child can be subjected to within adult-child relationships, including parental and guardianship ones.
Stopping the Use of Language that Sexualizes Adult-Child Relationships
Another solution is to stop using language that sexualizes adult-child relationships.
Language communicates cultural components and worldview; it carries meaning and delivers concepts, beliefs, values, attitudes, and perceptions.
Constructively used, language can help a child to understand her or his relationship with herself or himself, to nurture awareness of her or his emotional feelings, to develop emotional intelligence (Barnet & Barnet, 1998), and to safely situate herself or himself in relationships with others.
Language constructs a truthful reality when it names reality cor-rectly.
Language used destructively, as within the co-culture of RAT fam-ilies/groups, is distorting and enculturating by encoding and normalizing violence within adult-child relationships.
Distorting language is used by perpetrators to keep a child captive, to keep them from learning that what is being done to them is wrong and criminal.
Using distorting language is a protection-from-detection tactic of perpetrators to ensure that if the child tries to speak to outsiders, their conversation will likely be misun-derstood.
For instance, as a child Sara was taught to “suck a lollipop”— lollipop meaning penis.
Her father and others coded their pedophilic oral raping of her by teaching her distorted language that outsiders would most likely misunderstand.
As a result of the distorted and destructive use of language, the child’s comprehension of reality is severely manipulated, misshaped, and sexualized.
When mainstream society also uses language that delivers misleading, distorting, and sexualized messages, then the victimized child’s distor-tions are easily reinforced.
Consider statements such as the following:
Mr. X, a nurse, was arrested for having oral sex with a minor;
Ms. V, a teacher of 10 years, was charged for having sex with a 12-year-old student;
Mr. C was jailed for sex crimes against his daughters.
In each scenario, the language used is deceiving, distorting, and sexualized as it names the pedophilic assaults or rapes as sex.
A clearer message would be delivered to victimized children and adults if these messages were stated as the following:
Mr. X was arrested for the oral rape;
Ms. V was charged for raping a student; or
Mr. C was jailed for rape crimes.
Dismantling the centuries old misopaisic attitude that reinforces pedophilic violence as sex or sexual will make it more difficult for perpetrators such as ritual abuse-torturers to function with impunity.
Thus, the transforma-tive support that society can offer is to use language that names pedo-philic violence for the crime that it is; pedophilic violence should never be called sex.
Clearly and truthfully naming the behaviors of ritual abuse-torturers is essential as it offers persons who had been victimized the language to name the atrocities they endured.
As one women stated, “Abuse is a more benign word than torture, but torture is the correct term for what I experienced.”
Promoting Human Rights Education
“I’m a person? Nobody ever told me this before!” These were Sara’s comments when informed she was a human being with rights and responsi-bilities.
These concepts were extremely difficult for her to internalize.
For over 30 years, all she ever heard was “You’re good for nothing; slut, whore; you’re nothing but garbage.”
Sara and other victimized women spoke of being treated “like animals” by their parents, some of whom were ritual abuse-torturers and some who were not.
One woman described how her pedophilic father tortured her, although it was her mother whom she identi-fied as the parent connected to the RAT group. She said: My degradation was so profound there were times I didn’t even feel human; I felt like an animal, I felt like a pile of shit . . . . I was down in the basement with my hands tied together, a rope around my neck, in a cage hanging from the ceiling. My father used to put me there . . . with the rope placed around my neck in such a way that if I caused the cage to swing too much the noose would tighten around my neck. . . . Sometimes before putting me into the cage, my father threw food onto the basement dirt floor forcing me to eat like an animal, or sometimes he’d put canned dog food in a white china saucer and force me to eat it like a dog. I broke it [the saucer] and I remember my mother got angry at me. There was a bucket of pee that he’d force me to drink. . . .
Torturers intentionally attempt to destroy the personality of the person they victimize. This constitutes some of their pleasure.
To counter such dehumanization, a third solution is generalized interventions that promote human rights education at all levels of schooling, beginning in the earliest grades.
Such interventions would offer insights to the victimized school- aged child, providing them an opportunity to recognize that RAT victim-ization is a human rights violation, a form of torture, and is not their fault.
Human rights education could help expose all forms of violence, expose misopais, educate mainstream society, and contribute toward building a more empathic, responsive, and humane society.
Based on the provided document, here’s an explanation of the roles and mechanisms involved in family/group ritual abuse-torture (RAT):
What role do family and community members play in facilitating or perpetuating ritualistic abuse?
Family Members: Parents, extended kin, and guardians are directly involved as perpetrators. They inflict neglect, various forms of abuse (verbal, emotional, physical, sexual, financial), and torture. They also force participation in violent organized pedophilic gatherings disguised as “rituals and ceremonies.” Some family members facilitate human trafficking, using victims for pornography, drug carrying, or labor enslavement.
Community Members: The co-culture of perpetrators often functions invisibly within mainstream society. They manipulate their fit within communities—posing as professionals, business people, volunteers, local politicians, and active members in church organizations—to hide their activities. This manipulation helps them avoid detection and maintain access to victims.
How do these groups use ideology, coercion, and control to manipulate victims and maintain secrecy?
Ideology: RAT families/groups promote the superiority of their group, instilling the belief that perpetrators are intentionally harming victims for totalitarianistic power and control. They use coded language and omnipotent themes to distort reality, such as “marriage to Satan” to represent oral rape and forced semen ingestion. They manipulate beliefs to cause fear, such as the fear of producing animal babies through bestiality.
Coercion: Victims are terrorized through violence and death threats to prevent disclosure. They are subjected to horrifying acts, such as witnessing child torture and gang rape. Coercion extends to financial abuse, stalking, worksite harassment, and physical/sexual assaults to maintain captivity and control.
Control: Perpetrators maintain control through various tactics, including:
Forced self-harming behaviors: Victims are compelled to engage in self-destructive acts.
Human-animal violence: Training to harm animals and witnessing animal cruelty.
Exploitation: Victims are used in child pornography, forced to sell drugs, or become carriers for money laundering and gun smuggling.
Manipulation of ritualism: Group rituals maximize indoctrination, socializing girls into victim roles and boys into aggressor roles. These rituals lead to disconnection, out-of-body experiences, dissociation, and fragmentation, reinforcing the victim’s dependence on the group.
Secrecy is maintained through these methods of coercion and control, along with the manipulation of community perceptions and the use of distorting language to ensure that victims' attempts to communicate outside the group are misunderstood or dismissed.
Based on the provided document, here’s an even more detailed explanation of the roles and mechanisms involved in family/group ritual abuse-torture (RAT):
What role do family and community members play in facilitating or perpetuating ritualistic abuse?
Family Members:
Direct Perpetrators: Parents, extended kin (grandparents, aunts, uncles), and guardians are the primary abusers, directly inflicting various forms of abuse and torture.
Types of Abuse: This includes:
Neglect: Failing to provide basic needs (food, shelter, hygiene).
Verbal and Emotional Abuse: Constant belittling, threats, and psychological manipulation.
Physical Abuse: Hitting, burning, and other forms of physical harm.
Sexual Abuse: Rape, molestation, and exploitation.
Financial Abuse: Controlling resources and exploiting the victim’s finances.
Forced Participation: Family members force victims to participate in violent, organized pedophilic gatherings, which are disguised as “rituals and ceremonies.” These events normalize and enforce the abuse.
Human Trafficking: Some family members are involved in human trafficking. They use victims for:
Pornography: Creating and distributing child pornography.
Drug Carrying: Forcing victims to transport drugs.
Labor Enslavement: Making victims perform forced labor within the family or group.
Community Members:
Co-Culture of Perpetrators: The perpetrators often function “invisibly” within mainstream society, maintaining a facade of normalcy.
Manipulation of Community Roles: They manipulate their public image by:
Occupations: Holding positions as professionals, business people, and local politicians.
Volunteer Work: Participating in community service to appear benevolent.
Religious Affiliations: Actively participating in church organizations to gain trust.
Hiding Activities: This manipulation helps them to:
Avoid Detection: Preventing suspicion and investigation from authorities.
Maintain Access to Victims: Ensuring continued access to vulnerable individuals.
How do these groups use ideology, coercion, and control to manipulate victims and maintain secrecy?
Ideology:
Belief in Superiority: RAT families/groups promote the idea that they are superior to outsiders, fostering a sense of elitism and entitlement.
Intentional Harm: They believe that harming victims is justified to maintain power and control.
Distorted Reality: Coded language and omnipotent themes are used to warp the victim's perception of reality. Examples include:
"Marriage to Satan": Representing oral rape and forced semen ingestion as a sacred act.
Bestiality Fears: Manipulating beliefs to create fear of producing animal offspring.
Coercion:
Terrorization: Victims are threatened with violence and death to prevent them from revealing the abuse.
Horrifying Acts: Forcing victims to witness or participate in extreme acts of violence, such as:
Child Torture: Witnessing other children being tortured.
Gang Rape: Being subjected to or witnessing gang rape.
Financial Coercion: Controlling the victim’s finances to ensure dependence.
Stalking and Harassment: Monitoring and harassing victims to maintain control.
Control:
Forced Self-Harm: Victims are compelled to engage in self-destructive behaviors as a form of control and punishment.
Human-Animal Violence: Training victims to harm animals and forcing them to witness animal cruelty to desensitize them to violence.
Exploitation:
Pornography: Using victims in child pornography to create a permanent form of control and shame.
Drug Trafficking: Forcing victims to sell or transport drugs.
Money Laundering and Gun Smuggling: Using victims as carriers in illegal activities.
Manipulation of Ritualism:
Indoctrination: Group rituals are used to indoctrinate victims, reinforcing the group’s ideology and the victim's role within it.
Gender Roles: Socializing girls into victim roles and boys into aggressor roles.
Dissociation: Rituals induce disconnection, out-of-body experiences, and dissociation, making victims more compliant.
Secrecy:
Coercion and Control: Secrecy is maintained through the use of coercion and control, ensuring that victims are too afraid to speak out.
Manipulation of Community Perceptions: Perpetrators maintain a positive public image to avoid suspicion.
Distorting Language: Using coded language to ensure that any attempts to communicate outside the group are misunderstood or dismissed, thereby protecting the perpetrators.
In summary, RAT families/groups rely on a combination of ideological manipulation, coercive tactics, and strict control to subjugate victims and maintain secrecy. Family members play direct roles as abusers and exploiters, while community members unknowingly support the abuse through their ignorance or manipulation by the perpetrators.