What’s so special about ‘ritual abuse’?

Recently we’ve been discussing the “Fresh Start Foundation”, an organisation whose stated goal is to undermine the work of the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, and whose harassment of adult sexual abuse survivors seems to indicate that they’re also keen to co-opt or oust the IICSA.

It’s difficult to imagine why an organisation which is ostensibly meant to support survivors of sexual abuse would want to undermine the work of inquiries which are intended to assist those survivors, until one begins to really look at the FSF’s promotional material.

Billing themselves as “The People’s Independent Child Sexual Abuse Inquiry” (as opposed to the other kind, which presumably are neither “the people’s” nor “independent”?), they state:

Fresh Start Foundation Ltd, a not for profit company, is delighted to announce that we, together with partners, will be rolling out a programme of child sexual abuse & Satanist ritual abuse awareness road shows throughout Scotland from Spring 2018, with the message that we will not leave any Victims & Survivors behind.

The lack of engagement with the Scottish Government’s CSA Inquiry, speaks volumes that Victims & Survivors are suffering in silence in large numbers. We are inviting you to engage with us so that together we can reach out to Victims & Survivors, to empower them by giving them a voice, so that they do not have to suffer in silence any more.

Clearly, a “People’s Independent” inquiry is one which centres primarily upon that old bugaboo of the conspiranoid child sex abuse industry, “Satanic ritual abuse”. Forget regular old child sexual abuse. If you haven’t been “ritually abused”, you’re nowhere, baby.

What’s so special about “Satanic ritual abuse”?

What makes one kind of child sexual abuse more important than another, to the point where a group like FSF would deliberately attack survivors of one kind in order to privilege the other?

To explore this, we turned to the Dysgenics blog, former stomping grounds of HR commenter Justin Sanity. In an article titled ‘What is Ritual Abuse?‘, he points out that the way one defines the term “ritual abuse” is critical to understanding what the SRA-obsessed FSF conspiraloons are up to.

The term “ritual abuse” was invented by Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazdor, co-author of the 1980 book Michelle Remembers.

Justin wrote:

Pazder had used the term “satanic ritual abuse” to describe Michelle’s alleged experiences in the book, and that is the only version of the term “ritual abuse” which existed in the first years following its publication in 1980. …

According to the Wikipedia entry for Lawrence Pazder, “at a professional conference in Richmond, Virginia in 1987, Pazder defined ritual abuse of children as “repeated physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual assaults combined with a systematic use of symbols and secret ceremonies designed to turn a child against itself, family, society and God.” Pazder noted that “the sexual assault has ritualistic meaning and is not for sexual gratification”.

This lengthy definition – “repeated physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual assaults combined with a systematic use of symbols and secret ceremonies designed to turn a child against itself, family, society and God” – never caught on with ritual abuse therapists and victim claimants, although several concocted and published versions of it which better suited their own victim narratives or paranoid conspiracy theories. Every version of this definition eventually became problematic, after members of Canadian neo-pagan communities thoroughly debunked and exposed Michelle Remembers for the fantasy, fraud and pack of lies that it is – circa 1989-1990. Since Pazder’s definition of ritual abuse was specifically derived from, and in reference to, that fraudulent life story fantasy, it was now a definition of an imaginary no-thing.

A less-unwieldy definition, proposed by Canadian academic Dr Stephen Kent, has become popular with the SRA/mind control set, as they believe it bolsters their own beliefs. However, this is based on a misuse or misunderstanding of Dr Kent’s actual definition:

Dr Kent said: “Ritual abuse is any kind of systematic patterned disempowering violations. Ritual abuse can take place in a wide variety of contexts. They don’t necessarily have to be religious in nature; however, ritual abuse is systematic, patterned, disempowering violations …. In the allegations of ritual abuse that are say, outside a religious context, these kinds of abuses could involve a perpetrator who serially violates one person or one child repeatedly. In these cases the kind of violations would be patterned and the patterning can be important from the victim’s standpoint because each time the abuse begins, the victim knows what’s coming, having been through it several times before…”

Stephen Kent defined “ritual abuse” as ritualized abuse, i.e., “to make a ritual of” abusing a child. The patterned, repetitive nature of the abuse is the ritual, in the phrase “ritual abuse”. This is the only legitimate use of the words ritual & abuse in a phrase or term: “ritualized abuse” or “ritualistic abuse”.

Justin pointed out that “Satanic ritual abuse & mind control true believers persist in using the word “ritual” to mean “a religious/occult ceremony”, and “ritual abuse” to mean sexual abuse of a child while a religious ceremony is being performed. This is not a legitimate use of the term”.

The difference between the two definitions is important: the first ties the abuse into its religious/occult context, while the second is simply a description of “patterned, repetitive” sexual abuse.

So why are SRA/mind control believers so determined to inject a religious/occult overtone into plain old child sexual abuse?

The plain truth of the matter, is that when people use the term ritual abuse in a similar fashion to the way Lawrence Pazder used it, when people use it to mean “physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual assaults combined with a systematic use of symbols and secret ceremonies”, their intent is to confer special status upon that abuse and special, superior status upon those who claim to have been victimized in that context. Used in this manner, the intended meaning of Ritual Abuse would be; “abuse which is more traumatizing, devastating and damaging than any other ‘form’ of abuse – making those who have suffered it; the greatest martyrs to the suffering of the innocent and the powerless, the most courageous and heroic of all victims, the victimized persons most worthy of respect & deferential treatment by media, policy makers and the public”.

There we go. It turns out that in the minds of those who believe in SRA, “all child sexual abuse survivors are equal, but some are more equal than others”.

As Justin pointed out in the comments to his Dysgenics post, the goal of Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith was to have the Vatican declare Ms Smith a living saint.

After all, how many people endure an 81-day-long “ritual”, during which Satan himself manifests in the flesh, before being vanquished in guest appearances by Jesus and the Virgin Mary? Oh, and while they were at it, the mother-son duo removed all the scars and traces of abuse from Michelle’s body. Nice touch. Seriously, does victimhood get more “special” than this?