After amassing evidence from over 300 survivors to develop a legal route for prosecution or civil suits against pedophiles in Utah, we were unable to take a single case to the Department of Homeland Security or the FBI. We also couldn’t find a single attorney who would take a survivor as a client for a civil case. The reasons given for this:
1. The FBI does not prosecute ritual abuse cases in Utah, even though it acknowledges that ritual abuse is occurring in Utah. The reason given is that ritual abuse survivors make bad witnesses.
2. The statute of limitations for prosecuting perpetrators had been rolled back to previous levels by our legislators (only 4 years past the 18th birthday).
3. Federal law enforcement agents complained that they were being told to drop the cases by their supervisors, with opposition originating out of Attorney Sean Reyes’s office.
4. Federal agents were either fired, forced to resign, or transferred out of state to impede the investigations.
Due to the fact that many rapists — ritual and non-ritual — are Latter Day Saint males, the cultural inclination is to view victims as anti-LDS. The charge is not merely made against an individual Latter Day Saint, it is made against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints as a whole. Those males who hold the priesthood are not supposed to be sexual predators; often, due to cultural norms, this means that their victims are perceived as predators who tempted priesthood holders into sexual sin. This is the latter part of the classic DARVO strategy: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Victims are attacked for coming forward, especially if they go outside of their church in order to report their abusers to law enforcement. Their dress and conduct are scrutinized, as if they lured or tempted their assailant into sexual immorality in the form of a rape, even if they are children who are legally incapable of consent. Latter Day Saints face enormous pressure to keep reports of sexual abuse inside of the church and its disciplinary processes, rather than reporting sexual assault to law enforcement.
Law enforcement and criminal justice professionals who are Latter Day Saints face the same pressure to allow the church to handle offenders who are Latter Day Saints, often with diversionary, in-house treatment through LDS Social Services or church controlled therapeutic services. The goal is to restore the rapist to good standing within the church while containing the damage of a public arrest and prosecution to the abuser and the church. Victims are pressured to forgive their abuser even if the abuser never sought forgiveness.
With respect to ritual abuse, the difference in abuse is significant from non-ritual abuse. First, the abuse is often chronic and systemic, beginning in childhood within family units. Second, the abuse is intentional; that is, it is designed to turn a childhood victim into an adult perpetrator within the context of a family framework. Third, the methodology of the abusers has been refined through generations of experience to induce dissociation in victims, creating different parts or alters who fulfill different roles within the framework of abuse. Finally, the similarity between ritual and non-ritual abuse perpetrators is confined to their use of church and community membership as a camouflage.
The abusers never look like stereotypical abusers. They are fluent in the vernacular of faith, socially competent with respect to the norms of their faith communities, and appear outwardly successful. They use their family name and goodly parentage as a defense against suspicion, in addition to their good standing as a church member. An abuser will leverage any past difficulty, challenge, or community norm to extract empathy and sympathy in order to excuse their conduct: family dysfunction, illness or disability, and especially their community’s belief in forgiveness and second chances.
The victims who do come forward often come forward from a place of brokenness. They struggle to hold down steady employment, are diagnosed with mental health issues, and often struggle with behavioral and cultural norms. Victims often conflate their abusers with the faith the abusers profess, which has the effect of causing the faithful to identify more with the accused rather than the accuser. A ritual abuse survivor is simply an individual who did not succumb to the conditioning techniques of their abusers; instead, they are a victim who did not transition into a successfully dissociated perpetrator who could maintain a facade as a faithful member of a church, a socially and financially successful member of their community, and an individual who could balance both extremes required of ritual abusers: outwardly normal lives that conceal secretive existences as ritual abusers within intergenerational family units bonded in a wider, loosely confederated group bound by general goals.
A ritual abuse survivor is an individual within whom the conditioning or programming of their abusers did not take full root. They are fragmented, torn between what they were conditioned to be and the contradiction of the orthodox faith principles they were simultaneously exposed to in their upbringing. Ritual abuse victims are expected to maintain dual fluency in both the heresy of their intergenerational abuse group and the orthodox church doctrines and beliefs their abusers utilize as camouflage. The stress between the two extremes is often crippling to the survivor who attempts, as best they can, to both escape and expose their abusers while indicting the institutional religion in which those abusers are entrenched. The survivor must do this while obtaining and maintaining employment, functioning as an adult, and reckoning with what they know about family and community members who are involved in abuse. Unsurprisingly, many survivors cannot do this gracefully or in a socially competent manner that comes across as credible to others.
Survivors appear harried, disorganized, and illogical as they attempt to communicate what happened to them and who was responsible for their abuse with the limited cognitive, psychological, and linguistic means available to them as individuals whose formative years and developmental progress was detoured by horrific abuse. A ritual abuse perpetrator is an individual who was successfully conditioned by the systemic methodologies of their ritual abuse group. He or she is able to balance the orthodox, normal religious tradition their group has infiltrated with the esoteric or hidden ideology of the infiltrators. He is able to speak of God with fervor on the one hand, while profaning the sacred in secret on the other. A ritual abuser can live two lives simultaneously as needed, and this is entirely due to the conditioning that occurs in systemic, chronic abuse committed by their elders within a group. For those outside of the ritual abuse groups, who are unfamiliar with the exotic features of programming or conditioning through abuse, the choice between a seemingly normal perpetrator who blends in with them and an accuser who does not is obvious: they choose the perpetrator. He looks, talks, and acts like they do, even though he is secretly engaged in unimaginable activities.
Of all of the obstacles an abuse survivor faces, the skepticism, doubt, and denial of their peers who choose to believe the accused is the most difficult. Abuse survivors look like they have been abused.
Dissociation-ritual abuse survivors dissociate, because their abuse is designed to induce dissociation, and the DSM-5 recognizes dissociative disorders. For a survivor who does not become a perpetrator, dissociation impedes their ability to clearly communicate what happened to them, as it affects normal consciousness, memory, identity, emotion, and body representation. This makes it hard for law enforcement to effectively construct an abuse narrative that will stand up in court.
Failure-ritual abuse survivors fail, precisely because their social, cognitive, and physical development were derailed by systemic abuse during their formative years. The abuse that they endured did not turn them into split personalities who could balance the demands of a normal appearing life on one hand, with the demands expected of a member of a ritual abuse group on the other hand. Instead, the conditioning broke them on a fundamental level, impeding their ability to maintain healthy peer relationships, perform at a baseline during employment, and separate their abusers from the community in which the abuse occurred. As a result, they are often alienated from the family that abused them, the community in which their family exists, and they lack the core social skills to navigate the demands of day to day life relative to their trauma. They are often physically and mentally ill, frequently unemployed or underemployed, and viewed as socially inappropriate or antagonistic by others.
Unrelatable-ritual abuse survivors struggle to find law enforcement, counselors, or doctors who understand what they are alleging, or who have the expertise to treat ritual abuse and Dissociative Identity Disorder.
At Relentless Hope, we work exclusively with ritual abuse survivors, and we have years of experience dealing with the phenomenon of ritual abuse. We’ve built a network of counselors — and we are building a network of physicians and other professionals — who understand the unique challenges of working with ritual abuse survivors.
In order to succeed, we need your financial support. An average EMDR, neurofeedback, or talk therapy session costs $150 per survivor, and a full scope medical exam to document the physical effects of their abuse can cost $1,500 or more.
At this time, we are focused on those two areas: counseling and therapeutic modalities, and medical exams to document the physical effects of extreme sexual abuse and torture.
In the future, with expanded financial support, we hope to expand to transitional housing, residential treatment programs, and vocational training. At the present time, Relentless Hope is staffed and operated by volunteers, who work free of charge. That means that your donation goes directly to treatment and care for survivors. We have vetted and cleared counselors we know are experienced and trustworthy, and we are the only nonprofit organization in Utah that specializes exclusively in servicing ritual abuse survivors. We hope to change the cultural attitudes towards ritual abuse through educating the public in order to increase public support for those who survive ritual abuse but need help becoming fully healed.