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The
Christchurch Civic Creche Case |
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Pamela S. Hudson, LCSW,
is a child therapist with a county mental health outpatient department in
California and author of the book Ritual
Child Abuse: Discovery, Diagnosis and Treatment. Ms Hudson has presented
training sessions for professionals on child abuse in the United States,
England, and Canada. Ms Hudson first began
to identify the symptoms of satanic ritual abuse in several children who had
been referred to her at a county mental health agency in early 1985. What was
to follow was a most frightening phenomenon: throughout the remainder of 1985
and into 1986, twenty-four children, all from the same day-care center, all
exhibiting many of the same satanic ritual abuse symptoms, were brought to
her by concerned parents. What is even more amazing is that the cases came to
her individually, without the parents initially talking among themselves. Common symptoms seen
among these children included phobic reactions about water; extreme anxiety
about being alone in bedrooms, going to the bathroom, eating certain types of
food. In addition, some children exhibited such behaviors as using needles,
pens, and other sharp objects to poke the eyes out of people in magazine
photographs. And thirteen of the twenty-four children, many of them under the
age of ten, consistently attempted to masturbate and have sex with other
children or animals. Most of the children
also were experiencing frequent night terrors, night sweats, and
extraordinary anxiety on other levels. For example, eighteen out of the
twenty-four felt extreme separation anxiety if the mother was out of sight
even for a short time. Early in her work with the
children, Ms Hudson reported the cases to the county's Children's Protective
Services. (The names of the day-care center and the mental health center have
been omitted at Ms Hudson's request, to avoid legal or other repercussions.) About six months after
Ms Hudson began working with one girl, the silence finally was broken about
the specific nature of the abuse. The girl named a particular supervisor at
the daycare center and described this person inserting sticks in her vagina
and other orifices-an abuse frequently reported by satanic ritual abuse
victims. Shortly afterward,
other children started to talk as well about specific abuses, and Ms Hudson
began to compile corroborative data. Abuses reported included being locked in
a cage the perpetrators called a "jail"; being buried in
"boxes" (coffins); being told their parents, siblings, and pets
would be killed if the childen talked; being held underwater (the genesis of
phobic reactions to water); being injected with needles, threatened with
guns, defecated and urinated on; being forced to watch animal and human
sacrifices. One child reported helping kill a baby, as an adult female
perpetrator put her hand over the child's, gripping the knife and forcing it
down into the baby. The children also
described being taken off the grounds to other day-care settings, to.private
homes, even to a cemetery. As the stories
surfaced, the parents started coming together and talking. It was at this
stage in the revelations that Ms Hudson began to work with the parents rather
intensively. In these sessions, she allowed parents to vent their grief,
their rage, and revenge fantasies of killing the perpetrators. Ms Hudson says
these feelings are normal. Often the emotional devastation becomes so
pervasive that that even basic tasks - cooking, cleaning, getting the
children to school, going to work-are disrupted. So part of the therapy
emphasizes just maintaining the normal "rhythm" of the family. Ms Hudson teaches the
parents therapeutic techniques to help with the child's stabilization and
recovery. In the case of night terrors, for instance, Ms Hudson teaches the
parents not to discount the dreams, but rather to let the child talk about
them and then reassure the child that everything is fine now, and the child
is safe. Parents are taught to
help children process anxieties and repressed feelings triggered by everyday
occurrences. For example, one of the abused children, with her parents at a
fast-food restaurant, looked up to see someone enter the place with a shiny
red jacket on. This sight triggered her memory of seeing a perpetrator
dressed in a devil's outfit during a ceremony. The anxiety was so
overwhelming that she actually crawled under the table to hide. Instead of
the parents responding by telling the child, "It's nothing," or to
stop misbehaving, they had been trained to talk to her about what scared her
and what this incident was evoking for her from the past. Afterward, they
offered the child more reassurance that she was safe now. Ms Hudson also asks
parents to keep a written record of the child's behavior during the week, as
well as any memories of the abuse that are disclosed. Besides the twenty-four
from the particular day-care setting, Ms Hudson has since worked with twelve
more children who reported being abused in the same manner, from another
daycare center, by members of the extended family, and by neighbors. Ms Hudson devised a
questionnaire and polled a group of parents involved in litigation cases of
purported ritual abuse around the country. She procured names from an
organization called Believe the Children. This group was formed by parents
involved in the highly publicized McMartin Day Care Center case, and included
parents from seven other similar day-care center cases in southern
California. Using her
questionnaire, Ms Hudson did telephone interviews with parents whose children
were involved in the McMartin case, and in day-care cases in San Francisco
and New Jersey, and in a satanic ritual abuse case in California involving a
baby sitter. She talked also with parents in Texas and Oregon. In all, she
interviewed one set of parents from each of ten cases across the country. In
the findings, she also included data from the cases she had worked with. No matter where in the
country the abuse had taken place, the children demonstrated many of the same
post-traumatic stress symptoms-night terrors, fear of the dark or of being
alone, uncontrolled vomiting. All the children in the survey had demonstrable
medical indicators of sexual assault. Many reported being photographed during
the ceremonies. Of eleven victims, ten reported being threatened with guns
and knives, and nine reported watching people killed as part of the
ceremonies. (A full report on these findings is included in Parnela Hudson's
book, Ritual Child Abuse.) She said that the
similarities in these cases across the country are not only alarming but an
indication that perpetrators actually follow prescribed rituals that are
fairly consistent and calculated. What's more, she said that the types of
torture and mind control reported to her by the children derive from
conditioned response techniques reportedly developed for use with political
prisoners or prisoners of war. These include sensory deprivation and physical
tortures, such as electric shock or drug-induced states. In recent years, Ms
Hudson has visited England and reports that therapists there also are seeing
similar types of ritual abuse symptoms in some of their patients, both
children and adults. As she works with
ritually abused children, Ms Hudson said the disclosures of abuse generally
come incrementally. The reports range along a continuum, from what seems most
credible to, much later on, what seems least credible. Achild might at first
report that a day-care worker or baby sitter touched her or his "private
parts." Later, children may talk about someone "pooping" on
them, then maybe about being tied up, then having to watch an animal being
killed, then maybe even a baby. Sometimes a child talks
about being taken away by "aliens." Ms Hudson said it became
apparent to her that perpetrators actually set up stagings for incidents of
abuse. Perpetrators dressed as space aliens or cartoon characters, so that
later when a child was questioned by a therapist, lawyer, or police officer,
the child might say that the abuser was an alien or Mickey Mouse-and the
whole story might be dismissed as fabrication. "Some of these
people are extremely clever," said Ms Hudson. In therapy, Ms Hudson
uses a combination of techniques: psychodynamic therapy (helping parents
determine underlying psychological dynamics in their children), role play,
behavior modification, play therapy, art therapy, family therapy, and group
therapy. She said the art therapy is extremely helpful in bringing up data
around the abuse. "Simply, the
children were threatened about talking about the abuse, but not necessarily
drawing about the abuse," she said. Often, Ms Hudson said,
a therapist doesn't need to make concerted efforts to have a child regress to
the trauma. As the therapeutic rapport is established, the child often
regresses spontaneously. During this regression, a child may go back to the
behaviors of the developmental stage when the abuse took place. A
five-year-old child beginning to deal with repressed trauma that took place
at age two may, for a time, go back to two-year-old behaviors, using baby
talk, occasionally wetting or soiling. Working with ritually
abused children, therapists also often encounter multiple personality
disorder and need to move the alters through the trauma toward integration,
just as with adults (see chapter 17). During the course of
therapy, if the child is now in school, Ms Hudson consults with the
teacher(s) on an ongoing basis. Early in therapy, Ms Hudson coaches the
parents in apologizing to the child. Not that the parent is really at fault
in any way, but, according to the young child's perception, he or she was
taken by parents each day to a place to be hurt. "The parents need
to apologize to the child, and also continually tell the child they have been
tricked too," said Ms Hudson. "And it has been my experience that,
eventually, the child will forgive the parents." Also early in therapy,
the child has extreme fear about being alone, sleeping alone. Ms Hudson
advises that the parents spend as much time as possible with the child, and
in the beginning let the child sleep with them as often as he or she wants
to. She adds that it is
important for the therapist to try to maintain a presence of calm and
confidence that the situation is going to get better. While she realizes that
this might seem elementary advice at first, it takes on a whole new meaning
as the therapist enters into the maelstrom of disruption the abuse has caused
for the child and the family, in the school system, even in the judicial
system. She also recommends
that a therapist develop as much peer support, individual and group
supervision as possible, in order to stay professionally and personally
balanced while dealing with this. Ms Hudson agrees with
Maggie Irwin's belief that a therapist can't gloss over the spiritual aspects
of the abuse and recovery, She said it is common to hear ritually abused
children say things like: "I can't go in the bedroom-the devil is
there," or "I know the god below wants me to . . . " Ms Hudson
said it is ineffective to simply ignore the underlying references to evil and
deal only with behavior modification. Since much of the abuse revolved around
"dark side" spiritual abuse and programming, children continually
need to be reassured that there is another, "good" spiritual power
that is stronger and can protect them. Maggie Irwin and Pamela
Hudson agree that, in working with such abuse victims, therapists need to
come to terms about their own beliefs around the spiritual dynamics of good
and evil. Pamala Hudson also recommends that parents do a lot of education
with the child around spirituality. In the case of the
twenty-four children reporting ritual abuse from the particular day-care
center, Ms Hudson said that, although most of the parents professed some type
of religious affiliation, few were actively practicing it. On the therapist's
recommendation, most parents became involved again with their churches. They
began to learn as much as they could to counter with their respective
church's beliefs when a child began talking about a "dark side"
philosophy or fear. Children need to be assured over and over that they are
inherently good, that what was done to them or what they did to others could
not be helped, Ms Hudson said. She added that some of
the parents scheduled time to go over a picture book about Jesus with their
children-his life, his professed power over satan. Ms Hudson said that, even
in dealing with biblical subjects, the parents had to be careful. She cited
Old Testament stories (Abraham about to "sacrifice" Isaac, for
instance) or pictures (King Solomon poised with a sword over a baby) that
need to be edited out, so they don't trigger a child's fears, and so the child
won't connect these in any way with satanism. As careful as one might
be, a scene as seemingly innocent as the baby Jesus lying in a manger might
even bring on hysteria for some ritually abused children early in recovery.
She encountered reports of children forced to watch as perpetrators killed a
baby around Christmas time. Then they forced the children to chant,
"Baby Jesus is dead. Baby Jesus is dead." A major concern for
parents, Ms Hudson said, is what will happen to their children later in life
asa result of being exposed to this kind of abuse. Are they more susceptible
to being drawn back into a satanic cult? Are they more likely to become
perpetrators of physical or sexual abuse? With effective therapy, and good
spiritual and family support, these possibilities are measurably diminished.
However, Ms Hudson suggests a long-term study with children now reporting
this abuse, in respect to predilection for emotional, physical, and sexual
abuse patterns, drug and alcohol abuse, and suicidal tendencies. Because of the
sophistication of the perpetrators in keeping it hidden, Ms Hudson said she
had no way of knowing the extent of this kind of abuse worldwide. However,
"Anyone who's had a brush with it [therapists, friends of victims, or
law enforcement representatives] can't seem to drop it." As people learn
about its insidiousness, the heinous nature of the abuse, the sophistication
of the cover-ups, and the possible organizational ties, they "begin to
recognize it as a threat similar to the growth of Nazi-ism - and they need to
keep telling other people about it." As for the day-care
center case involving the twenty-four children, the District Attorney's
office made a decision not to prosecute. A disappointed Ms Hudson attributes
that decision to the lack of physical evidence, the children being perceived
as too young and also considered to be too emotionally traumatized for the
stories to appear credible to a jury. Other similar cases around the country
have gone to litigation. Her book (see
Bibliography, page 264) deals at length with techniques for working with
children exposed to ritual abuse. |
