"The ritual abuse field today is where the incest field was 12 to 15 years ago." Daniel Ryder
What is ritual abuse?
Ritual abuse involves the use of rituals to physically, sexually or psychologically abuse children, adolescents and adults.
The physical abuse is severe, sometimes including torture and killing.
The sexual abuse is usually painful, sadistic and humiliating, intended as a means of gaining dominance over the victim.;i>
The psychological abuse is devastating and involves the use of ritual indoctrination, which can include mind control techniques, mind altering drugs, and ritual/intimidation which conveys to the victim a profound terror of the cult members and of the evil spirits they believe cult members command.
Because of the extreme nature of the abuse, it seems hard to understand that human beings can do this to other human beings, especially children. A major effort is made within the cult, usually at a very early age, to program the initiate. This can be lethal programming (such as suicide, assassination), self-injury (cutting, burning, traffic accidents, jumps, falls), cult-control (reporting, access, return, seduction, etc.), therapy interference (scrambling, flooding, erasure, fixed verbal response, nightmare, isolation, etc.) and psychoneurological (numb, seizure, vision, hearing, sleep, etc.).
Ritual abuse is perpetrated by men and women from all walks of life and geographical areas, both rural and urban. The percent of the population that perpetrates or that is victimized is unknown.
Perpetrators have been classified as:
Family or Transgenerational: Adults, who were abused as children, in turn abuse and indoctrinate their own children. The tradition can go back for generations.
Extra-familiar: Adults abuse non-related children. Children can be accessed at day care, schools, church, or through social groups.
Ad hoc groups: Adults, who may or may not have had abusive childhoods, come together and form a new group with its own ideology and rituals. Teens are thought to comprise many such ad hoc groups.
Any ideology can be twisted or adapted to abusive ends. In the United States, Canada, and Europe, people have reported being ritually abused under the banner of satanism, Christianity, various pagan and pantheistic belief systems, white supremacy movements, nazism, Santeria, voodoo, etc.