by biaothanatoi » Mon May 30, 2005 8:48 pm
<!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>> Is vicarious trauma what we are dealing with? Does it really cause so much pain to simply "know" that something is happening?</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br>Yes. Yes yes yes yes. Yes. Horrible. <br><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>> I understand some of it certainly, but my feeling is for the reactions to be so strong, we are tapping into people's basic survival defenses.</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> <br><br>And I think we really have to think politically about that, about how to get around it. The very knowledge of this crime is toxic, it generates powerful and unconscious defense mechanisms in the observer. People without the reflexivity to challenge these responses and actually consider this situation from other points of view are the ones that drive the denialist discourse.<br><br>If you want to undertake a thorough analysis, it’s not enough to simply reflect on your own frameworks and processes, you have to be able to consider completely different positions – in this case, you need to try and empathise with a torture victim, or, worse, a perpetrator. That’s exactly what the denialists are working so hard to avoid.<br><br>I’ve read denialist accounts of Sinason in which the fact that her first ritual abuse client was mentally disabled is the ‘reason’ why the clients disclosures of torture are self-evidently false … and the fact that she would be so stupid as to believe a woman with a psychological handicap is further proof of her professional incompetence. <br><br>The denialists can use any logic to support their position – they cast around for any form of reasoning at all, no matter how tangential or situational or contradictory – but the only “evidence” that they will accept from us must be empirical, have been through a court of law, AND resulted in a conviction … at which point, the denialist claims that the perpetrator/s have been wrongly imprisoned BECAUSE they have been convicted of ritual absue. <br><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>> Does the very idea that your community contains humans who are capable of such activities threaten your relationship to all its institutions and therefore your survival?</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br>Absolutely. The conflict is ontological – ritual abuse may be relatively rare in comparison to garden variety child abuse, but the level of the atrocity inflates its significance to the point that its very existence can challenge people’s basic understandings of law, order, safety and civilization. <br><br>That is what denialists object to, and that is what they “punish” us for – bringing this crime to their attention causes them pain, and they lash out at the source of that pain – us.<br><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>> Is there a way to gently guide people through the grief, or a way to present a new world view, encompassing ra, that is not quite as much of a shock?</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br>I think there is. I think we have to consider that “ritual abuse” may have been framed wrong from the start, because it emphasizes the religious/spiritual aspects of torture, which is the WORST aspect of torture. All torture employs an ideology, all torture takes place within ritual – look at Abu Ghirard, with toilets choked with Korans, menstrual blood painted on the cheeks of prisoners to break their connection with Allah.<br><br>We may need to think about rebadging the crime into something more focused, and better located within debates on human rights – something like “child torture”. I don’t believe that the cult aspects of this crime are the most salient, and it confronts the media/police with alien ideologies that they simply refuse to believe in. It is the "Satanic" angle that our detractors use against us the most effectively. <p></p><i></i>