I am in Guatemala now and part of what I am doing it assessing and researching the incidence of trafficked children. I have learned 2 things. 1. You put your life on the line by housing sex trafficked children in a safe house. It might be blown up. 2. Teachers in the remote Mayan areas are scared to even do "good touch/bad touch" talks because if a kid comes forward and discloses abuse, the teacher puts his life on the line getting that child help. So basically not much is being done about it "because no one wants to die".
I have many pictures and have learned many other things about the communities and children and mamas we are helping. As soon as I get home and can put my pictures on my computer, I will post blogs about them.
Here is the next blog in my abuse series. Want to get them finished up so we can start on our book.
Another Therapist
I am going to change the name of this blog
from "From Child Prostitute To Child Advocate" to "From Sex-Trafficked
Child To Child Advocate". The first title seems to indicate some
complicity on my part. Many people
ignorantly believe that prostitution is something that women do of their own
volition. That is rare and never the
case with children. And I know some of
you are wondering when we will actually get to the part where I was trafficked.
I believe we have already gotten there. At the time I was retrieving these memories
neither one of us understood this, but now it seems most plausible that the men
and women who came to the secret pineapple meetings in Hawaii were paying
participants. They received drugs and sex and in exchange paid cash. My dad sold his daughter and got sex and drugs
for free. This first cult experience in
Hawaii did not have much ritual and little Satanism. But this memory was mixed with others where
the ritual of Satanism was more dominant.
I believe that some of the multi-perpetrator groups my father had me in
used the word “Satanism” as a cloak. It was
easier to do all the evil things they did in the name of religion than to just
admit they were dirty old men and women horribly abusing children. History is littered with cruelties done in
the name of religion. At the time Jody
and I did not have any other way of giving it a name and we were inclined to
think there was some continuity between the various memories even when the
geography changed. And there was some
ritual--like the act of killing yourself if you told and the brainwashing that
went along with that. "Child-Sex
Trafficking" are words that started in the 21st century and more
accurately describe my experience.
We began reading everything we could find on Ritual Abuse
and Satanic Cults. Always before I had
thought of this as science fiction or the occult and not quite real, but there
was something very real happening. The
palpable fear that Vicki was experiencing and radiating throughout the house
was not part of her normal character. Neither
Vicki nor I understood it and there were few books on the subject; it was
something very new.
After networking for several weeks Vicki managed to find another
therapist with experience in this area. Joe
was two and half hours away in another direction. Before he would even meet with Vicki he
peppered her with questions: “Do you
find that you sometimes lose time and don’t know what happened over a period of
several hours or days? Do you meet
people who seem to know you but call you by a different name? . . . ” Vicki answered no to each question. “Basically I’m trying to figure out whether
you’re a multiple or not. I’ve already
got one such client and I can’t handle another.”
In addition to Ritual Abuse we added several new words to
our lexicon: Multiple Perpetrator Abuse;
Dissociation; Multiple Personality Disorder; and PTSD—Post Traumatic Stress
Syndrome. There was another whole vocabulary that went
with Ritual Abuse because it was of a much more severe order than sexual abuse
or incest. The word “ritual” came for
the ceremony that went along with much of the abuse.
Joe belonged to a group of therapists and could only
barter one-half of his fee, which was almost exactly how much her father was
sending her each month. But Joe was more
than willing to do that. Like Isaac he
seemed to have a heart for the work that he did.
The nature of Vicki’s memories did not bother Joe. He had heard it before and that offered a
form of validation to Vicki—apparently other people had been through these
kinds of experiences before. It was
real. In one sense that was comforting;
Vicki wasn’t crazy. But it did
underscore the potential of some of her fears.
Joe did have a strict rule about not calling him after
hours. “This memory work is going to be
very difficult,” he told Vicki in a form of understatement that we didn’t
appreciate at the time, “and you need to get together a support team. People you can call day or night to listen to
you and help you work through this.” My name
was not to be on the list. These were
people she could call when I felt overwhelmed and needed time out. I was especially grateful for this dictum
because I could not handle much of Vicki’s reaction to her memories. She would get angry and then nasty as if I
had been the perpetrator and she blamed me for everything she was feeling. This altered state of personality was called
dissociation. Joe said Vicki’s reaction
to me was partially due to the fact that I did much of the actual memory work
with her—what a therapist might normally do if she were close enough to do
multiple sessions a week. This conveyance
of feelings was called transference and was supposed to happen with a therapist
but it was too late to change since she could only do appointments every other
week, and it was one of the things that we did well together. Joe wanted her to make a list of five or six
people who would volunteer for this role as telephone counselor and bring it to
him.
After several sessions Vicki brought up the subject that
worried us most: Was Vicki’s father
still involved with these groups? Was
there reason to fear? At that time Joe
was uncertain. Vicki had not had any
memories beyond simple incest while she was in her teenage years. Her father had left the military and moved
to their present home when she was fourteen years old. It appeared from her memories that the
ritual abuse had only occurred while he was in the military and traveling from
one assignment to another.
“To be safe I think you need to assume that he is still
involved. Based on my experience that’s
what I would guess. Not seeing him is a
good idea--let’s continue that.” Because
of Vicki’s high level of fear Joe also though that Vicki should write him another
letter saying that she had finished therapy and no longer needed him to
continue sending money. This ruse would throw him off and he would
assume that she had not remembered anything beyond incest.
This part of my
life was not happening in a vacuum. Less
than a month before Hannah was born I made a trip to Florida with Jody to see
his mother who was dying of cancer. She
died a week later on Memorial Day. A few
weeks after Hannah was born word came that his father was in the terminal
stages of melanoma. He would die
unexpectedly early in the beginning of September. Life
at this time was extremely hard. Jody
remembered a dream that he had had earlier of twin tornados that might best
describe the devastation those two events caused in his life. Our life during that season was a wreck and
we were just surviving. Hannah was my
saving grace. I wouldn't dare stab
myself when I was pregnant--there was a baby inside! And afterward she was totally dependent on
me; it was imperative that I stay alive.
The sweet spirit of that tiny baby was Heaven sent.
