I was 15 years old and pregnant when these words were written. Frightened out of my mind as the father of my unborn child was one of those who had inflicted years of pain and abuse on me and on so many others. The father of my child was my oldest brother. I had become pregnant after being brutally raped by him as I was held down by my own father, as well as our family doctor while dozens of people watched and took pictures as I cried out in pain, as my brother was ordered to make it as painful as possible which he achieved in the end by forcing both of his hands inside of me literally tearing me open. Fifty four stitches with nothing for pain brought even more evil smiles to everyone when they tired of watching me bleed totally helpless.

The feeling of being trapped was overpowering having been conditioned from earliest memory to believe that my life and body belonged to others to use in any way they saw fit. The turning point for me was after my first ultrasound when my child’s father brought me home and placing his hand over me announced to everyone that soon they would have a new pet to play with. Somehow those words broke through everything and I realised that if I didn't find a way out of the abuse then my child would be condemned to suffer the same tortures that had been inflicted on me and those that I witnessed being inflicted on others. I promised myself then that I would either get away somehow to anywhere my child would be safe or I would kill us both. I was already dead inside and I just could not stand by watching the slow, agonising, soul destroying torture of my own child. I managed to send a SOS for lack of a better word to the only person I could think of that might be able to help.

My aunt in Toronto was the only person in my entire life that was not part of this insanity. She was a survivor of the Shoah (the holocaust) and the only one I was not totally afraid to trust. It took some time but six months later and almost eight months pregnant I ran no longer caring if they killed my body because my neshome (my soul) was already dead.

I made it to my aunt who had been trying desperately to contact me. Today I am 34 years old and after many years of therapy I myself work with sexual abuse survivors but what I want to say so that everyone may have some understanding of what the torture of a child does is: There is no amount of therapy that can completely heal me, no doctor skilled enough to piece together the fragments of a child’s shattered soul and for so many no love great enough to restore the faith that was stolen and perverted by the very adults who were supposed to protect us and keep us safe.

Linda and Jeanne, I thank you for all you have done and continue to do. There exists what we call Tikkun Olam-It mans Repairing The World. What you are doing is the very essence of Tikkun Olam and you bring hope to many. Never stop believing because one day we will change the world. … S. K., a survivor of ritual abuse-torture Donated February 16, 2004

Testimonial by Nobody February 16, 2004 I have often pondered my earliest photographs for clues. But always a normal middle-class girl peers out at me, oblivious. Playing on the swings, pushing a cat in a baby buggy, crying on Santa’s knee. By age six, this photographic stranger begins to look gaunt and awkward, her smile is strained, she is clearly trying hard to please, and by fifteen, in her eyes I can see a disquieting cynicism. But there are no bruises, no severed limbs, no visible scars to reveal the hell that was her childhood. My childhood. Here is my story....

I was born in a large city in Canada to a very young mother who married an unreliable man. I was my mother’s first child. My father abandoned my mother when she was pregnant with her second child and her own family refused to help her. When my brother died of crib death shortly after his birth, my mother fell apart. She was divorced in the 1960s when it was still shameful to be divorced and had to lie about her status to get a job. Unfortunately, the job she found was as a traveling saleswoman and so she hunted around for someone to look after me. A friend of a friend told my mother she knew of two women who were taking in children from broken homes. They ran an unofficial day care from Sunday to Friday, where the little girls lived, dormitory-style, during the week, returning home on the weekends. I was sent away to live with these two women from the age of two until I was seven years old, with two short additional stays at ages eight and twelve.

On the surface, the women who looked after me were exemplary. Jane was a sensitive, chronically ill woman who was working on her degree in child psychology. She was petite, charming, had a way with children and a reputation for saving small animals. Her partner was a large disciplinarian named Bertha who held a prestigious job in a national organization dealing with children.

In this house of little girls, I was well-fed and well dressed. In spite of the so-called expert care I was receiving, I hated going. I woke up depressed every Sunday morning. I began to wet my bed. I had frequent nightmares and awakened screaming. I developed imaginary friends and outlandish escape fantasies. I had difficulty remembering things. I had tantrums whenever I was separated from my mother. I was branded a difficult, oversensitive child.

Fortunately, as soon as I became a teenager my mother married a stable man and I was allowed to leave the house of little girls for good and live in a relatively normal family. I rarely remembered or mentioned my early childhood from that day on.

As a teenager I began drinking and smoking heavily. I was terrified of sex and yet promiscuous. I ran away compulsively. I dropped out of school repeatedly even though I was a good student and quite bright. I had talent in the creative arts but was easily discouraged. Again, these behaviours were treated as evidence of my bad character.

By my early twenties I had serious health concerns and so I embarked on a healing journey which started with doctors and psychiatrists and gradually progressed to more alternative modalities as I grew frustrated with traditional venues. I went into psychotherapy finally while living with a boyfriend who had a traveling job. Every night he was away from the house, I spent in the doorway clutching a knife, having “waking hallucinations” of being attacked, raped and tortured. My therapist didn’t know what to make of these “hallucinations” and treated them as Jungian symbols. I spent the first six years in therapy saying over and over, I want to go home, and, there’s something I’m not remembering. No one understood repressed memory in those days. I had no idea what I was saying. All I knew was that I felt perpetually haunted.

After years of therapy, I told my therapist I wanted to get to the root of these night terrors I was still having and booked some longer sessions. That summer I had my first ritual abuse torture memory. In the flashback, I was raped by two men in a barn. I would spend the next seven years remembering unspeakable things.

At three years old a knife was taken to my vagina and my hymen was severed. (This was confirmed by a doctor at age 13 although the doctor assumed I had ruptured it on a bicycle.) At six years old I was raped in an elaborate “pretend” marriage complete with wedding dress, and told I had been married to the Dark One. Every Sunday night we were driven to strange events. Often drugged, petrified and half-asleep, I huddled with the other little girls in the back seat. When we arrived we were forced to witness, perpetrate and endure bizarre acts. These were usually preceded by some form of abuse or torture; being tied up and left in a fruit cellar. Being locked in a butcher’s freezer. Having electric shock on a table in a farming shed. Locked inside an open grave and left for hours. At the end of such degradation, I was forced to harm animals or some of the other little girls in some way and if I didn’t comply I would be sent back to the fruit cellar, butcher’s freezer, cage, etc.

The things I remembered tested my sense of reality, severely damaged my faith in humanity. At first, I thought I was going mad, but I did not crack up. I thought I would die but I did not. I thought my life would never be the same and this was true. I didn’t want to have the flashbacks, I struggled and resisted every one, but they came and came. At the end of it, I counted eleven murders, although I believe now that some of them were faked. In at least three cases the murdered people were stolen off the streets: hoboes and drug addicts whom no one would come after. In two cases they were young runaways.

The worst involved a girl named Shelly who resembled me and I was told to look after. She was gang raped in a group ritual, then stabbed and dismembered. Afterwards, I was thrown into the dark pit of the fruit cellar naked and told her murder was my fault. I lay in the dark, listening to the crawling insects and they threw her blood drenched head in after me. It fell with a thud onto my naked belly and in that moment, I can’t tell you what happened to my mind—a blind terror swallowed me and I simply ceased to exist. I lay there for hours slipping in and out of consciousness, afraid to breathe or move, feeling her soft hair on my skin, her blood pooling around me. Whether it really was Shelly’s head or not I will never know, but the fact remains I experienced a terror and grief then that completely shattered me. From then on I was often called Shelly and told that her angry spirit now lived inside me.

When I rebelled and refused to do what they wanted or threatened to tell, I was told they would come in the night and murder my mother the way they had murdered Shelly. For years I dreamt of waking up to find my mother dead beside me and so said nothing. To break my spirit and destroy my memory, I was frequently taken to a shed where I was restrained and tortured with electric shock and cattle prods. At this time, the two men who were the leaders of this intergenerational cult would sit at both sides of my head and whisper hypnotically in my ears, that I was white trash, I had no father, my mother didn’t want me, I belonged to them to do as they wished. Over and over they repeated, you are nothing, you are nobody.

For years, I had struggled with the blackest suicidal depressions, and complained to my therapist that I felt worthless, unloved, dispensable. I am nobody, I had told her.

During the flashback years I slept with the lights on. I entered my apartment with my keys out like a knife and searched it before closing the door. I was agoraphobic, afraid of people, unable to tolerate crowds or have close relationships. While my friends were moving ahead in their careers, getting married, having children and buying houses, I was lying on a futon writhing and sobbing, re-experiencing unimaginable pain and degradation. My mother told me I had always been difficult when I disclosed what had happened to me. I separated from my family. I lost my job, my friends, and lived in poverty. None of this is obvious in my photographs, although my suffering did manifest.

Over time, the fragmented flashbacks began to form a coherent narrative. I figured out that Jane, one of my guardians, had been born into an intergenerational cult with its basis in southern Ontario. Her brother was one of my frequent abusers. The brother’s friend was the high priest, although he was never called that. Both Jane and Bertha were pedophiles and had ample access to children, (all the cult members were bisexual.) Jane and Bertha rented out both myself and the other little girls to pornographers, for photographs and pedophilic sex, we were passed around from person to person. During that time, only one mother grew concerned and took her daughter out of boarding. No one ever said, you are being inculcated into a cult.

No one ever used the word cult. I was told I was lucky and chosen, or nobody and damned. Whatever hurt me I was told was good for me. There were no words to describe any of this in my young mind. How to remember things everyone pretended to forget? How to describe events so bizarre I had no words to explain them? So shameful I was afraid to say them out loud? My tormentors were organized, they committed their actions with purpose and drama and rational, they may have been pedophiles and petty criminals, yet they had inherited rituals, symbols and a bizarre religious ethos to justify their actions and felt themselves spiritually ordained to use us as they saw fit. And they got away with it.

All in all, I spent fifteen years in therapy. In spite of chronic health problems, I did survive and manage to build a life. I have no children, but I have a husband, and a career that I love. I have achieved some peace and wholeness. But I live a dual life. Most acquaintances don’t know of my “dark years,” I am careful telling new friends after so many bad experiences. On the surface I seem like a normal middle-aged woman, a bit reclusive perhaps. Inside I still carry around Nobody. Nobody does not exist in the eyes of the world. Nobody receives no compassion, no compensation, no validation for her pain. On some level, no matter how much therapy I do, Nobody remains locked in a shed, isolated, treated with scorn by the societal denial around ritual abuse torture that prevails. Nobody has been silenced. I have spent most of my life on inner work, trying to change myself in order to become a better, healthier person. But the truth is, now it is the world that needs to change, to make it safe for all the other children out there who have been abused in such a real and horrific manner. … A Canadian survivor of ritual abuse-torture Donated February 16, 2004

I went into foster care at age 12. This is where my memories begin. I was living in the country on a farm. I was 13 or 14 years old. The foster parents were involved in Satan worship. My first memory was of the ritual rape and betrothal to Satan. I was tied on the altar there were people circled around me. A priest was at the altar dressed in black. He recited some form of liturgy and then told me I was to be the bride of the lord of darkness. I would bare his child to be returned to him. There on the altar in front of the other members chanting I was raped. I was told that if I revealed what had happened my brother and sister would be kidnapped and tortured. I became pregnant. I delivered a baby girl on October 1st. I was given her to take care of and bond with. She was perfect. Blond hair and the most gorgeous blue eyes. I immediately fell in love with her. Now it is Oct. 31. My child and I are taken to the altar again. This time she is placed there. Fear goes racing through my heart. What are they going to do to my precious baby? A knife is placed in my hand; I refuse to take it I am reminded of the torture that awaits my child if I do not follow their orders. My hands shake and my heart aches as one of the members’ places there hand over mine and thrusts the knife into the chest of my child. I let out a shriek of grief and pain. Her blood is drained into a challis each member drinks from the challis. It is handed to me. I shrink back in horror, how can they expect me to drink the blood of my child. The cup is placed to my lips and I drink. The taste of her blood is revolting. I puke. I feel a prick in my arm the next thing I remember is waking up groggy and bloody in my bed. The memory of what happen hits me. I cannot tell anyone because I participated in this gruesome rite and will be found just as guilty as they are. I sink into despair. Life is now worthless. I will be forever guilty of not doing my best to free my child.

… Blackcloud writes this Donated December 7, 2003

~Part One:Morning~ it's morning again I can't move still tied up from last night naked as well I try to move get more comfortable pain sears through me oh yes the beatings last night I had been very bad I hear the door open there you are belt in one hand blindfold in the other you cover my eyes I hate not being able to see I know what the belt means question and answer time I’m not good at those I know I’ll get beat "whose fault is this sophie?" "yours and you know it" ((crack)) I feel the belt on my stomach damn them it hurts "try again sophie, you know how this works" "it's your fault" ((crack, crack)) I’m so sore from last night the belt is like needles, stinging everywhere "whose fault?" "mine" I hang my head damn them ((crack)) I feel the belt across my face "I answered right" ((crack, crack)) "don't question us, you know better" I feel blood running down my lip "ready to go on" "yes" ((crack)) "yes, what ? what are we to you" "yes....... masters" I can tell they're enjoying this "do you deserve this?" "no, I don't" ((crack, crack, crack)) "you KNOW better sophie now answer us!!!" "I don't deserve it" I feel them turning me on my back I can almost feel their hated I hear the wind before contact is made it’s the buckle again and again and again "please stop" "then answer us do you deserve it?" "yes" ((CRACK)) bleeding again they're so angry "now, are we going to have more trouble?" "no........ masters" I hang my head is disgrace I’m so embarrassed "so, it's your fault, right? you deserve it?" "yes. it's my fault. I deserve it" ((crack, crack, crack)) "let me at her she wont question us again" oh no its elston he's stronger I want to see I hear laughter they turn me back over I wonder what he has "sophie? do you love us?" I thought about this was it a trick question? "no, I don't" pain what was he doing? the knife!! oh the pain was great I thought my vagina was being split in two I couldn't help it I started to wiggle "stop moving bitch you're gonna end up dead" I simmered down "I hate all of you" he took the knife out I heard the gun being loaded oh no!!! what have I done?? I’m only ten I feel the gun go into me same as the knife I hear him say its going to make a mess I hear the safety being taken off I start to cry "I love you" too late he pulls the trigger I flinch I hear them laughing I know better then to let them hear me cry they pull the trigger again and again I know my luck is running out I know it's over they take it out of me rubbing the blood on my face it's so degrading the gun is now to my head "we'll miss you" he's pulls the trigger nothing I’m hysterical they're loving it they take off the blindfold untie me even "can I shower?" "yes, I guess just be ready for tonight" ah yes, night when the cycle begins again

~Part 2: Daylight~ the water feels good I hate the blood on me I scrub myself trying to get the dirty feeling off I can't it won't leave my oldest cousin is awake now he wants to race he's such a good runner we go outside and have races all the terrors are forgotten we play basketball and climb the tree elston sees me I know he's mad I’m not allowed to have fun I know better I didn't go there to entertain myself I went to entertain them I found that out when I arrived today we go swimming I am bad they force me out of the pool they dry me off accidentally putting fingers in places I need to learn how to behave then they will stop they won't let me back in the pool we leave I ruined it for everyone we go to the store they buy their son things nothing for me I was bad I don't deserve to get new toys we finally go home the house is a mess part of my punishment is to clean it the living room isn't that bad neither is the kitchen the boys room is a disaster they can't keep it clean for a second when I am done john wants to wrestle which is just a cover up he wants to touch me I can't say no we go on my bed he pins me like always he says he won the right to touch me and he does my chest my butt my vagina everywhere I tell him to stop he slaps me I know better a slave has no feelings no wants "it's getting dark again" he smiles at me "you know what that means" he leaves I hate the darkness

~Part 3: Night~ I must have fallen asleep at least I’m not tied up yet I stir about you must have heard me the door opens you have the rope you come over to me undress me I curl up un a ball "hands up legs spread" I don't move "NOW sophie" I flinch and give them my hands they are tied to the bed just like every night "legs" I shake my head their eyes seem to be glowing what have I done? I start to uncurl my legs they grab them they are tied to the bed as well they punch my vagina I don't even flinch I know that's nothing the worst is yet to come all three of them are in there now they always warm me up once before their customers arrive and once when everyone is there she gets to lick me today she knows how embarrassing that is to me she goes so slow she loves torturing me I want to scream I try to move ((whack)) I get hit on the back of my head they won't let me pass out they like seeing me suffer they get done just as the rest arrive "what can she do" "she any good" "I better get my money's worth" my family climbs on top of me again licking, sucking raping I just want them to stop they finally get off "I want my turn" "can I be next?" I am blindfolded again I feel like a toy I am a toy they come one at a time raping me my innocence is long gone I want to cry but I know I’ll get beat I hear women shuddering "I would never let my husband do that to me" I feel saliva on my chest more on my vagina I just want them to stop my butt feels like its been torn in two I hear my family they make everyone get off I hear them tell me not to make a sound impossible they untie me throw me on the floor they kick me "if we beat her enough maybe she won't remember" I shield my head everyone is kicking me I feel blood running down my face maybe it's tears I can't tell anymore they stop I am picked up they hold me at a standing position each person come by they all kick my vagina I can't move they always hurt me as soon as I orgasm they stop and start hurting me stupid body it's your fault you know what happens my family has the customers hold me up elston is coming I can hear his boots please don't let him kick me too late I scream they tie me back up I can't shower I am so dirty I must wash it off they won't let me a hear a knock at the door "is everything all right? we heard a scream" it's the neighbor help me please help "everything's fine sophie had a nightmare" the door closes the customers leave my family comes in they take the blindfold off "we love you sophie you know that, don't you?" "yes, I know I love you too"

That Night You let me have fun All day long You told me To go outside To play I didn’t know It was an act You tricked me At the end of the day I thought I was free But I wasn’t You had plans You woke me up And took me to the car We went to a house That I knew so well I didn’t know What you were going to do The last time I was here Was no fun for me You let them hurt me We went inside You forced me To go down To the basement I hate the basement You hung me From the ceiling By my wrists Sometimes my neck You beat me Whipped me with things Shoved things inside me I was just a little girl You took me down Pushed me to the floor You start to kick Hit, punch and Humiliate me Urinating and Shitting on me I stop moving I can’t feel Anything anymore I passed out You gave me Mouth-to-mouth You “brought me back” You hugged me Telling me You loved me I looked at you “I love you too” I said It’s six years later Guess what? You broke my back That Night One of my Thoracic vertebrae The most Uncommon place To have a vertebrae break The thoracic region Is supported by the ribs It’s suppose to be harder To break You managed to break it You know what I can’t bend my back Now I can’t run My cartilage Connecting my ribs To my thoracic vertebrae Has hardened You did it You broke my back You hurt me An innocent child A ten year old CHILD

… Sophie, a youth survivor of ritual abuse-torture Donated September 7, 2003