A Search For Survivors

We’ve been having some good laughs here at anti-torture HQ over the unintentionally hilarious vitriol thrown by a handful of fundie AT/RAD cultists.

It’s hard enough to take the old “What Would Jesus Do” chestnut seriously after its hijacking by hipster outlet stores, but when it’s thrown around to justify anyone who believes that “God wanted them to adopt,” then tries to abandon their adopted child online, the absurdity becomes too great not to laugh out loud at.

Nothing against devoutly religious people of any stripe, of course. Some of them are our strongest supporters, and some of them are us; there is one survivor’s account yet to be made public, in which spirituality and memorization of prayers actually helped comfort and anchor the child during the worst phases of torture.

It’s just the fundamentalists and the cultists that we don’t tend to mesh with very well.

Of course, condemnation comes too often and easy, while understanding is vital and difficult to come by. So, in an effort to provide some necessary insight into the actions that many parents (both adoptive and biological) consider to be unthinkable, here are some excerpts by various academics and child advocates:

Via Psychology Today:

For some years now, I’ve been studying situations where parents choose unresearched mental health treatments that can harm or even kill their children. There are obviously many similar situations that have to do with physical health. In addition, parents sometimes choose to use child-rearing techniques that are seriously abusive. In all these cases, people working on this topic will periodically turn to each other and moan, “What makes them do it? Are they crazy? Are they desperate? Are they just plain bad people?”

…In their attempts to feel less threatened, these parents may be drawn to belief systems that consider all or some human beings (for example, adopted children) to be inherently evil, and may express these beliefs by irrationally suspecting children of sexual predation… They may follow compulsive rituals like caging or demanding specific actions or postures from the child, while at the same time neglecting needs like food or medical care. These parents may be committed to beliefs that demand faith-based rituals rather than normal mental health or medical care…

Crittenden notes that parents in this group rely heavily on external authority. This may be in the form of religious groups, of quasi-religious cult systems, or of self-identified child-rearing or child mental health gurus who stress their superiority over conventional child guidance or psychological thought. Crittenden suggests that these parents have unusual difficulty with close relationships, becoming both isolated from normal supportive relationships and highly dependent on strangers and on organized groups. (This dependency is much facilitated by the availability of the Internet, of course.) An important point is that the parents are “particularly vulnerable to authorities that prophesy dire outcomes and require painful sorts of propitiation because these are consonant with their childhood experience” (p. 418).

…The inappropriate and harmful parenting behavior is not caused by indifference or hostility to the child, hard though this is to imagine. However, the very existence of recognizable love makes life even more difficult for the children, who are not able to protect their own thoughts and emotions from the complexity and evident contradictions of the parents’ behavior.

Source: (Crittenden, P. (2006). Why do inadequate parents do what they do? In O. Mayseless [Ed.], Parenting Representations (pp. 388-433). New York: Cambridge University Press).

The aforementioned authoritarian groups that dovetail with religious and quasi-religious systems give rise to “underground” networks of RAD parents who traffick and trade adopted and abused children.

So, as tragic as this case of child abandonment is, it is not terribly uncommon – the Internet has only served to make it more conspicuous.

Via Linda Rosa, Executive Director of ACT (Advocates for Children in Therapy):

I suspect that if AT proponents — therapists, adoptive parents, and therapeutic foster parents — weren’t dependent on public funds (such as adoption subsidies) and insurance reimbursements, the entire practice would be much happier operating underground. But they walk the difficult line of trying to appear legitimate while torturing children.

Attachment Therapists have found acceptance from decades of lecturing to judges and child welfare workers about their multitude of bogus beliefs, with false assurances about the effectiveness of their “therapy,” using a jargon that conceals their true methods, e.g. “Holding Therapy is gentle and nurturing.”

AT/P parents approach police, teachers, and neighbors early on. Using the gnostic arguments Dr. Mercer describes above, they attempt to “inoculate” themselves from charges of child abuse. The parents are instructed to say things like, “You may hear some screaming or yelling coming from my home. You should know that we have adopted a severely disturbed child. This child may tell you that he is being abused, but these children typically make false accusations. They may claim they haven’t eaten in days, but that’s just the crazy lying they do. You can speak with the child’s therapist to confirm all I’ve said.” Thus, children caught up in AT/P may have no where to turn for help. This is one of the practical reason for maintaining isolation of the family in this “therapy cult.”

And lest children think about going for help, they may have it pounded into them that “no one will believe you.”

Other signs of a cult that we see in AT/P:

No tolerance of criticism or questioning their methods or beliefs. Proponents appear to have an unreasonable fear and loathing of those who aren’t supportive of AT/P. They demonize critics, as well as children. A habit, perhaps.

There are reports of therapists haranguing parents who want to take their child out of therapy, or intimidating concerned grandparents.

Adoptive mothers use parent support groups for validation of harsh AT parenting. Implementing the highly authoritarian parenting methods is necessarily a 24/7 obsession. The role of the adoptive father (and relatives) may be limited to only supporting and believing the mother. (Divorce appears to be not uncommon.)

It appears that a number of parents who have been charged with criminal abuse or homicide tried to protect their AT/P therapist from sharing the blame.

AT/P has been associated with a dubious underground trafficking in children (and their adoption subsidy checks). Some parents have mentioned online, private discussion groups for such private placement dealings.

Some families (”mega families”) seem to make a business out of boarding, for months or years, unwanted children who have already been subjected to AT/P — and the parents want the child to continue to with the harsh parenting.

AT/P families may pass off children to others for a variety of reasons: including wanting to get rid of a child permanently, to “keep the child off balance” (a therapeutic notion), and in one case, as punishment for failure to do 500 push-ups. In another case of an AT/P mega family, authorities had a great deal of difficulty tracking down the origins of one girl who had been handed around.

By the way, I recently read an AT/P mom’s blog, where she acknowledged that some AT/P is abusive, but not the type she was using, of course. Yet she categorically (and it seemed defensively) denounced all survivors writing online as mentally disturbed.