by Ellen Lacter, Ph.D., February, 2025
I have been working as a psychologist with victims of extreme and sadistic child abuse, including ritual abuse, torture-based mind control, and production of sadistic child abuse materials, for 30 years now. In the last 15 years, my understanding of coercion of victims to harm and kill other victims, including victims’ pets and other animals, has considerably deepened. This is my most recent article on this subject.
Understanding Coerced Perpetration
I now understand that coercion of children to harm other victims through torture and terrorization is a mainstay of extreme and sadistic abuse, including ritualistic abuse, abusive mind control, production of child sexual abuse materials (CSAMs), and modern-day sex trafficking of children.
Sadistic abusers take deep satisfaction in coercing victims to harm other victims. It inflicts physical and psychological abuse on two victims simultaneously. The victims who are coerced to harm others are generally physically tortured to do so, and they are psychologically devastated by having harmed the other victim. The recipient of the torture by the first victim is usually both physically and sexually abused In addition, in coerced perpetration, abusers often pair together two children who deeply care about each other, to further the heartbreak of both children..
Coerced perpetration is also a highly effective form of psychological control. The effects are immediate and long-term psychological devastation, heartbreak, moral injury, self-hatred, and self-recrimination. By design, victims generally feel like accomplices, and unworthy of affiliating with anyone outside of the abuser group. They are effectively silenced and rarely disclose their abuse or seek help.
This trauma is calculatingly inflicted on countless numbers of children, often in abuse that continues into adulthood, by perpetrators who have completely shut down their humanity and who embrace this form of unthinkable cruelty as a means of coping with whatever trauma they have themselves endured and likely dissociated.
Coerced Perpetration in Ritualistic Abuse and Mind Control
In ritualistic abuse and abusive mind control, coerced perpetration is a highly effective means of manipulating victims’ minds to form additional dissociated self-states: 1) who will define themselves as evil, irredeemable, unworthy of being with people other than the abusers, 2) whom the abusers claim as initiates into the abuser group, 3) whom the abusers claim to be accomplices and murderers, often paired with threats to release video of their “crimes” to the authorities, 4) who are forced to harm or kill others in abusive rituals, such as child sacrifices,5) whom the abusers define as assassins used to kill people who threaten to expose or interfere with abuser network operations, and, 6) who will be exploited in the production of sadistic child abuse and torture materials.
The goal of coerced perpetration is to cause particular dissociated self-states to believe that they harmed and killed others of their own free will. The abusers create an illusion of choice using Machiavellian set-ups comprised of false choices between two reprehensible options. In truth, the victim has no option but to submit.
Tactics that the abusers employ to induce submission to directives to harm others include:
1. The victim is physically trapped in a setting that the abusers completely control.
2. The abusers ensure that the victim has no opportunity to escape through suicide.
3. The abusers inflict forms of torture cannot be endured for even a moment. Electroshock is particularly effective because abusers can inflict shock with hand-held devices as they direct victims to harm or kill other victims.
4. When victims hesitate or resist directives, the abusers typically prolong the torture of the second victim, blame the first victim for this suffering, then coerce the first victim to complete the act.
For example, Anneke Lucas, in her book, Quest for Love: Memoir of a Child Sex Slave (2022), describes how her abusers applied this strategy the first time they coerced her to kill. First, they told her that as a reward, she could choose a puppy from a litter to keep. After allowing her to bond with the puppy for two days, they ordered her to stab it to death. When she refused, her abusers tortured the puppy in front of her as punishment. She stabbed it to stop their torture. She then felt responsible for its death, as her abusers had originally intended. Thereafter, whenever they directed her to kill, she describes that it felt like a mercy killing (personal communication, 2023).
5. The abusers direct a victim to kill another victim under the threat of killing the victim’s loved one or pet or killing multiple victims.
Many survivors report that their abusers subjected them to days-long torture to induce rage-filled dissociated identities to form, whom they could then exploit to kill others. Svali (1996) explains:
… The child is severely beaten, for a long period of time, by the trainer, then told to hit the other child in the room, or they will be beaten further. If the child refuses, it is punished severely, the other child is punished as well, then the child is told to punish the other child. If the child continues to refuse, or cries, or tries to hit the trainer instead, they will continue to be beaten severely, and told to hit the other child, to direct its anger at the other child. This step is repeated until the child finally complies…The child will be taught that this is the acceptable outlet for the aggressive impulses and rage that are created by the brutality the child is constantly being exposed to.
Another tactic is to force a young child to kill a baby or animal, then to immediately, as a group, feign horror, shock, and moral outrage that the child did such a thing, labeling the child a murderer, etc. At that moment, a new self-state is likely to form who has no memory of the coercion applied moments before, but who only knows that it did something unforgivable.
I have identified four types of dissociated self-states that mind control abusers induce to form through coercion of victims to harm others, each representing a deeper break in self-agency and loss of self:
1. Self-states consumed with soul-crushing guilt, shame, and self-hatred,
2. Emotionally numb robotic self-states who obey directives like a hammer in the abusers’ hands,
3. Self-states who experience harm to others as the entirety of who they are, and who may feel pride in fulfilling the tasks demanded and praised by the abusers; this defends the victim against feeling terrified, helpless, guilt-ridden,
4. Self-states who release rage when they are forced to commit violence, who achieve a “high” from feeling powerful, but who are unconsciously driven by pent-up terror, pain, helplessness, tension, and rage toward their abusers, now displaced onto the victim they are being forced to kill. This also relates to the kill-or-be-killed survival response that soldiers experience in combat and that often results in devastating moral injury (Shay, 1994). Many victims describe that their abusers enter a state of excitation and frenzy as they sacrifice/kill, torture, and rape victims. I believe that there are likely instances of victims allowing themselves to “drop” into the frenzied state of their abusers when their abusers entrap them into harming and killing other victims, to make them more capable of completing the acts.
Shay, J. (2014). Moral Injury, Psychoanalytic Psychology, 31(2), pp 182-191. Retrieved June 5, 2024:
https://www.themoralinjuryinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Moral-Injury-J-Shay.pdf
Anneke Lucas, in Chapter 16 of her book, Quest for Love: Memoir of a Child Sex Slave (2022), provides the most complete description of this last response that I have ever read. Only a victim of this extremity of abuse, and perhaps combat soldiers, could understand this experience, this “power rush,” enough to help other victims understand and accept themselves for experiencing this. I feel deeply grateful to Anneke for her courage in sharing this with survivors, therapists, and the world.
Coerced Perpetration in Production of Sadistic Child Sexual Abuse Materials
In my clinical work, and in reports by national and international agencies that investigate CSAM, there is increased evidence of CSAM producers coercing children to victimize other children.
My best understanding of the reasons that CSAM offenders coerce victims to perpetrate sexual abuse and torture, and sometimes even even murder, against other victims includes:
1) to conceal evidence of their own participation in the sexual abuse they film,
2) to enhance their sadistic pleasure by harming two victims simultaneously, the victim who is coerced, often through torture and threats, and the recipient of that abuse,
3) to cause victims to believe themselves to be guilty parties to better control, extort, and silence them (to guard against disclosure of the abuse), and,
4) to inflict such severe moral injury that victims will dissociate their memories of this abuse to newly-formed dissociated identities.
The Nottingham Report (2023) address victims being coerced to perpetrate against other victims:
IJM’s [International Justice Mission] casework data in the Philippines has revealed that out of the more than 250 cases they have worked on, the abuse endured by children at the hands of these offenders typically goes beyond simply displaying erotic behaviour (IJM, 2020, p. 12). Sexual exploitation commonly involves forcible sexual penetration, which is classified as rape in the Philippines and many other jurisdictions. Additionally, minors are oftentimes forced to participate in sexual activities with other children, sexually abused by an adult, and even subjected to other inhumane acts, such as bestiality. Furthermore, the data indicates that over half of the victims are 12 years-old or younger, with over 100 of them being 6 years-old or younger when they were rescued (ibid). (p. 11)
(See International Justice Mission Report 2020., pp. 12-17)
International Justice Mission (2020c). Falling Short: Demand-Side Sentencing for Online Sexual Exploitation of Children: Composite Case Review, Analysis, and Recommendations for the United Kingdom. Retrieved January 2025, from
Salter & Woodlock (2022) discuss the devastating effect of coerced perpetration on the victim:
Survey respondents described the recording of their abuse with deep shame and fear that any individual, including a police officer, might view those images. These images captured not only sexual abuse but also forced perpetration and other acts intended to engender feelings of complicity and guilt. One survivor explained:
“If the perpetrators push you into the role of the perpetrator (that is, require you to abuse others yourself), then you’re even more likely to be silent, because you ultimately feel more of a perpetrator than a victim. If they furthermore have that on film, then you go totally mute. (Female, mid 30s, Belgium)”
Salter, M. & Woodlock, D. (2022) The antiepistemology of organised abuse: Ignorance, exploitation, inaction. British Journal of Criminology. 63. 10.1093/bjc/azac007. Available in full text on ResearchGate.
The 2018 Interpol Technical report discusses the difficulty in determining whether CSAM imagery was self-generated by youth or coerced by an adult offender:
The range of sexual activities depicted in ‘youth-produced’ series was substantial and ranged from more innocuous, nude or semi-nude ‘selfies’, through to ‘self-generated’ depictions of extreme sexual activity involving bestiality and sadomasochistic themes. Some apparent sexual extortion was evident in newer series, and in videos where children were visibly and aggressively coerced and instructed to perform solo or group sexual activities on camera. In many cases however, when relying on visual cues alone, it was near-impossible to determine with any level of reliability whether the imagery was in fact self-generated, coerced or otherwise solicited, or whether an adult or minor has coerced or otherwise solicited the depicted victim(s) into the production of the CSAM/CSEM. Noteworthy in these series was the visible context of production; while many images were produced in domestic settings, as would be expected, others appeared to have been produced in school settings, and featured uniformed students. [my bold emphasis]
…
In many cases, the depictions of the victim ‘self-generating’ CSAM/CSEM appeared to be offender-generated, where the offender captured the stream of their online interaction with the victim, and the victim’s ‘self-generation’ of CSAM/CSEM, via webcam and retained it in video or still format (e.g. in the form of screenshots). In the absence of further contextual data, it is unclear what the underlying motivations for this behaviour might be. However, in a small number of cases (where this offender-victim interaction around ‘self-generation’ was recorded by the offender on video), it was apparent that these offender recordings were used for exploitative ends – to further blackmail and extort the depicted victim. (pp. 44-45)
Interpol (2018). International Child Sexual Exploitation database. Downloaded January, 2025:
This 2018 webpage provides links to these two Interpol reports:
Summary: Towards a Global Indicator on Unidentified Victims in Child Sexual Exploitation Material – February 2018
Technical report: Towards a Global Indicator on Unidentified Victims in Child Sexual Exploitation Material – February 2018
The case of Peter Scully captured CSAM evidence of coerced perpetration. Scully was convicted and given a life sentence in the Phillippines for raping and filming numerous children, including a baby, in a series of “hurtcore” films entitled: Daisy’s Destruction. According to as article by ABC.Net Australia, in 2018, Scully faces up to 60 further charges for torture, murder and abuse against children. The CSAM film, Daisy’s Destruction, includes video of:
a 5-year-old girl hung upside down while Scully and two accomplices raped and tortured her, two cousins, aged 9 and 12, forced to perform sex acts on each other, chained in dog collars and, after an escape attempt, made to dig what they were told would be their own graves. (The Australian, March 13, 2018)
Psychotherapists and Supporters Must Develop a Deep Understanding of Coerced Perpetration
I am convinced that to be able to help survivors of extreme and sadistic abuse, those of us who support victims – therapists, clergy, friends, loved ones, fellow survivors, etc., must develop a deep understanding of how torture-coerced harm works, that torture can force anyone do anything, and quite quickly, and the kinds of “breaks” in self-agency that happen under torture. We need to understand all of this well enough to put it into words, as many times as it takes, to help victims of this soul-crushing abuse to begin to understand and forgive themselves for things that they could not escape and for which they hold no responsibility.
The calculated evil that underlies coerced perpetration is unthinkable and unspeakable, painful beyond words to acknowledge, to most everyone, but especially to the victims who have lived through it. Therefore, those who love and support survivors must be prepared to talk about it for them and with them. I will now explain why this is so critical.
1. Survivors need the knowledge and support of people outside of themselves to be able to make sense of coerced perpetration and to process these horrors, to grasp that this form of abuse exists, and to understand that it is a common tactic of sadistic perpetrators, even though the world, the media, even most trauma professionals, do not usually speak about it.
2. Survivors need to be able to share their experiences of this victimization with others, to release their devastating grief, and to receive love and compassion in response.
3. Survivors need to hear others explain that victims of torture-coerced perpetration are completely entrapped, terrorized, and stripped of all self-agency and free will, in order to begin to replace their self-condemnation with self-compassion – to begin to heal their moral injury.
What Words Can Psychotherapists and Supporters Use to Help Victims Heal their Devastating Moral Injury?
As I sit with victims, my heart breaks as I witness the torment and devastating moral injury of having been coerced to harm another person, usually a very young child, sometimes an older child, sometimes an adult, and sometimes an animal. The magnitude of the abusers’ cruelty is absolutely terrifying. Simply listening to these accounts is almost too much to take. I sometimes feel that I am losing my mind. But I write down every word. I type it up later. I will not let these horrors vanish into thin air, be forgotten, trivialized, or dismissed.
I work to mentally put myself in the victim’s position. When I do, I am clear that I could not hold out any longer than they did, that I too would “break” and submit to the will of torturers. Always knowing that my words are inadequate, I tell them words to the effect of:
“I too, under torture, would harm and kill another person.”
“I know that they would have been able to make me do that too, even though I am a grown adult, not a child. There is no way that anybody would not submit to abusers’ demands under torture conditions. Anyone who says they would not have complied is lucky enough to have never been tortured and to never have had to find out how these horrors work.”
I believe that the guilt, shame, and moral responsibility for these acts is borne entirely by the perpetrators who executed the torture, not by the victims who were being coerced. I say:
“The abusers reduced you to a hammer, a tool, that they wielded. You had that little control over your actions. The one who holds the hammer holds the responsibility.”
“You don’t have to ask forgiveness. You have done nothing that needs to be forgiven.”
“Intention is everything. It was never your intention to harm anyone else. You wanted no part of any of it. The intention was that of the abusers. They forced you. The blood is on their hands, not yours.”
I sit with how bad the torture was and try to put the intensity of the coercion into words. I say:
“You were trapped, stripped of all control. You had no choice to do anything different.”
“Torture is completely intolerable. Anybody can be coerced to do anything under torture and they are not to blame for what they are forced to do.”
I tell them that I know that they would never have committed any of these acts of their own will:
“I know that you would never have done any of these things if you had any choice. You were completely stripped of your free will. There was no escape. I know you were completely trapped.”
I let them know that by the time of the episode of coerced perpetration, they had already learned that any resistance, no less any defiance of their abusers, would be immediately met with an escalation of torture:
“You had learned a long time ago, by the time they forced you to do this, that you don’t cross these people.”
“I know that you learned early on in the torture that any resistence resulted in an escalation of torture.”
I remind them of their true wishes and that they had no option to act on them:
“I know you would have rescued the victims if there was any way for you to do that, but there was none.”
When I see despondent shame in their eyes that betrays that they believe themselves monsters, I say:
“You are innocent. You are as worthy of love and compassion as anyone else. In fact, any person with a heart would feel even more love for you because of what you have suffered.”
These words are never enough and I believe it helps to express this as well:
“I know if I were made to do these things, I would also unjustifiably hate myself. How could anyone not feel that way? But it is unfair. It is unfair.”
“I know that no matter how many times I say you were not to blame, it will not take away the pain of what you were forced to do, and the memory of looking into the eyes of the other victim(s), but I will keep saying it anyway because it is the truth.”
When I try to explain torture-coerced perpetration to people who know nothing about it, they often reflexively say: “I would have died before I tortured or killed another person.”
These people do not understand torture. The objective of torture is not murder. Torture is inflicted to coerce a behavior, to extract information, to instill a belief, or in the case of sadism, to take pleasure in inflicting pain, terror, helplessness, heartbreak, and self-hatred on one’s victims. A victim of General Augusto Pinochet’s regime of torture on the country of Chile explains:
[Torture] kills people’s spirits but keeps their bodies alive, transforming all those who escape it into zombies in the service of another despicable torturer: fear. It is a gruesomely effective tool, for it knows just how to manipulate imagination and paralyze instincts for rebellion or resistance.– Rafael Gumucio, My Tortured Inheritance, New York Times, December 13, 2004, at A27. Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/13/opinion/my-tortured-inheritance.html
I explain that perpetrators of extreme and sadistic child abuse do not give victims the option of death while they are torturing them. Many victims report being brought close to death, but that their perpetrators were skilled in resuscitation and revived them.
I help victims to remember that their torturers did not give them the option of suicide:
“The objective of torture is not murder. You were not given the option to die.”
“I know that you probably wanted to die many times while you were being tortured. Most torture victims do. But, they are not given that option.”
“I know you would have chosen to die rather than torture or kill someone else. You were not given that choice.”
“It is essential that you not allow yourself to judge yourself by what you imagine people who do not understand torture may think or say. This can only be fully understood by having lived it.”
Helping Victims Understand the Breaks in Self-Agency and Develop Self-Compassion
It is important to help survivors understand the kinds of “breaks” in self-agency occur in victims while being torture-coerced and terrorized to harm to others. I will describe five kinds of breaks.
1. First there may be subjective resistance and observable hesitation, which is reliably met with an escalation in torture, and also often mockery and ridicule.
2. The next adaption is outer compliance, while still maintaining some awareness of inner resistance.
As the torture continues or intensifies and the pain, helplessness, and heartbreak of being tortured, terrorized, and entrapped into harming another human being or animal become even more painful to bear, the next psychological responses to coerced perpetration are involuntary.
Victims describe the mind instantly “snapping” into an altered mental state, often taking the form of the spontaneous formation of an alter identity generally dissociated from the rest of conscious awareness, who can submit to the behavior being demanded while experiencing less emotional anguish. Victims have described to me these two kinds of “snaps” into altered mental states, the first usually preceding the second:
3. The victim’s mind snaps to form a robotic self-state who obeys the commands to harm or kill like a machine, an automaton, like a hammer in the perpetrator’s hand, with no conscious experience of resistance, grief, or remorse.
4. In response to further unrelenting, unthinkable, and unbearable torture to coerce a victim to harm to another victim, the mind involuntarily, reflexively, snaps again, this time, in a burst of violence against the second victim. My best understanding of this response is that it is a release of pent-up terror, tension, and rage that is unconsciously felt toward one’s torturers, but cannot be safely directed toward them. Even though this response is involuntary, this self-state is aware of the power and size differential between itself and the abusers. The victim knows who holds the reins. I have never heard of a child releasing rage on an adult perpetrator while being abused. So it explodes in the only direction possible. This is a “kill-or-be-killed” response to torture and terrorization. It is a primitive sympathetic nervous system response, a physiological reaction to threat to life and limb based in the survival instinct. In response to acute stress, we react with “fight or flight.” Since “flight” is clearly not an option while being tortured, “fight” kicks in.
This fourth psychological response emotionally devastates victims. Victims feel like they became non-human, like an animal, a monster. It makes them feel that they are inherently evil, not as good as other people. But, they are no different from the rest of us and we are no different than them. They were simply trapped in a situation in which they were forced to discover this potential within themselves, a potential that exists in all humans, in most mammals, and in many other animals. This response is the basis for the devastating “moral injury” that so many combat veterans struggle with in response to killing others. It is a large part of what drives their posttraumatic stress disorders (PTSD).
Most people are never placed in situations that force them to discover this response within themselves. Most people would like to believe they do not have this capacity, that they could inhibit such reactions. Torture and combat veterans know better. I often say:
“This thing you think is unforgivable is in all of us. It is in me.”
“This is a primitive animalistic response. It is not who you are, but it is an involuntary psychological state that all of us can be pushed to.”
“You were inside a pressure cooker that finally exploded. It would happen to anyone within these kinds of entrapment and torture.”
“Discovering this response within oneself is why so many combat veterans live isolated on some mountaintop.”
Many victims also describe a fifth psychological response, one that is even harder for victims and other people to acknowledge, understand, and accept.
5. When the physical pain and psychological torment become even more severe and unrelenting, the victim’s mind “breaks” again to form a dissociated self-state (or more than one) who adopts violence or sadism as it’s identity, i.e., not limited to reflexive responses to unbearable torture. This violent identity believes itself an abuser and often nothing else. It does not have access to the memory of the events that caused it to form, until the survivor works to make this conscious.
Victims of the most extreme forms of abuse describe abusers going to great lengths to coerce this fifth response, this fifth “break.” Reported tactics include extensive coerced harm of other victims; manipulations to cause victims to believe that they harmed others of their own free will; torture-conditioning to force them to pronounce themselves and believe themselves to be evil; group ceremonies in which they are condemned, pronounced as evil, and/or elevated in status in the group; set-ups, tricks, illusions (often through film or virtual reality technology), mind-altering drugs, etc., to cause them to believe themselves possessed by demonic entities; and caging, starving, and otherwise terrorizing them until they behave like predatory animals.
Victims explain that abusers exploit these identities to do violence for their networks. Each act of violence causes these identities to experience themselves as even more entrenched in evil and less human. Being forced to commit repeated violent acts paradoxically helps them escape the self-loathing of having harmed and killed others, as explained in the two sections that follow.
6. A sixth response to sadistic torture and coerced perpetration is even more painful and challenging to understand. A victim may make this abuse more than okay – may make it pleasing. In one case, for the first seven years of the victim’s life, his abusers imprisoned him and subjected him exclusively to sensory deprivation, torture, and coerced harm of others. The victim’s mind, or particular identities, somehow managed to make all of this acceptable. My best understanding is that the only sensory stimulation and human contact that this victim experienced occurred while being tortured, so he learned to focus on particular aspects within the torture that could be experienced as enjoyable – a color, a sensation, a human touch even though it hurt. Alternatively, or perhaps in combination, this victim may have done this with some degree of intentionality to get the upper hand on his abusers by depriving them of the sadistic pleasure that they took in causing pain, terror, and heartbreak.
Identification with the Aggressor
In addition to the calculated tactics described above to induce violent identities to form and similar tactics to maintain them, a “position” of violence as a trait is caused and maintained by well-known psychological mechanisms understood within psychoanalytic theory that addresses the psychological defense of “identification with the aggressor.” Aggressor identities need not feel repeatedly and horribly defeated, helpless, and terrorized. By identifying with their abusers and becoming aggressors, they preserve some sense of self-agency, some rudimentary sense of self.
“Identification with the aggressor” is a well-established psychological defense against feelings of helplessness and fears of annihilation. It preserves the relationship with the adult on whom the child depends for survival, and it permits the victim to discharge tension and rage toward one’s abusers, now displaced onto oneself or onto less threatening others.
Identification with the aggressor was first described by Sandor Ferenczi in a paper entitled, The Passions of Adults and Their Influence on the Sexual and Character Development of Children in 1932, that he read at the Twelfth International Psycho-Analytic Conference in Vienna. It was first published in print in 1933 in German (in the Int. Z.f. Psa. 19, 5–15). It is now best known by the title, Confusion of Tongues, published in 1949 in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis (see: 30:225-230: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Ferenczi_Confusion.pdf). This passage well-captures the dilemma of the abused child:
The real rape of girls who have hardly grown out of the age of infants, similar sexual acts of mature women with boys, and also enforced homosexual acts, are more frequent occurrences than has hitherto been assumed.
It is difficult to imagine the behaviour and the emotions of children after such violence. One would expect the first impulse to be that of reaction, hatred, disgust and energetic refusal. “No, no, I do not want it, it is much too violent for me, it hurts, leave me alone,” this or something similar would be the immediate reaction if it had not been paralysed by enormous anxiety. These children feel physically and morally helpless, their personalities are not sufficiently consolidated in order to be able to protest, even if only in thought, for the overpowering force and authority of the adult makes them dumb and can rob them of their senses. The same anxiety, however, if it reaches a certain maximum, compels them to subordinate themselves like automata to the will of the aggressor, to divine each one of his desires and to gratify these; completely oblivious of themselves they identify themselves with the aggressor. Through the identification, or let us say, introjection of the aggressor, he [the aggressor] disappears as part of the external reality, and becomes intra- instead of extra-psychic; the intra-psychic is then subjected, in a dream-like state as is the traumatic trance, to the primary process, i.e. according to the pleasure principle it can be modified or changed by the use of positive or negative hallucinations. In any case the attack as a rigid external reality ceases to exist and in the traumatic trance the child succeeds in maintaining the previous situation of tenderness.
I would add that identification with the aggressor is also a defense against the psychological devastation and heartbreak of being subjected to extreme cruelty at the hands of another human being. Being in close proximity to evil is a terrifying form of trauma in itself. Children do not expect people to harm them intentionally. This is even true in adulthood. The unfathomable cruelty of torture and being coerced through torture and terrorization to harm others cause intense heartbreak and cognitive dissonance. The events seem unreal. The perpetrators seem non-human, like monsters. Monsters are not real, so how could this be real? Victims, their therapists, and others struggle to understand how another human being can be so heartless. Being in the presence of such complete perversion of everything that it is to be human is completely intolerable to the child and I believe it is likely a large factor in causing victims to dissociate such horrific events.
Hardening oneself by identifying with one’s abusers defends against being further emotionally devastated by them. It shuts down vulnerability, dependency needs, and longing for human connection. It chooses hate over hurt. And it blocks empathy for others.
Once identification with the aggressor develops as a defensive response, it has a tendency to become more fixed. Carl Goldberg (1996), in Speaking with the Devil: A Dialogue with Evil, (New York: Viking), explains that identification with the aggressor leads to repetition compulsion of cruel, aggressive, and antisocial acts. For example, the victimized child acts out aggression with a weaker or younger child, then feels guilty and hates the self, then is again confronted with the weaker child and defends against the guilt-ridden memory by viewing the weak child as worthy of being hurt and thus repeats the act. Others see the aggressive child as bad, which causes the child to give up on any hope of being seen as good. If the cycle is not interrupted, the downward spiral will continue.
Identification with the aggressor is also likely to become increasingly fixed in dissociated identities who have identified with their abusers within torture-coerced perpetration. In addition to abuser machinations to entrap these identities in this stance, these identities likely “turn off” their empathy because their victims’ pain and terror and their own guilt become completely intolerable. They often identify themselves as vicious killers, as one of their abusers, sometimes even as serial killers. They can stay locked in this mind-set because to soften it, to allow for a crack in this defensive posture, would cause them to be consumed with unbearable guilt and force them to re-connect to their own terror, helplessness, pain, and heartbreak. Their options are essentially to remain addicted to violence or to become terminally terrified and guilt-ridden.
Child Soldiers
A window into these psychological mechanisms is afforded us through the study of soldiers and child soldiers.
For example, Roland Weierstall, Susanne Schaal, Inga Schalinski, Jean-Pierre Dusingizemungu, and Thomas Elbert (2011), studied Rwandese genocide perpetrators and found that, “appetitive aggression can inhibit PTSD and trauma-related symptoms in perpetrators and prevent perpetrators from getting traumatised by their own atrocities.” These authors state that their research suggests that “humans may enjoy cruelty, when moral restrictions do not prevent or even command organised violence.” (See: “The thrill of being violent as an antidote to posttraumatic stress disorder in Rwandese genocide perpetrators,” in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 2:1. Link: https://doi.org/10.3402/ejpt.v2i0.6345). Clearly, in torture-coerced perpetration, violence is organised and commanded.
The study of child soldiers offers similar findings. From 1991 to 2002, approximately 10,000 children were forced to be child soldiers in the Sierra Leone Civil War by both the Sierra Leone Army and the Revolutionary United Front (the RUF, aka, “the rebels”).
(See: https://borgenproject.org/10-facts-about-child-soldiers-in-sierra-leone/).
Ishmael Beah, in his book, “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier” (2007), describes how the Sierra Leone Army recruited him and other young adolescent boys and systematically cultivated in them a hatred for the rebels and a deeply entrenched addiction to violence. They did this by manipulating their emotions, with stimulant drugs, with war films, by forging familial-like relationships with the boys, and by exploiting their rage about their families and villagers having been massacred by the rebels.
A short video of Beah being interviewed by CBS Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith, is available here: https://alchetron.com/Ishmael-Beah. It includes a segment at minute 5:10 to 5:25 that shows the young age of the boy soldiers. It also explains that “kill or be killed” were the only options available to him and his friends, the phrase I use above to explain coerced perpetration.
Beah and the other child soldiers did not experience terrifying flashbacks, posttraumatic nightmares, etc., during their more than two years of fighting. These symptoms began only once UNICEF forces removed the boys from the army and placed them in a residential rehabilitation program in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where they could no longer kill, were detoxed from drugs, and “deprogrammed” (see Early Show clip above).
I will cite some of Beah’s descriptions of these events from his book.
Here, Beah provides an example of the language his commanders used to motivate the boy soldiers to hate and kill the rebels and how the boys reacted:
“They have lost everything that makes them human. They do not deserve to live. That is why we must kill every single one of them. Think of it as destroying a great evil. It is the highest service you can perform for your country.” The lieutenant pulled out his pistol and fired two shots into the air. People began shouting, “We must kill them all. We must make sure they never walk this earth again.” (p.108)
Here, Beah explains how the commanders manipulated them to see guns as the solution to their losses and fears:
I had my gun now, and as the corporal always said, “This gun is your source of power in these times. It will protect you and provide you all you need, if you know how to use it well.” (p. 124)
The commanders sent the armed boys into battle. Beah describes how he was initially consumed with anguish upon hearing people dying in pain and could not shoot his gun:
We walked into the arms of the forest, holding our guns as if they were the only thing that gave us strength… I lay there with my gun pointed in front of me, unable to shoot. My index finger had become numb. The forest had begun to spin. I felt as if the ground had turned upside down and I was going to fall off, so I clutched the base of a tree with one hand. I couldn’t think, but I could hear the sounds of the guns far away in the distance and the cries of people dying in pain. I had begun to fall into some sort of nightmare. (p. 117)
However, in this nightmare of kill-or-be-killed combat, Beah’s innately human survival-driven capacity to kill kicked in, much like the fourth and fifth breaks in self-agency described above:
My face, my hands, my shirt and gun were covered with blood. I raised my gun and pulled the trigger, and I killed a man. Suddenly, as if someone was shooting inside my mind, all the massacres I had seen since the day I was touched by war began flashing in my head. Every time I stopped shooting to change magazines and saw my two young lifeless friends, I angrily pointed my gun into the swamp and killed more people. I shot everything that moved, until we were ordered to retreat because we needed another strategy. (p. 119)
Beah describes the numb, robotic state of mind that followed that night, much like the third break in self-agency described above:
After that first day of fighting: ―I went for supper that night, but was unable to eat. I only drank water and felt nothing. As I walked back to my tent, I stumbled into a cement wall. My knee bled, but I didn’t feel a thing. . . . Nothing happened in my head. It was void, and I stared at the roof of the tent until I was miraculously able to doze off. (p. 120).
Here, Beah describes his commanders’ use of violent war movies to incite the boys to violence:
War movies, Rambo: First Blood, Rambo II, Commando, and so on, with the aid of a generator or sometimes a car battery. We all wanted to be like Rambo; we couldn’t wait to implement his techniques. (p. 121)
Sometimes we were asked to leave for war in the middle of a movie. We would come back hours later after killing many people and continue the movie as if we had just returned from intermission. We were always either at the front lines, watching a war movie, or doing drugs. There was no time to be alone or to think. (p. 124)
Here, he describes the use of stimulant drugs to further facilitate an addiction to killing in the boys and the above-described the third or fourth breaks in self-agency, that is, the ability to kill without the conscious experience of resistance, grief, or remorse.
We walked for long hours and stopped only to eat sardines and corned beef with gari, sniff cocaine, brown brown [a drug cocktail of cocaine and gun powder] and take some white capsules. The combination of these drugs gave us a lot of energy and made us fierce. The idea of death didn’t cross my mind at all and killing had become as easy as drinking water. My mind had not only snapped during the first killing, it had also stopped making remorseful records, or so it seemed. (p. 122)
Once the boy soldiers were taken from the army and placed in the UNICEF-supported rehabilitation facility, the boys could not stop their engineered addiction to killing. He explains:
We needed the violence to cheer us after a whole day of boring traveling and contemplation about why our superiors had let us go. The jubilation was stopped by a group of MPs who walked into the kitchen and asked us to follow them. They had their guns pointed at us, but we laughed at them. (p. 136)
It was only once the boys could no longer kill that they became consumed with the horrors of their experience:
But we were still traumatized, and now that we had time to think, the fastened mantle of our war memories slowly began to open. Whenever I turned on the tap water, all I could see was blood gushing out. I would stare at it until it looked like water before drinking or taking a shower. (p. 145)
I would try desperately to think about my childhood, but I couldn’t. The war memories had formed a barrier that I had to break in order to think about any moment in my life before the war (p. 149)
I tried to think about my childhood days, but it was impossible as I began getting flashbacks of the first time I slit a man’s throat. The scene kept surfacing in my memory like lightning on a dark rainy night, and each time it happened, I heard a sharp cry in my head that made my spine hurt. (p. 160)
Here, Beah describes his horrifying posttraumatic nightmares, violent outbursts, and episodes of dissociative amnesia:
But at night some of us would wake up from nightmares, sweating, screaming and punching our own heads to drive out the images that continued to torment us even when we were no longer asleep. Other boys would wake up and start choking whoever was in the bed next to theirs; they would then go running into the night after they had been restrained. The staff members were always on guard to control these sporadic outbursts. Nonetheless, every morning several of us were found hiding in the grasses by the soccer field. We didn’t remember how we had gotten there. (p. 148)
Finally, Beah describes the agonizing guilt that consumed him while in the rehabilitation facility. His empathy was so profound that he vicariously experienced the assaults he inflicted on others:
I held my ears to stop hearing them, but I began to feel their pain. Each time a person was stabbed, I felt it worse; I saw the blood dripping from the same part of my body as that of the victim. (p. 164)
On February 14, 2007, Ishmael appeared on The Daily Show and talked about the difficulties of returning to civilized society. He said: “Dehumanising children is a relatively easy task” (see: Ishmael Beah’s website: https://aalv2001.wixsite.com/aalvaj).https://aalv2001.wixsite.com/aalvaj). For Beah and the other child soldiers, facing the reality of the violence they were forced to commit was the greater challenge.
I believe that the documented psychological responses of child soldiers teach us the following:
1. In metaphorical pressure cookers of many kinds, we can all be forced into “kill-or-be-killed.”
2. Once this entrapment is accomplished in the person as a whole or in specific dissociated identities, it is likely to become increasingly fixed.
3. Violence is not the whole of such persons or identities, even when this is the individual’s subjective experience.
4. The process of re-connecting with one’s inner humanity is grueling – full of horror, guilt, and severe posttraumatic stress.
Survivors of extreme abuse benefit greatly from learning about the psychological responses of child soldiers. They were both subjected to hell on earth. Understanding child soldiers can build a foundation for self-compassion in survivors of extreme child abuse and coerced perpetration. It can help identities who were made to believe by their abusers that they were evil to realize that they are not unidimensional – they were victims of extreme torture and sophisticated psychological manipulations.
An advanced treatise on dissociative responses to extreme abuse, including comparisons to the experience of child soldiers, and the role of identification with one’s perpetrators, is Harvey Schwartz’s 2013 book, The Alchemy of Wolves and Sheep: a Relational Approach to Internalized Perpetration for Complex Trauma Survivors (published by Routledge).
Sitting with Survivor’s Emotional Devastation about Having Harmed or Killed Others
In addition to expressing words to help survivors understand their inability to defy the abusers who were torturing them, we also need to be able to sit with them in the pain of having harmed another human being, no matter what the reason, no matter what the level of torture.
Victims of coerced perpetration had to look in the face of another victim, perhaps a child who trusted them, who previously relied on them, who hoped they might be rescued by them, maybe a sibling or best friend, maybe their own child or parent, and had to see the absolute terror and utter anguish. Perhaps the victim begged for them to stop. Perhaps they watched the victim’s heart break right in front of their eyes. Perhaps they killed the intended victim robotically and without feeling. Or maybe they had been pushed to the point of “kill-or-be-killed” rage. Perhaps they killed while in a dissociated identity who had finally embraced sadism as his/her own, who had aligned him/herself with the abusers as one of them in an underground where they had no real options. They may live in fear and grief that this last experience may haunt the victim forever.
Listening to this, allowing survivors to express the pain and horror associated with this, is very, very hard. Our natural impulse is to try to relieve their unjust self-hatred before they can tell us how bad it was. But, if they cannot tell us, who can they tell? Very few people have the capacity to hear this and sit with it. We have to figure out how deep to let them go in expressing this pain before we offer them the lifeline of solace, words of compassion, understanding, and realistic rather than abuser-engineered self-judgment.
We Need to Cry with the Victims
I let myself cry, with victims and survivors, with colleagues, and by myself.
I cry for Lois. I cry for the children she had to hurt and for the children who had to hurt her.
Survivors deserve our tears, our outrage, an admission of our own feelings of helplessness in response to these forms of ferocious and calculated cruelty, and our willingness to travel into the nightmarish hell-holes of these memories with them, in order to extend a hand that they can grasp to begin to climb up and out, and to feel worthy of the love of people who will rally with them against this evil.
Some Closing Thoughts and Words to Help Victims
I rage at the injustice of extreme abuse. I am often left with tears and rage that has little place to go except to unite with survivors and supporters to bring truth to light. Although I cannot stop these unacceptable horrors, I can work to help victims and survivors to have compassion for themselves as I have deep compassion for them. Here are some more thoughts that I share:
“I know that when I was born, I was born no better than you. We are the same, both born innocent babies who only wanted to experience reciprocal love and who had no innate sadistic instincts. But under sadistic and brutal torture as children, anyone and everyone will form parts who will release rage, who can commit violence. Most people get to live their lives never knowing this response. They do not want to believe it. They cannot withstand the possibility that they too would have “broken” under torture. No one wants to know this capacity exists within them. But, it exists within all of us.”
“I get that it feels like only the other victims could ever truly understand all of this, forgive you completely, and love you anyway – actually love you more because of it. But I believe that everyone owes you to understand all of this as deeply as we can, to forgive you completely as there is nothing to forgive as there was never any choice, and to love you, have deep compassion for you, respect you for what you have endured, and to want to do everything in our power to help you to feel loved and to love yourself. That is the only way to begin to bring any justice at all to any of this.”
Below is something I wrote to a survivor who was subjected to extreme torture and coerced perpetration and who believes “themselves” stupid, evil, weak, selfish, and unworthy of love:
“You and the other victims abused beside you understand things that are almost impossible for other people to understand in terms of the ferocity of the evil and how it comes very close to destroying the mind and soul of its victims. The cruelty perpetrated against you went very deep and almost accomplished what the sadists intended, to make you purely evil like them. But, you are here sitting with me because your heart is broken and that tells me that they did not win, that you did not succumb to becoming like them, even if you sometimes ‘snapped’ within the worst moments of hell inflicted upon you.”
“I do not believe you did anything out of weakness. I think it is simply easier to condemn yourself as weak than to remember what it was like in your mind, in your body, and in your soul to be relentlessly tortured with no conceivable means of escape. States of entrapment, of complete helplessness, while being assaulted, raped, etc., are intolerable to human beings. If you have trouble functioning, if you condemn yourself because you do not have the internal resources to “contribute to society,” try to be kind to yourself, to have compassion for yourself, to remember that the abuse you suffered devastated you psychologically. Please do not punish yourself to try to force yourself to function better. It will not work. It will only increase your already intolerable “trauma load.” Do not condemn yourself as selfish or a burden because you need help to live your life. This does not make you selfish or ungrateful.”
“You believe yourself evil, but I believe that the word “evil’ does not apply to you. Yes, you have parts who could not stand being victims anymore, who were completely alone in the depths of hell and unbearable, unrelenting torture, and who may, at a point of horrific torture, have taken all of their inevitable and justified rage and vented it on others. I know I would have done the same and I do not believe I am evil. To “break” in this way is inevitable when one is tortured, terrorized, and humiliated and coerced to harm others for unending hours and days. I feel angry at anyone who would like to pretend that they could do better and I feel no anger at you at all.”
“Truly, deep in my heart, I believe you are wonderful.”
I will now share the words that one victim, who I will call “Victim C,” spoke as she tried to soothe the heartbreak of Victim A who was forced to harm Victim B while Victim C was forced to watch. When Victim A and Victim C were alone again, Victim A explains what happened:
“…When I saw [Victim C] again, she hugged me for a long time and finally said, ‘It’s okay. Only thing you could do, no choice. You never have a choice. I love you. She [Victim B] wasn’t mad, just scared. But so were you. Dog-eat-dog place here. You’re not bad, you’re an angel in a nightmare. It’s not your fault, please don’t feel sad’.”
Although moral injury runs deep and although it may take years for survivors to overcome their unjust self-condemnation, our insight into the power of torture and our words of compassion for the heartbreak of coerced perpetration mean the world to survivors. The more we bring this truth out into the open in the world of working with extreme abuse, on websites, etc., the more momentum we gain in helping survivors out of the psychological traps that the abusers sought to lock them in forever.