NCJ Number
200443
Journal
Critical Criminology Volume: 11 Issue: 1 Dated: 2002 Pages: 61-73
Date Published
2002
Length
13 pages
Annotation
The author discusses how his involvement in child custody cases that feature allegations of sexual abuse and/or ritual abuse and mind control (RA/MC) have influenced the development of his theory about how to make peace in the face of violence on the one hand and on the other hand how he is perceived by his peers as an objective criminologist.
Abstract
The author regards his primary research informants as those he believes to be survivors of so-called intergenerational ritual abuse, among them being those who were involved in government-sponsored programming and experimentation in mind control. The first part of this paper provides some background on how the author became involved with survivors of ritual abuse and the types of experiences they have described. This is followed by a comparative analysis of the validity of research data from informants researchers have never met and the validity of data the author obtained directly from victims and survivors of sexual assault. The next section of the paper discusses some important issues for critical criminology and peacemaking in the face of extreme violence. Survivors of such violence are rarely encountered in the daily work of most criminologists, so the author acknowledges that this puts his involvement with and belief in the victimization accounts of these survivors at risk of skepticism and criticisms of research bias. The author believes that in working directly with victims as a source of research information, his objectivity as a criminologist is not compromised. He notes that he feels at once enlightened by the marginal voices of a relatively small segment of victims and cautious about weighing evidence in support of and in rejection of their accounts of their victimization. 19 references