Advocacy and Saving Lives
Neil Brick’s Presentation at Indiana University, Professor Pepinsky’s classes – November 11, 2008
Thank you Hal for asking me to speak today to your class.
I was thinking about the many years we both have spent working on the issue of exposing ritual abuse crimes. A great deal of literature has been written about these crimes, including numerous peer review journal articles, legal cases with long term convictions, thousands of survivor stories, many books and so on.
Yet where are we today. True there have been some recent excellent publications and research put out on the topic of ritual abuse, including hundreds of peer reviewed articles, the works of Noblitt and Perskin, Sinason, Becker, yourself and others as well as the incredible Extreme Abuse Survey with over 1000 replies documenting the existence of these horrible crimes.
But, what does the majority of the public hear about. Not the research, nor the convictions, research or stories, all they hear about is a neatly packaged litany of spun propaganda stories detailing some sort of unproven moral panic, often replete with name calling, ad hominem attacks and the total burying and dismissal of all the aforementioned data that conclusively proves the extensive nature of ritual abuse crimes.
This Orwellian rewriting of history basically only helps cover up these horrible crimes and in essence continue the promotion of pedophilia against children for profit, which is presently a multi-billion dollar industry. Who is responsible for this crime of historical misdocumentation? So called false memory type organizations were one of the earlier ones sensationalizing supposed wrongful convictions while helping convicted pedophiles get released from prison based on technicalities. These organizations defended alleged and convicted perpetrators of child abuse. Their proponents include those with documented pro-pedophilic philosophies as well as child pornographers.
Looked at from a historical perspective, these crimes were exposed as part of the liberation of a variety of oppressed peoples, including social minorities, children and women. When the backlash against minorities and personal freedoms began anew, so began the backlash against children’s rights. A similar thing happened over a hundred years ago, causing the miscategorization of multiple personality disorder as schizophrenia and the cover up of incest crimes, which society did not recover from for over fifty years.
The question is, will this happen again? Or will something different happen this time. History is a living vital force. We can create history in every moment that we are alive. Do we have the courage, focus and strength to do so. Will we allow the continued rape, torture and murder of children to continue? Will we shirk our responsibilities as human beings and allow those that bully and hurt children to win?
If we do so, we are morally responsible for not doing everything we can to make a difference. Every wasted moment causes another human being pain. What decision will we make? To be afraid, to be scared every time those that bully children call us names or threaten us, or do we ignore the bullies and decide that the world deserves to be better than a world in which children live in terror. What kind of world do we want to live in? Will we change to make the world a better one?
Every single one of us in every single moment needs to let the world know about these ritual abuse crimes against humanity. As moral human beings we have no choice. Every time we allow a distraction or a fear to stop us, we lose and the world loses.
No more TV, drugs, alcohol, parties or letting other things get in the way of our making a difference. We must become advocates in every moment. No distractions, advocacy is not a hobby, it is a lifetime pursuit.
The battleground is on the Internet and in the media. We can talk to few people here and there, but the numbers of people we need convince needs to be much greater. We need websites everywhere, Internet groups in the thousands, massive letter writing campaigns demanding that children be protected and that the true story be told. Everyone needs to know the truth about these crimes as well as the truth about those that have continuously worked for over twenty years to cover these crimes up.
Children were abused at McMartin. The forensic evidence is there. The jury even believed the children were abused. There is no excuse for the cover up of the important data of this case and many others.
Where is the research exposing the fallacies of those that spin the data and promote the theory that all of these crimes are simply some sort of panic? Where are the voices demanding the truth be told? Where are the advocates for those that have no voice, the children?
Ten of thousands of readers can easily see a website on the Internet distorting the evidence in favor of those wanting to bury the existence of ritual abuse. Yet to find our data is very difficult. Why? We haven’t done the necessary work to get the data out. We haven’t done the work to let others know about the extensive nature of ritual abuse. Where are the voices? Why do we allow those that control the Internet and the media to continue this misrepresentation of the story.
In the sixties, people rose up. They made a difference. They had a voice. They changed the world. They said “no more.” They hit the streets in the millions. They changed the world, at least for a while. Then they were attacked, threatened, killed and society was manipulated into decades of repression again. Yet they did make a difference. The world will not return to what it was before. Some of the freedoms gained will be maintained.
As survivors, co-survivors and survivor advocates, we need to do the same. We need to act now, not tomorrow, not later, not when we feel better, not when we have “free time,” but now. No more fear, let’s do what’s right and act accordingly.
We have a choice, a simple one. We must change. Anything getting in the way of this change only hurts us and the world. The world needs us. The children need us. They need us now.
Questions?