My generation was the SILENCED GENERATION. When we complained as children about child sexual abuse no one listened. When we talked about child pornography, the torture of children and ritualized pedophilia, no one believed. When we tried to speak out in the early 1990s, the false memory syndrome poisoned the media with false medical science. Denial has ruled the day around most forms of extreme child abuse until just recently. Now the internet is coughing up photographic evidence that adults torture children, even infants, for pleasure and profit. The tide has turned. There is now hope for this generation of victims.

Still, for those mistreated in decades past, the search for truth and justice has been fraught with obstacles. To cope with the rage and frustration I felt around public denial, I turned to activism.

Every year I try to attend at least one feminist or survivor conference in the U.S. and Canada to present on different forms of human rights abuses against women and children.  Linda MacDonald and Jeanne Sarson of Persons Against Ritual Abuse-Torture and I have given talks on the sexualization of torture, on human trafficking of young girls, on healing from ritual abuse-torture and child pornography. Typically at these conferences, I share personal details about my own childhood suffering, and although I often feel skinless and exposed afterwards, generally people listen with respect and are supportive. They are almost always surprised by the depth of human cruelty there is out there, and anxious to do something to change it.  Every time I speak out I feel like I have done something to break the cycle of  silence and denial. I have transformed my rage into a vehicle for social action.

In this way, activism is healing.

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