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Aufsätze - Ritual Abuse:
An European Cross-Country Perspective
Thorsten Becker & Joan Coleman

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It took about five years to develop a form of multiprofessional cooperation in Germany. Ritual Abuse cases appeared in counselling agencies for victims of sexual abuse, in the counselling concerning cults and among therapists who work with dissociative patients -- all of them separated from the others.

In 1995 the German Section of the ISSD was started and cooperation developed from there. The 6-monthly meetings of the German section, which are open for professionals who are not ISSD-members as well, became the basis for information exchange, mainly among the workgroups who are part of every ISSD-meeting. The workgroup on what may be translated "Ideological Based Rings of Perpetrators" started at the first meeting and is the only workgroup that meets aside from the ISSD-conferences. Through the contacts which have been established here, a good networking on counselling for counsellors and therapists / clinicians as well as law-enforcement professionals has developed.

In 1997 the ISSD-members Ulla Froehling, journalist and author of "Vater unser in der Hoelle -‘Our Father which art in hell'2 called the "first in-depth German study of a DIDpatient with a background of severe home abuse, child prostitution, and sadistic ritual abuse"3; and Michaela Huber, therapist and author of a bestselling-handbook on Multiple Personality Disorder4 conducted a first 'ad hoc' study on Ritual Abuse in Germany. Thanks to them I can present some of their findings at this conference:

They sent 355 questionaires throughout Germany, 126 returned and 113 have been evaluated. Every 'maybe' or 'perhaps' was excluded, which led to a total of 354 cases in treatment -- 299 in current treatment -- of Ritual Abuse in Germany. These patients or clients were treated at 61 locations in Germany.

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