I survived Bill Gothard’s cult & now I’m on a mission to secure humanitarian aid for other survivors of non-war-related childhood torture.
This article contains distressing themes of child torture, cults, religious trauma, war crimes, and mental health struggles.
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What if I told you that the little girl in yellow was frequently being doused in cold water and forced to sleep in wet pajamas on an empty mattress in her room, after being denied a meal for some infarction or another?
What if I told you she already genuinely believed she deserved this, and spent the next 22 years trying to kill the parts of her “responsible” for being treated this way?
This is basically where my story begins.
In the bastion of isolation — mid 1990s Alaska.
But 10 years ago, if you’d have asked me about my childhood, I would have told you it was wonderful and I was so #blessed!
I couldn’t be an abuse survivor. I wasn’t abused.
I was “guided.” I was “corrected.” I was “disciplined.”
I knew the consequences of doing something heinous like fidgeting, breathing too loudly, failing to clean up my room quickly enough, or walking too loudly in the house. If I didn’t want to “get in trouble” — I should have behaved better.
This was my genuine belief about my life until one day in 2020 I was lying in bed dreaming of ways to die — and suddenly a reality crashing moment interrupted my mindless scrolling.
It was a social media post about “blanket training.”
(If you’re wondering what blanket training is, it’s where you put your 6 month old infant on a blanket, and place a tempting toy on the floor near the blanket, and strike them with an object until they stop leaving the blanket to reach the toy.)
My mind began reeling, and, to make a long and horrifying story a little bit shorter, I went no contact with my torturer (the person who gave birth to me*) within the week.
Reading about it happening to someone else began to change something in my brain.
If it was horrific enough to fill me with white hot rage reading about it happening to someone else — a CHILD — why did I still believe I had deserved it?
In the months that followed — which included suicide attempts, intensive psychiatric treatment, and the beginning of making art for the first time in nearly 20 years**, I also returned to reading on a topic that had long provided a haunting sense of comfort that I wouldn’t come to understand for a few more years: firsthand accounts of concentration camp survivors.
(Side note, if a 10 year old clings to books on this topic written for adults and finds comfort in them, that’s a bit of a red flag that they are probably not okay.)
In one such account, I learned about the pointless forced labor(1) prisoners were often subjected to — such as being required to carry heavy stones from one side of a field and then back to the starting point, for literally no reason other than humiliation, punishment, and/or the amusement of the guards.
Upon reading this account, my mind flashed to this familiar image:
This image features a distraught 8 year old in the middle of being forced to dig up stones in their yard and carry them back and forth across the yard — pointless labor that lasted for hours with no restroom or water breaks (except sneaking drinks from the garden hose pictured in the background).
To add insult to injury, this photograph exists because capturing on film her victim’s emotionally distraught meltdowns during these horrifying episodes was a favorite pastime of my tormentor.
Weeks later when the film was developed (this was the early 2000s in Alaska, remember) — an equally large production was made of forcing her victim to observe the photographs and witness how “ridiculous” their reaction had been to subhuman treatment.
The last detail to note in the photograph is the wrapped wrist — forced labor to aggravate the pain of an existing injury is a favorite of people who torture their children because it causes immense pain and suffering while simultaneously evading detection by law enforcement or child welfare agencies.
Even reading that my tormentor’s “parenting” strategies in many ways paralleled the tactics employed by war criminals, I still was barely comfortable identifying my experiences as abuse.
The realization that I had survived torture came a couple years later while watching one of my favorite shows — Criminal Minds.
It seems strange that a prison abolitionist with a history of intense psychological, physical, and sexual trauma would find comfort and enjoyment in shows like Criminal Minds and Law & Order: SVU, yet this is a common phenomenon because it allows us to escape into a world where the monsters always eventually lose in the end — an experience we rarely have in real life.
Back to my realization.
As I sat watching the scene where JJ is blasted with water during the scene where her captors are attempting to torture a piece of top secret information out of her — I suddenly felt intense pain coursing through my torso. It was the same pain I get anytime I try to get into a pool or other body of water.
I paused the show and finally realized…it’s not normal to get flashbacks to one’s childhood while witnessing a film depiction of an FBI agent being taken hostage and tortured.
So, I typed three words into google that changed the trajectory of my recovery: “definition of child torture.”
What I found was a Psychology Today article that read like a bird’s-eye-view my upbringing.
The main difference between child abuse and child torture, it said, was that abuse typically results from the abuser’s loss of self control or unchecked anger***, while torture is performed by a calculating perpetrator with the intention of establishing complete domination and control over their victim and “breaking” them physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Suddenly, her intense commitment to “breaking my (sinful) will” made so much sense in light of this new context.
Another important feature of torture compared to abuse is that torture involves the perpetrator establishing total control over their victim’s access to the necessities of life. This means that our access to food, water, hygiene, bathroom functions, movement, sleep, safe temperatures, comfort/safety, connection, and even breathing are controlled by our tormentor.
(some tormentors will exploit all of these, while others will pick a few “favorites” such as food and sleep to rely on to exert their control).
Through this Psychology Today article, I also came to discover what is still my favorite piece of literature on the topic to date — an article by Knox et al. entitled “Torture as a Form of Child Abuse”.
(Please exercise extreme caution if you choose to read the Knox article. It contains graphic descriptions of acts of torture, as well as graphic photographs of injuries to children).
Reading through their description of the extreme isolation, acts like sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, forced positioning, perpetrator profiles and family dynamics — I was at long last able to integrate my experiences into a meaningful context.
Knox et al. proposes a definition of childhood torture as follows: “we propose defining child torture as a longitudinal period of abuse characterized by at least two physical assaults, and two or more forms of psychological maltreatment (e.g., terrorizing, isolating), resulting in prolonged suffering, permanent disfigurement/dysfunction, or death.”
Through this article I learned that what I had survived has a 36% fatality rate (that we know of!)
Due to the extreme isolation in which these acts typically occur, my personal belief is that the actual fatality rate is much higher and many deaths simply go unreported.
Speaking of “unreported” — it is important to note that the child “welfare” system is NOT the solution to child torture for several reasons.
First, when the maltreatment is reported and a removal does not occur, the isolation often intensifies and the severity of the abuse often increases (especially if the perpetrator believes that the child is the one who reported the abuse).
Secondly, even if a removal does occur, countless cases of abuse and torture occur in foster care and adoptive homes every day, and an estimated fifty-five(!!!) children go missing from foster care…. every single day.(2)
100% of the cases analyzed by Knox et al. involved at least one adult female perpetrator — in stark contrast to the male-dominated world of other forms of child maltreatment.
(It is important to note that men can absolutely be involved in child torture, and individual experiences may vary — some survivors report not having a woman involved in their torture at all).
Additionally, the perpetrators demonstrate no remorse and often cite a “religious duty” to punish their children harshly, according to Knox et al.
And this fact brings us to Bill Gothard, and his IBLP/ATI cult as well as his promotion of Michael and Debi Pearl’s book “To Train Up a Child” which in my opinion is a child torture instructional manual.
Remember blanket training? We have the Pearls to thank for that.
In the docuseries “Shiny Happy People” which premiered on Amazon Prime this past week, we see footage of Michael Pearl instructing parents on how to “properly” perform “punishing with the rod severely” on their children during which point he recommends waiting several moments between sets of five strikes because “A little psychological terror is sometimes more effective than the pain.”
Once I had processed my new understanding of the correct categorization of my experiences as child torture, I began speaking out about my experiences on TikTok.
Careful to not share graphic details on that platform, I simply began by sharing Psychology Today’s information on the difference between torture and abuse.
That first video, titled “childhood torture vs child abuse” has 186.3K views as of the writing of this article, with 25.2K likes, 749 comments, and 3259 saves. I had no idea so many people would relate.
As I continued to share more of both my experience and the (very limited) literature on the topic, some themes began to emerge in the conversations that fellow survivors were having on my page.
I found out I wasn’t the only one who struggled with lifelong debilitating physical and psychological symptoms leading to increased healthcare costs and difficulty maintaining full time employment.
Learning that the annual cost of treating the health conditions that result from Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) is 953 BILLION dollars in North America alone(3) was the turning point.
Childhood torture survivors face severe economic burden coupled with drastically reduced earning potential.
It’s no wonder that our health and life outcomes tend to be so bleak.
Even high profile cases like the Turpins and Duggars feature economic struggle and exploitation— many of the Turpin siblings faced enormous challenges with accessing the funds that were allocated to them to assist with medical and housing expenses, and Jill Duggar points out that she never saw a dime from her part in the TLC shows that generated enormous profits both for her family and for the network.
As Shiny Happy People points out, another factor that contributes to our economic struggles is the fact that many survivors experience educational neglect. This neglect can come in a variety of forms — for example, the Turpin children were not given really any access to education at all, and people who grew up in ATI and similar organizations were “educated” with materials that proclaimed such nonsense as “the earth is 6,000 years old” and “all the fossils on the planet were formed during the Great Flood” and called it “science education.”
Thus has been born the mission to secure humanitarian aid for survivors of non-war-related childhood torture.
The UN and HHS have made funds available for people who were tortured in other countries and now reside in the US (HHS), as well as for victims of state-sanctioned torture (UN), but both of these definitions exclude survivors like myself, the Duggars, the Turpins, IBLP/ATI survivors, and countless others.
It bears mentioning that the scope of this problem is enormous.
Knox et al. estimates that 1–2% of children presenting for medical care due to injuries sustained from abuse are actually being tortured.
This number is likely to be much higher because torturers rarely obtain medical care for their victims.
But assuming 1–2% of child abuse cases being cases of torture IS an accurate representation, this leaves us with the knowledge that roughly 36,000–72,000 children are victims of torture in the US every single year.
According to Shiny Happy People, approximately 2 million people attended Bill Gothard’s seminars during the height of his popularity.
Couples who were involved in IBLP (the organization founded by Gothard) were encouraged to have as many children as possible (hence 19 kids and counting earning TLC millions and millions of dollars), so a conservative estimate of children who experienced severe abuse and torture at the hands of Gothard’s followers — assuming couples attended seminars together, bringing the 2 million people down to 1 million families, and assuming an average of 5 children per family — is around 5 million.
These numbers are very rough estimates and, aside from the figures cited from Knox et al., do not have any basis in peer-reviewed literature — which is another example of the severe need for a humanitarian aid package to include funding for research.
We can’t begin to help solve a problem that we don’t even have an accurate understanding of the scope of.
So how do we secure humanitarian aid?
Well, eventually, we will need to get the attention of an organization like the United Nations.
Unfortunately, the UN has quite alot going on at the moment and didn’t immediately respond to my Instagram tags with a comprehensive humanitarian aid package (shocking, I know!).
So in the meantime, I am funding humanitarian aid through my art sales.
Once I began creating art again, I very quickly discovered my unique style (Pretti Graffiti), and immediately knew that this was how I was going to begin to make these changes.
The list of needs for humanitarian aid is exhaustive but, at a glance, some of the largest needs are: funding for therapy, medical, and psychiatric care for survivors, funding for housing assistance, funding for service dogs, funding for vocational/occupational training, funding for research, and funding for training for medical and mental health professionals on how to properly and effectively care for survivors of this extremely complex developmental trauma.
This is a tall order and will take lots of work and supporters to realize.
How can you help at this stage?
Follow along on TikTok.
Purchase art.
Support creators who are doing this work.
One day, my hope is for all survivors who make it through childhood to be able to look back on their past selves with compassion, and their future selves with hope.
*I eventually learned that the profile of these types of perpetrations frequently involve an adult female — in stark contrast to other crimes against children.
**Once upon a time, when I was about 8 or 9, I accidentally plagiarized during the course of writing some poetry, and was so terrified of the consequences if I was ever caught that I stopped writing poetry or doing any form of artwork for the next two decades.
***We know that abusers don’t actually lack self control, since they are generally able to control themselves in front of witnesses. The main takeaway is that abuse is reactionary while torture is calculated.
(1)United States Holocaust Memorial Museum [Forced Labor: In Depth] accessed 06.04.2023
(2)USA Today [Foster care children are easy prey for predators: They disappear without a real search]; Gen Justice [Disappearing and Dying, January 2020
both accessed 06.04.2023
(3) Lancet Public Health [Life course health consequences and associated annual costs of adverse childhood experiences across Europe and North America: a systematic review and meta-analysis] published 2019
