Child Sexual Abuse in the Context of the Hamblin Allegations #UtahAbuseCrisis
Todays MUST READ report from Investigations in Ritual Abuse is behind the paywall but here are a few clips
The Deliberate Methodology
The fact that David Lee Hamblin and many of his accused accomplices were psychiatric professionals is a key detail. Hamblin and his uncle in law Clyde Everett Sullivan were psychologists. They were steeped in the academic literature of abuse and trauma,
along with the methods of abuse that cause trauma. Rather than using their specialized knowledge to heal victims and patients, Hamblin and Sullivan allegedly utilized their professional expertise to develop methods of victimizing children and evading detection or criminal liability.
Hamblin and Sullivan were not the only accused members of the LDS Church of Satan with psychological or psychiatric backgrounds and training. Alleged LDS Church of Satan member and Alpine Stake President and LDS Bishop Conrad Gottfredson has a Ph.D. in Instructional Psychology and Technology from BYU.
David Hamblin’s alleged mentor C. Terry Warner is renowned for his work on human behavior and self-deception, which argues that people are responsible for negative emotions and actions, apart from and despite the actions of others.
Warner’s work arguably provides a systematic methodology for blaming victims and severing the link between cause and effect as it pertains to an abuser and a victim. Warner and his supporters advertise his work as “the greatest breakthrough in psychology in 50 years.”
…Hamblin, Allred, and others were aware of the legal inadmissibility of memories recovered under hypnosis, and yet they repeatedly employed hypnosis even though they knew that the use of hypnosis would make the testimony of sexual abuse victims inadmissible in court.
This reality should have cause Hamblin and Allred to fall under greater suspicion; instead, it had the effect of causing law enforcement and prosecutors to dismiss the allegations made by the Hamblin children and other victims of alleged ritual abuse. Time and time again, the techniques used by mental health professionals in Utah were the exact techniques one would refrain from using in order to preserve the admissibility of victims’ claims and memories of abuse in criminal and civil courts.
By 1989, the reality that hypnosis and leading questions would result in admissibility issues in criminal courts was widely known among legal and mental health professionals. This did not lead mental health professionals like Snow, Hamblin, Sullivan, and Allred to abstain from employing such techniques in order to enable their patients to achieve admissible testimony against their abusers.
The fact was that mental health professionals in Utah were doing everything one would do if one wanted to disqualify such patients in criminal and civil trials.