The ability to dissociate as a reaction to a traumatic experience is given to all people. However, it is particularly pronounced in children up to school age. The younger a child is, the more severe the physical injury, the more frequent it occurs and the more sadistic and targeted the abuse, the more serious the effects of trauma. A dissociative identity disorder arises when small children up to the age of five or six have to experience violence, torture and near-death experiences. If the child has no opportunity to integrate what they have experienced into their own immature personality, the experience remains split off and with repeated abuse, other people develop inside who spread the suffering across many shoulders and help to bear it. Some of these inner people have little or no knowledge of each other because their emergence is linked to the respective traumatization and has the purpose of keeping the experience of violence out of the child’s everyday life. The child remains a seemingly unharmed everyday person who has no knowledge of the horror and tries to live as inconspicuously and as normally as possible.

Perpetrator groups can take advantage of this ability of children by using targeted violence and torture, drugs, hypnosis and conditioning to “create” inner people who can perform specific functions on demand. An example of this is the production of child pornography, or actually child torture documentation. No one can seriously claim that children voluntarily participate in such depictions, which are sold at a higher price the more brutal and sadistic the abuse is. But children are not only trained, mistreated and educated to satisfy paedophilic needs. There are also ideologically motivated groups that mistreat and abuse children in a ritualized form, in a ritual context, and subject them to torture and sexualized violence in order to train them for their own purposes and goals. In addition to dissociation, threats, violence and blackmail are means by which the tormentors demand that the child maintain absolute and eternal silence about the crimes.

Affected children grow up, and their everyday friends may not know anything about it. Nevertheless, the trauma has effects that we know as clinical pictures: pain, anxiety, depression, immunological or psychosomatic illnesses and repeated (para-)suicidal acts. Because of these illnesses, those affected do not seek medical help by saying: “I have been sexually exploited for years and decades; I am a victim of organized pedophile violence. I am many; I am multiple.” For people with complex trauma, it often takes a very long time, sometimes up to ten years, before the connections between the violence suffered, physical complaints and psychological symptoms become apparent. Psychotherapists have the task of helping patients to develop a narrative for what has happened, which means that patients often only gradually learn to find words for what has happened to them. Only when there is space for the unthinkable to not only be thought but also said, and when there is someone who is prepared to listen and confirm: “I think it is conceivable that it was as you say,” can severely injured people find the courage to talk about their injuries. This is only possible if therapists are aware of or develop an awareness that criminal acts and not just neurotic disorders or conflicting behavior patterns can also be the basis of psychopathology or psychosomatic disorders. And these criminal acts can, under certain circumstances, lie years or decades in the past.