For survivors of organized abuse, family can be the most dangerous people in the world to them, and survivors can be forced to seek out help on their own––without a safety net and without any advocacy from people who know them and who can represent their best interests. 

 

On this page, the word “you” means a survivor born into slavery and/or currently enslaved and/or any survivor with developmental disabilities and/or lifelong injuries from torture and trafficking that leave them vulnerable to ongoing harm, who needs help to utilize supports and services without being trafficked and/or harmed further in the process.

 

This page supports survivors to make plans for increasing safety and decreasing dependence on abusive people and systems and should only be shared with trusted people who are supporting you.

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We hope this page can help you to:

 

·       Learn about your rights.

·       Maintain privacy.

·       Begin building a safety/exit plan to help you get the help you need.

 

A developmental disability is something that may be lifelong, even if it presents differently over time or dynamically from moment to moment, and makes it hard for you to do things that most able-identified adults can do:

 

·       being able to control your body's actions;

·       speaking at will;

·       saying yes/no in your own best interests;

·       caring for yourself;

·       being able to remove yourself from danger;

·       supporting yourself economically;

·       accessing supportive social networks;

·       having awareness of being disabled;

·       having awareness of being abused;

·       being able to identify or be identified as a person with disabilities.

·       Some victims are abused specifically to prevent them from benefitting from help, therapy, or treatment; 

·       things like walking, speaking, taking care of yourself, or working.

·       Anything that causes you to need the same kind of support that someone with more overtly identified disabilities needs.

Your rights remain valid

 

Survivors left disabled from abuse remain vulnerable to ongoing harm, and who may be currently being harmed, have rights. Your rights exist, even when they are unknown to yourselves or parts of yourselves or are being violated and ignored. A slave has rights regardless of the opinion or power of their slaver. Your rights exist whether you are consciously aware of them, or not.

 

Being a slave is being deliberately engineered to lack access to your own agency. Disabilities we have in knowing and/or asserting our own rights resultant from sadistic abuse are entirely private for our safety. We are working towards building and making effective representation for people made with these disabilities.

 

Rights to Effective Representation/Advocacy

 

We are building advocacy that can function to represent the rights of survivors, including the slave population enslaved, from being forced to prove their disabilities; demonstrate the causes of their disabilities; produce evidence of their endangerment; and reveal intrasystem data to unknown/unsafe people and in unknown/unsafe environments.

 

In a just world, these rights would be known and given to us. Because we do not live in a just world, we need advocacy. Because we lack adequate advocacy, we have formed a Survivors’ Rights Coalition that trains people to effectively represent survivors, to protect survivors from becoming further enslaved by the people around them.

 

Survivors are vulnerable to extreme harm in exchanges with others––dyadic, social, formal/commercial, and otherwise. Social contracts are only secure when the people entering those contracts are doing so on equal grounds, which for many survivors, has not been possible.

 

Rights to Privacy

 

Privacy is deciding for yourself what you want to share and whom you want to share it with. A “right to privacy” means:

 

·       You do NOT have to share what is personal.

·       You do NOT have to tell private thoughts to anyone.

·       You do NOT have to share your private things.

·       You do NOT have to share intrasystem information with outside people.

·       You have a right to be alone, and you have a right to choose trusted people to accompany you.

 

What other privacies do you consider that you might want or need?

 

Survivors have the right to choose not to disclose the details of disabilities. Being asked to demonstrate a disability or prove endangerment forces survivors to give up privacy to people who may be acculturated and/or trained and sanctioned to disclaim evidence and validity.

 

The sadistic and sophisticated abuse inflicted to make a slave is private. It is your right that programming and its effects remain private. If your privacy is not being respected: you have the right to tell trusted people, a support group facilitator, a service coordinator, etc. You have the right to advocacy and help.

 

Rights to Disability

 

Survivors have a right to be temporarily, permanently, and/or entirely disabled. Survivors’ disabilities are regularly devalued as invalid relative to others’ with more apparent types of disabilities.

 

Rights to Privacy During Representation/Advocacy

 

Some slaves have no agency in being forced out to reveal private information when asked, and are saddled to report or disclose without any regard for personal security or safety. It is inappropriate and dangerous to discriminate/ask for proof who experience this. Advocates must not ask slaves their inside experiences or histories.

 

Only trusted people can interact with a survivor's internal world. It is the survivor's right to choose in their own time who, when, and what to trust others for. Advocates do not have the right to access within this domain. Effective advocacy must adhere to an agreed upon scope and limits of external representation of our agency, not what the advocate perceives as needed.

 

Protection from Conservatorship

 

Survivors lacking agency need to be protected from further removal of agency and consent. 

 

Rights to Ethical Care Standards

 

Dangerous Assumptions––Needing Your Conditions to be Taken Seriously.

“It's most important that people take our fears seriously by, at the very least, not ruling them out using calculations based on risks they consider typical or likely only in their culture. The lengths that our perpetrators went to gaslight us and the others around us are likely unimaginable to you. Regard of our sanity cannot be based on whether people believe us based on their culture.” -Anonymous victim-survivor.

 

“When our safety concerns are not taken seriously by providers, the source of the protection that we are seeking now becomes a source of the harm. There is nobody protecting us from that. No offense but being put in danger by helpers is typical for slaves. Providers are trained not to trust the wisdom of our own system to be able to protect ourselves more than they can. Because with providers this is a paid service, this is received by slaves as overt trafficking.  When providers do not take slaves’ emergencies seriously, slaves split again because nobody is looking out for them.” -Anonymous victim-survivor.

 

Active Harm and Danger is Not PTSD.

 

When people are born into torture and trafficking, and the perpetrators exist both above the law and having unlimited access to resources, it is least harmful to assume that the lifespan of a slave is an active condition, and while there is no expectation of getting out, it may be possible to decrease proximity with unsafe [deliberately or not] individuals and increase access to resources that are less directly dependent on the abusing system. We need our immediate needs represented and taken seriously without requiring us to demonstrate or prove immediacy.