[5][6] Religious abuse can have serious and long-lasting effects on individuals and communities, including psychological trauma, emotional distress, loss of faith, and even physical harm.
[7][8] One specific meaning of the term religious abuse refers to psychological manipulation and harm inflicted on a person by using the teachings of their religion.
The study, which was published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, showed that religious/ritual abuse may result in mental health issues such as dissociative disorders.
Psychologist Jill Mytton describes this as crushing the child's chance to form a personal morality and belief system; it makes them utterly reliant on their religion or parents, and they never learn to reflect critically on the information they receive.
They list the eight marks of spiritual abuse as comprising:[citation needed] The author of Charismatic Captivation, Steven Lambert, in a post on the book's website delineates "33 Signs of Spiritual Abuse",[18] including: Flavil Yeakley's team of researchers conducted field-tests with members of the Boston Church of Christ using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
"[21][22] Physical abuse in a religious context can take the form of beatings, illegal confinement, neglect, near drowning or even murder in the belief that the child is possessed by evil spirits, practicing sorcery or witchcraft, or has committed some kind of sin that warrants punishment.
[citation needed] In 2012, the United Kingdom's Department for Children, Schools and Families instituted a new action plan to investigate the issue of faith-based abuse after several high-profile murders, such as that of Kristy Bamu.
Human sacrifice may be a ritual practiced in a stable society, and may even be conducive to enhance societal unity, both by creating a bond unifying the sacrificing community, and in combining human sacrifice and capital punishment, by removing individuals that have a perceived negative effect on societal stability (criminals, religious heretics, foreign slaves or prisoners of war).
[28][29][30] Psychologists Alice Miller and Robert Godwin, psychohistorian Lloyd deMause and other advocates of children's rights have written about pre-Columbian sacrifice within the framework of child abuse.
[31][32][33] Plutarch (c.46–120 AD) mentions the Carthaginian's ritual burning of small children, as do Tertullian, Orosius, Diodorus Siculus and Philo.
"The slaughtering of newborn babies may be considered a common event in many cultures" including the Eskimo, the Polynesians, the Ancient Egyptians, the Chinese, the Scandinavians, and various indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas and Australia.
[44] In The Gambia, about 1,000 people accused of being witches were locked in government detention centers in March 2009, being beaten, forced to drink an unknown hallucinogenic potion, and confess to witchcraft, according to Amnesty International.
[45][46] In Tanzania thousands of elderly Tanzanian women have been strangled, knifed to death and burned alive over the last two decades after being denounced as witches.
[50][51][52] A small number of academics subscribe to the theory of psychohistory and attribute the abusive rituals to the psychopathological projection of the perpetrators, especially the parents.
[53][54] This psychohistorical model claims that practices of tribal societies sometimes included incest and the sacrifice, mutilation, rape and torture of children, and that such activities were culturally acceptable.
[57] Dr. Marlene Winell, a psychologist and former fundamentalist, coined the term religious trauma syndrome (RTS) in a 2011 article she wrote for the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies.
[58] Winell describes RTS as "the condition experienced by people who are struggling with leaving an authoritarian, dogmatic religion and coping with the damage of indoctrination.
[59][60] While many extreme traumatic experiences associated with religion can cause simple PTSD, scholars are now arguing that chronic abuse through mind control tactics used in fundamentalist settings, whether intentional or not, can induce C-PTSD or developmental trauma.