CZ:Cold Storage/Extreme Abuse Survey

The Extreme Abuse Surveys (EAS) are a set of online surveys that were developed as a study of the responses made by people who stated they were victims of physical or psychological abuse, as well as statements from professionals that care for those people. Extreme abuse is child abuse that includes torture, threats, confinements, violence, and other types of unlawful or immoral exploitation that children may have endured during the abuse, which results in debilitating after-effects. The EAS was created to develop a qualitative and quantitative base of data regarding the allegations of survivors of extreme abuse. Four researchers from Germany and the United States, Carol Rutz, Thorsten Becker, Bettina Overcamp and Wanda Karriker worked together to develop three different surveys to develop this base of data.

The Trilogy
The international online survey was divided into three parts. The Extreme Abuse Survey for adult survivors (EAS), was conducted between January 1 and March 30, 2007. The Professional-Extreme Abuse Survey (P-EAS) was conducted between April 1 and June 30, 2007. This survey was for therapists, clergy, counselors and other persons that had worked professionally with at least one victim of extreme abuse. The Child-Extreme Abuse Survey (C-EAS) was conducted between July 8 and October 8, 2007. This survey was for the caregivers of child survivors of what the authors described as extreme abuse and mind control. The authors of the study defined mind control as “all mind control procedures designed to make a victim follow directives of the programmer without conscious awareness.” Lifton describes eight mind control elements: milieu control, mystical manipulation or planned spontaneity, the demand for purity, the cult of confession, sacred science, loading of the language, doctrine over person and dispensing of existence.

Methodology
The main objective of the surveys was gather preliminary data on the nature and extent of extreme abuse. The researchers decided that the most practical way to generate a large number of responses was to announce and conduct an online survey. Survey questions were pretested, and all survey items were confirmed to have face validity. The target population of the study was defined as all survivors of extreme abuse.

Attacks
On January 2, 2007, the server that had the survey faced an intense amount of port scans at low and high ports and attempts to access non-existing server pages. These were carried out on a large scale. This used an enormous amount of bandwidth. The attacks diminished and after three weeks almost ended. In early March 2007, there was an attack to hack into the server, but this failed. Several attempts were also made to obtain the private data of some technicians and surveyors. The EAS survey was successfully completed on March 31, 2007.

Results
Fourteen hundred and seventy-one participants from more than thirty countries answered at least one question of the EAS. The survey was given in both German and English. Sixty four percent of 985 participants reported memories of incest and 48% of 977 participants reported memories of extreme abuse before they sought therapy. Sixty nine percent of 257 respondents that reported secret mind control experiments on them when they were children also reported that they were abused in a cult.

Of 1007 participants in the EAS, 65% stated that they had been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. Higher percentages were found in the C-EAS and the P-EAS. High percentages of physical abuse, sexual abuse from multiple perpetrators and child pornography were found in all three surveys. In the C-EAS, medical evidence consistent with extreme abuse was found in 53% of 80 respondents, psychological symptoms consistent with extreme abuse were found in 91% of the 88 respondents and the symptoms abated when the child was able to tell about the abuse in 78 respondents.