A word to the wise
“Enlightenment. We are nothing without it!”
Over the past two years, some very fanciful coverage about the Lantern Project has appeared in the Sunday Times, the Mail on Sunday, The Times, the Guardian, The Mail, The Daily Telegraph, and on social media, as part of a smear campaign, aimed at discrediting the project and the survivors we help.
The individuals behind this campaign have toiled hard, often huddled in dark places, behind anonymous key boards, hidden away from scrutiny, or so they thought, as they wove their tangled web of deceit in their lemming-like attempts to undermine the Lantern Project and the hundreds of survivors we support. They have also attacked other survivors support groups, for similar reasons, not all of which are yet in the public domain, but that will change.
While it’s certainly true to say that the disordered minds of these toxic individuals have caused considerable distress to very vulnerable people, and damaged our reputation in the eyes of some of our funders, it would be wrong to say, as some do, that the Lantern Project is a ‘busted flush’, far from it, and, working with other agencies, including three police forces, we are in the process of exposing the forces working against us, and we will publish more about this as events allow.
One of the extraordinary, almost mythical ways they sought to undermine us, was to use hand-picked ‘experts’ to raise doubts about the support we offer to victims and survivors of child sexual abuse, saying such ridiculous things as we put ‘false memories’ into the minds of the people we support. We do not, of course, and those ‘experts’ will in time be asked to explain why they said what they did, and for what reason?
A particular bone of contention the ‘experts’ pontificated on is the therapeutic recovery model we developed, which we call Unstructured Therapeutic Disclosure (UTD). Despite what the ‘experts’ have said in the press to the contrary, UTD is NOT a clinical therapy. It is a therapeutic, holistic approach to dealing with the many problems adult survivors of child abuse come with when they are referred to the Lantern Project by their GP or any other agency. It includes dealing with debt, court fines, drug and alcohol abuse, relationship problems, the police, civil lawyers, family issues and much more. If the survivors need clinical therapy, such as CBT of EMDR, in addition to all of the other support we provide, we refer them back through their GP to their local psychology services, who see them, assess them, and provide whatever therapy is appropriate.
We work with other local and national agencies to provide the support each survivor needs, and what we do is in fact no different to what the majority of other CSA support services do, the only difference is we gave it a name, and wrote a book about it! If you want to understand more about it, read the book we wrote – it’s on our web site as a downloadable PDF lanternproject.org.uk and it’s free!
